Family :

Education & Career :

Excerpt from ""The County gentleman and Land & water. Jan - June 1916"

Recallling Commander Gipps:
"Shortly after he rejoined he was sent to China as second in command of Newcastle. When war broke out he was detailed for special work in the
far East. Triumph, not at that time commissioned, was at once hastily got ready for sea, and Gipps joined as Senior Lieutenant Commander. He served through all the operations of the attack on Tsing Tau, and was constantly in action. In February Triumph joined up with Sir Sackville Garden's fleet off Galipoli. How
often she was in action altogether I do not know, but it must have been nearer thirty than twenty times. In all these affairs Gipps distinguished
himself greatly.

His knowledge of gunnery was almost unique and the new problems of fire control
which bombardments presented, insoluble as they actually were, came as near being solved by him as they could be. He was in Triumph when she
went down, and the small loss of life was a proof of how thorough had been his work as an executive officer.

When he had lost his ship he volunteered to build and equip a heavy battery for Hellcs, and remained in command of it for some time. The battery was then turned over to the army and Gipps was detailed to prepare a naval siege train, a business which entailed much preparation in Egypt.

The failure at Suvla left the siege train without an object and Gipps became N.T.Q. at Anzac. He was one of the few who was present first at the landing and then at the evacuation of that much-contested area.

There have been few men of more brilliant promise. He got every first that a sub-lieutenant could get and won the earliest possible promotion to lieutenant's rank. When he specialised in gunnery at Whale Island he passed so brilliantly that he was selected for the special course at Greenwich, and got an easy first in one of the most exacting mathematical ordeals there is.

But no one who knew him, either in his professional work or in private life, would have taken him primarily for a student. Brimful of energy, activity, enterprise and initiative, he was crazily fond of sport, rode to hounds with the hardest
and was a first-class shot, and in working for a private firm was as indefatigable as he had been when gunnery lieutenant of a battleship. Gipps had a kind of fury for getting things done in the way they should be done, and his friends in the
Navy — and no man had more — sometimes wondered whether what seemed a sort of ungovernable impatience with those who were slower witted, slower footed, slower handed than himself, could ever be sufficiently got under to make him a
real leader. No nian is a great leader unless he has the gift of making all those around him work towards his aim as a single whole-hearted unit.

Organisation is after all only a long word for the art of making others understand what we want, training them how to do it, and making them wish to do it in our way. You cannot attain these objects unless you win their affection as well as
their respect and admiration, and affection is not won unless you are tender to all faults that are not those of heart and spirit. Nelson, the greatest of all organisers, owed his success to the recognition of these simple truths.

His friends, I say, sometimes wondered whether George would ever learn the "long-suffering " essential to such success, but I take it from his ' admirable war record and its recognition in the promotions last July, that, once faced with the real thing, he learned this lesson just as easily eis he learned every other. If he was
sometimes impatient and rough spoken to subordinates, the least quick witted must have recognised the generosity of his spirit, and that, after all, in nothing was he so exacting as in his example.

Death has taken him as I think he would have preferred to die, and once more it is his example that is his sternest legacy to those that follow him.

God rest his gallant soul."

Service Life:

Campaigns:

• The First World War 1914-1918, World-wide.

Naval Campaign is defined as to include all sea operations where attrition rates are in ones and twos and which do not fall within specific naval battles such as Jutland, Coronel, Falklands etc. This includes Merchant Navy losses.

Detail :

On 10 June 1917, Grafton was torpedoed by the German U-boat UB-43 150 nautical miles (280 km) east of Malta and was damaged, but was safely brought into port at Malta. There were no casualties in the attack.

Masonic :

Source :

The project globally acknowledges the following as sources of information for research across the whole database:

• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• The (UK) National Archives
• Ancestry.co.uk - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History online
• ugle.org.uk - The records of the United Grand Lodge of England including the Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Additional Source:

• Founder Researchers : Paul Masters & Mike McCarthy
• Researcher : Bruce Littley