Philip Gibbs

Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs KBE was an English journalist and prolific author who served as one of the five official British reporters during World War I. His siblings A. Hamilton Gibbs, Francis Hamilton Gibbs, Helen Hamilton Gibbs, and Cosmo Hamilton, as well as his father Henry James Gibbs and his own son Anthony, were all writers. Gibbs, the son of a government servant, was born in Kensington, London, and his name was registered as Philip Amande Thomas. He had a home education and decided at a young age to pursue a career as a writer. Gibbs was a Roman Catholic. His first piece appeared in the Daily Chronicle in 1894, and five years later, he released the first of many volumes, Founders of the Empire. He was appointed literary editor of Alfred Harmsworth's main (and expanding) tabloid-format daily, the Daily Mail. He also worked for several big newspapers, including the Daily Express. His first attempt at semi-fiction, The Street of Adventure, was published in 1909 and told the story of the official Liberal Party journal Tribune, which was created in 1906 but failed dramatically in 1908. Franklin Thomasson, Leicester's MP from 1906 to 1910, created the paper at great expenditure.