Philip Gibbs

Sir Philip Armand Thomas Hamilton Gibbs KBE (1 May 1877 – 10 March 1962) was an English journalist and author who served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War.

With tensions growing in Europe in the years immediately preceding 1914, Gibbs repeatedly expressed a belief that war could be avoided between the Entente and Central Powers.

As one of five official war correspondents Gibbs wrote about the Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): Suddenly at dawn, as a signal for all of our guns to open fire, there rose out of the dark ridge of Messines and 'Whitesheet' and that ill-famed Hill 60, enormous volumes of scarlet flame from nineteen seperate [sic] mines throwing up high towers of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce colour, so that many of our soldiers waiting for the assault were thrown to the ground.

Gibbs' work in the immediate post-war period was focused on a fear of societal unrest created by brutalised ‘ape-men’ and wartime-employed women who 'were clinging onto their jobs, would not let go of the pocket-money which they had spent on frocks’.

[5] In The Realities of War Gibbs exacted a form of revenge for the frustration he suffered in submitting to wartime censorship; published after the armistice, the book gave an account of his personal experiences in war-torn Europe, painting a most unflattering portrait of Sir Douglas Haig, British Commander-in-Chief in France and Flanders, and his General Headquarters.

Working as a freelance journalist, having resigned from the Daily Chronicle over its support for the Lloyd George government's Irish policy, he published a series of books and articles.

This proved a brief stint, however, and he spent part of the war employed by the Ministry of Information, the department responsible for publicity and propaganda, which the British government re-established in September 1939.