them here. We had good billets in Tournai, and our mess was in a large building overlooking the town square, where we occasionally had Battalion parades. Soon after our arrival, I was given command of �A� Company with the rank of Major. I had been promoted to the rank of Captain when I was made second-in-command of �B� Company. �A� Company was the former 17th Company, to which I was originally posted and in which I had spent nearly all my service in France. At about the same time, a new Commanding Officer of the Battalion was appointed. He was Lt. Col. Wetherall DSO MC, a fine soldier and a nice man. I remember teaching him how to play chess, and he and one or two other members of the mess became enthusiastic players of the game.
We had some social life in Tournai and gave two or three dances at our mess, to which the local girls were delighted to come. There was also a small night club, to which some of us used to go occasionally to dance. On one of these occasions I remember the Colonel saying to me, �We mustn�t tell Mrs. Gilbert about this,� but it was all very harmless really. A few shops were open and I was able to buy two lace handkerchiefs of surprisingly good quality, one of which I sent to my mother and the other to Marjorie.
What a number of us enjoyed most was the rugby football competition that was organized in the Division. Our captain was a Major Davies, a Welshman and a very good player, and under his guidance we became quite a formidable side. We had reached the finals without much difficulty when, early in the New Year of 1919, I went on leave. Marjorie and I, incidentally, spent that leave at a pleasant little hotel in Kensington called the British Empire Hotel. I presume that it is no longer in existence, not under that name at any rate. On my return to Tournai I found that Davies had been demobilized. I was asked to take on the captaincy and I made every effort to find another player to make up the side, but without success. We had therefore to play the finals one man short. This proved too great a handicap and we were beaten, but not badly so, and I am sure that if Davies had still been with us, we should have won quite easily. An unexpected sequel was the arrival by post, some months after I had been demobilized, of a suitably engraved bronze medal that had been awarded to the runners-up in the competition. I still have it.
During the next two or three months our numbers numbers diminished steadily. Some were demobilized; more, including officers and men, were transferred to the Army of Occupation in Germany, and finally only a nucleus, or cadre, as it was called, was left to look after the equipment and stores and take them back to England. This, I understood, was to be the procedure, but how exactly it was carried out I do not know, as in the early part of April instructions were received that I was to be demobilized. My good fortune in not being sent to the Army of Occupation was probably due to the fact that as I joined the Army from Oxford I would be registered as a student, and students were given high priority on the list of those waiting to be demobilized.
When the day came for me to leave, I said goodbye to the Colonel and the Quartermaster, who would soon be the only officers left in the Battalion, and had come out to see me off, and was then taken by lorry to the railway station, where I started my slow journey to Calais. On arrival there, I embarked on the boat for Dover, and being the senior officer on board I was placed in charge of the ship, so far as the assorted collection of troops was concerned. The duties were not onerous, and for the first time on one of these cross-channel journeys I was allotted a cabin. When we reached England, I was appointed to conduct to the Crystal Palace all those who were to be demobilized. The Crystal Palace was an important demobilization centre at the time. We arrived there on 20th April, 1919, my last day in the Army, and after handing over my party I was given my discharge papers and set off to join Marjorie, who was staying with her parents at a comfortable house in East Croydon called �The Quest�.
It had previously been agreed that as soon as possible after I had left the Army, Marjorie and I should pay a visit to Bermuda to see my father and mother and my sister Gracie, who of course had not met Marjorie before. My brother Trounsell and my other sister, Mary, who was always known as Mimi, were not living in Bermuda at that time. As soon as I was demobilized, therefore, I began to make enqueries about passages to Bermuda, but we were unable to obtain any until August, when we left on the Orduna for New York, where we would have to take another boat to Bermuda. The Orduna was a new ship at that time and in later years we made several trips on her with our family when she used to call at Bermuda on her way to England from South America. We had to wait about two weeks in New York before going on to Bermuda on the Charybdis, which was a former British warship that had been converted to take passengers and freight and was then the only means of communication between New York and Bermuda. On arrival in Bermuda, we and two or three others were greeted by Sir Thomas Wadson, Speaker of the House of Assembly, who made a point of welcoming home all Bermudians who had been on war service. We were shown great kindness and hospitality by our numerous relations and friends during our three months stay in Bermuda and thoroughly enjoyed the bathing, the picnics, the dances and the tennis, which in those days was played on grass only and almost entirely on private courts.
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This ends the excerpts dealing directly with Major Gilbert�s military service, on Page 25 of his typescript memoirs, which run to 79 pages, not including several pages of foreword, obituaries and photographs. A complete copy is held by the Bermuda Library.
The remainder of the text recounts his and Mrs. Gilbert�s brief residence in England, before they returned to Bermuda where Charles took the post of Director of the Island�s educational system, which he held until his retirement in 1956 (he continued to give part time contribution to the department for some time longer).
During this period he took the decisive role in restructuring, expanding and modernising the public ducation system, which was composed of a mix of public and, mostly, aided (private schools that submitted to Government curriculae and accepted unpayed students in exchange for Government providing their operating funds) primary and secodary schools into the 1990s, when the education system was completely reorganized on a tertiary arrangement.
Charles Gilbert would be awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1951, and a primary school, Gilbert Institute, in Paget Parish was named for him.
His memoirs also give record of his growing family, which included first child Glyn, who would go on to become the highest-ranking Bermudian soldier, entering the Lincolnshire Regiment in 1939 and retiring from the Army in 1974 as a Major-General (an extensive entry on Glyn Gilbert, who died last year, is included here).
Charles Gilbert died on the 9th September, 1981, at the age of 87.
Tuesday, 27th April, 2004.
