29th September, 2003.
The Royal Gazette, In Memoriam,
8th November,2003.
The Telegraph, Obituary,
24 October, 2003.
Military Week, Obituary.
Second Lincolnshire Regiment,
Personal Recollections.
the Army in 1974.
Charles Gilbert was born in Hamilton on the 27th November, 1893. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar for Bermuda, he was studying at Oxford when the Great War began in 1914. Leaving his studies for the duration of the War, he took a commission into the Army, via the Oxford Officers Training Corps (OTC). First entering the Royal West Kent Regiment, he transferred to the newly formed Machine Gun Corps in 1916, being drafted to the Western Front in August, 1916. He served at the Front for the remainder of the War, being awarded the Military Cross and having attained the rank of Major, with the command of his own Company, by the time he was demobilized and discharged on the 20th April, 1919.
During a leave, the previous year, Charles had married H. Marjorie Stanford, an English girl whom he had met shortly after the onset of the War. Together, they returned to Bermuda for three months before setting out, again, in January of 1920, for London. Charles hoped to make a career, there, in business, but in this he was not successful (though the cause was wholly due to the poor economy in the post-War years). Consequently, they returned in 1924 to Bermuda where Charles took up the post of Director of Education. This time, however, they had company for their journey.
The first of three sons, Glyn Charles Anglim Gilbert was born on the 15th August, 1920, at Croydon, in Surrey. In his memoirs, Charles Gilbert would note that his infant son 'could crawl faster than any baby' he'd ever seen, and that he learnt 'to whistle when he was not much more than one year old.' This was to prove the beginning of a life filled with noteworthy acheivements.
Charles Gilbert remained Director of Education 'til his retirement in 1956. During that period, he was responsible for the modernisation and expansion of the island's entire education system. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours od 1951. Marjorie would join the Sir George Somers Chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (IODE,) and ultimately head the Bermuda branch of that organization. They would have two more sons: John Trounsell, born on 19 April, 1927, and David Stanford, who was born on the 12th September, 1933 while his mother was staying with her parents at Surbiton, in England.
John, on reaching maturity, would enter the Colonial Service, then work for an insurance company in Canada, before following his father into Education, teaching in England. Marrying in 1970, he returned to Bermuda the following year with his wife. David went to Oxford before enlisting in the Royal Navy for his National service during the '50s. He was soon commissioned, but returned to civilian life after his National Service was complete. Entering business in England, he married early and quickly began building a family.
Charles and Marjorie would return to Bermuda in 1973 after more than a decade spent almost nomadically, moving about England, Jersey, Man and Europe. Charles Gilbert would die on the 9th September, 1981 at the age of 87, leaving Marjorie to tend over their still growing family.
Glyn Charles Anglim Gilbert was given the name Anglim for his great grandfather, Othniel Anglim Gilbert, at the request of his father's mother. She had been asked to give the name to one of her own sons, but that had not proved possible. As has been the case with his father, who had left Bermuda to attend school in England in 1911 (on the Bermuda Scholarship, meant to prepare students for the Rhodes Scholarship,) Glyn left the island in 1935 to attend Eatbourne College. War was by then widely thought imminent and so Glyn entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in January, 1939, launching himself upon a career as a military officer, though he managed to pay a visit home that Summer, before War was declared on the 3rd. September.
Glyn had only just returned to Sandhurst when War was declared. the rest of his training course was immediately cancelled and he and his fellow cadets were given immediate commissions.
Glyn was commissioned into the Lincolnshire Regiment which had close ties to Bermuda. Two contingents of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps had served in France as part of that Regiment during the Great War, as well as islanders who had joined the Regiment independently, and the Bermudian Territorial unit had been affiliated to the Regular Army regiment ever since. Two more drafts from Bermuda would join the Lincolns during the Second World War; the First leaving Bermuda in June, 1940, the Second in 1944.
In 1940, Glyn's unit, the 2nd. Battalion of the Lincolns. was placed aboard ship for France to join the British Expeditionery Force in its defence of France. Before they could sail, however, word came that the Germans had reached Calais and they were ordered to debark. The German Blitzkreig would quickly roll over France, and the BEF was forced to abandon most of its equipment as its manpower was evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk (at least one Bermudian was not to be so lucky. Major (later Colonel,) William Eldon Tucker of the Royal Army Medical Corps, after drawing lots with fellow doctors, stayed behind to tend to wounded as the last escaping Surgeon swam two miles to a Royal Navy destroyer. Captured by the Germans, he remained a Prisoner of War 'til freed by the advancing Allied armies after D-Day).
English-born Major Donald Henry 'Bob' Burns, MC, who served in the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Regiment after the War (he retired from the latter in 1974 after serving as second-in-command, and was later Town Crier of Saint George's), also was part of the BEF retreat through Dunkirk area, serving in the Cameron Highlanders, to which Regular Army regiment he'd come with a voluntary draft from the Liverpool Scottish the previous year. He was posted to Prospect Camp in Bermuda as a 2 Lieutenant in 1941 when his Battalion came on Garrison. He married a Bermudian and returned to the island after further war service in Italy and Austria.
Glyn would not again have the opportunity to carry the War to the Nazis until 1944, as a large part of the British Army was kept in Britain, first to ward off a German attack, then through the long build-up of Allied forces preparing for the invasion of Hitler's 'Fortress Europe.' This came on the 6th. June, 1944 when the allied forces bludgeoned their way ashore across the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord.
Glyn was one of two Bermudians who took part in the landing, the other being Captain William T. Wilson, of the 17th. Field Artillery, Royal Canadian Artillery, who would be invalided back to a desk job in London after he was wounded during the landing.
Part of the 3 Division, Glyn landed on Sword Beach on D-Day, in command of "C" Company, and would remain so for the rest of the War. The objective of the Battalion was Caen, but due to unexpectedly strong German defenses it would take six weeks to reach it and casualties would be heavy.
The first night in France, "C" Company spent guarding the rear of their Battalion. The following day Glyn's men were advanced to provide support for "B" Company, which was to clear the German defenders from the village of Lion-sur-Mer and a neighbouring chateau. When "B" Company's attack was brought to a halt by heavy German machine gun and mortar fire, however, "C" Company was able to advance under the covering fire of "B"
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