Author: Paul Flint

The Porthole Murder story was well received by the local magazines with appearances in the Rabbiter, Kempshott Kourier, Villager, and on the web pages of Basinga Extra and the Link in Oakley.

You will also see the Bramley report that I missed in February about Robert Burns but in March the Bramley magazine did not feature our report. The Loddon Valley Link also missed us out.

The speaker at the latest meeting of the Probus Club of Basingstoke, Paul Stickler, is a retired detective, an FBI graduate, with degrees in history and criminology and is working towards a PhD in history. He is well qualified to investigate cold cases such as he described – the Porthole Murder.

This was about a young woman aged 21 called Gay Gibson. Despite her name being Eileen Isabelle Ronnie Gibson she was called Gay because she was always happy. She had been discharged from the ATS after the war with medical advice not to travel in the tropics as an ear infection would be problematic. Headstrong as she was, she immediately joined her parents in Durban, South Africa where her father had been transferred with his job. Becoming bored she moved to Johannesburg as a secretary and then had ideas about becoming an actress. Moving to Cape Town she became involved in the theatrical world proving to have abilities in the acting scene.

Again, expressing boredom, she decided to return to England to develop her acting career. In 1947 she sailed first class on the Union Castle line MV Durban Castle non-stop from Cape Town to Southampton. On the voyage she vanished without a trace.

What was discovered showed that she had formed a relationship with 31 years old James Camb, a First Class deck steward. He initially denied any form of contact but then, following proof that his palmprint had been found on the inside of her cabin door, admitted Gay Gibson had died while they were in bed together.

He had panicked and managed to thrust her body through her cabin’s porthole which was why she was never to be seen again. Whether she was dead was impossible to establish but in evidence at the trial of James Camb, which attracted national newspaper headlines, he claimed she had gone rigid and was frothing at the mouth and blood had come from her nose. Such characteristics are seen if someone has been strangled.

Some actors had witnessed similar medical episodes during rehearsals in Cape Town when Gay Gibson had fainted, going rigid, frothing at the mouth and her lips turning blue. Crucially, all did not travel from South Africa for the trial. One was Doreen Mantle, who became well known as the character Mrs Warboys in the television series One Foot in the Grave. She shared a dressing room with Gay Gibson in the weeks prior to the sailing and witnessed similar medical episodes but was persuaded by her father not to get involved with the case.  In contradictory evidence, believed by the jury, her mother claimed she was a well brought up English young woman without any known medical conditions. And yet her fellow actors knew that she was a party girl and there was some suspicion that she was pregnant.

At the Hampshire Assizes, held in the Great Hall, Winchester, the jury took only forty minutes to find James Camb guilty of her murder and he was duly sentenced to hang. He avoided capital punishment because a no-hanging bill was being discussed by parliament. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Reacting to the news, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said; “The House of Commons, by its vote, saved the life of the brutal lascivious murderer who thrust the poor girl he had raped and assaulted through a porthole of the ship to the sharks.”

What emerged was that James Camb had tried to become involved with a sixteen and eighteen-year old girls on the same voyage but this was not used at the trial as this was before Gay Gibson vanished.

James Camb was released from prison in 1959 but was later convicted of other sexual offences and spent his remaining years behind bars. He died in 1979 still protesting his innocence about Gay Gibson’s death.

The audience were left to come to their own conclusions about the case. But the charge could have been one of manslaughter rather than murder if the true medical condition was able to be established that Gay Gibson died from natural causes. But without the body there could be no autopsy to establish the actual cause of death.

We had a good result in the February magazines with most of the publications including our report about the Robert Burns’ The Immortal Memory in their printed magazine, or in the cases of the Basinga they gave a large display in their Basinga Extra, as did the Oakley Link in their online additions. Unusually, the Bramley Mag for February, as far as I can ascertain, blanked us this month.

Member John Kynoch was the speaker at the January lunch meeting at Test Valley Golf club with his personal view on the life and times of Robbie Burns.

Many people have attended a Burns’ Supper around 25^th January, the birthdate of Robert Burns, the National Bard of Scotland, Scotland’s Favourite Son, and will have witnessed the piping in of the haggis and someone giving the Address to a Haggis in “Lalland Scots” being virtually unintelligible to all the sassenachs present. But at the best of such occasions, irrespective of wherever in the world there is a Caledonian connection, the guest of honour has the responsibility of telling those present their view on Robbie Burns, the Ploughman’s Bard.

Such was the situation outlined by the latest speaker at the Probus Club of Basingstoke, member John Kynoch. Although born in New Zealand, the son of an ex-pat Scot, as a teenager he came to join the family woollen manufacturing business in Scotland and lived for over thirty years in Keith, a small town to the east of Inverness. 

This talk, The Immortal Memory, was John’s personal insights and long past connections with Robert Burns who was born in 1759 in Alloway, Ayrshire and died at the early age of thirty-seven. The sister of John’s great grandfather married a man who was a friend of Burns whose own father started an educational establishment for apprentices that today is the Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh.

Around the time of Burns’ birth, the British Empire was developing with Wolfe capturing Quebec making Canada British rather than French. George111 was soon to reign as was Catherine the Great in Russia, Hayden got a job making music in the court of Prince Esterhazy in Hungary and Captain Cook discovered New Zealand. Less than a decade before Burns was born the Duke of Cumberland, the King’s brother, carried out the last battle on British soil at Culloden near Inverness defeating the final Jacobean rebels.

During his short life, the bard had been a tenant farmer, a flax dresser, a continual rebel against orthodox religion and eventually a Revenue & Customs Officer and a member of the militia in Dumfries, despite being a nationalist at heart. He also penned 559 writings of which 368 were songs often putting new lyrics to existing Scottish traditional and folk melodies.

At the age of 28, and only 14 months after his first book was published, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns undertook a coach trip on poor roads around that part of north-eastern Scotland where the speaker had lived. In such a short time, and without the ease of communications we have today, his fame had spread to the extent that he was feted by the great and good. He was described as the equivalent of a Rock Star, a working-class hero, gifted beyond measure, attracted by and attracted to, the opposite sex (he had nine children with his wife, his last son born an hour after his death, and at least four more with other women) and finding further distraction in misuse of substances, in his case “the drink.”

At one such meeting at Duff House, in Banff, Burns met a young boy who had his book at home and knew some of the poetry by heart which gives some idea of the popularity of the Bard’s work. That a schoolboy in Banff, so far north from Ayrshire, where much was written, should be familiar with his work so soon after it was published, is quite remarkable.

One can only marvel at the genius of this man who could produce such words that we still admire and can quote at times, almost off the cuff. Robert Burns was obviously a man of huge intelligence with a great understanding of the human condition. Words and ideas that have been translated into more than 60 languages around the world and used as reference points by many great people in history such as US President Abraham Lincoln who wrote of Burns “From Shakespeare I learnt the sonnets. From the Bible, the scriptures. But it was from this man that I learnt humility.”

After the guest of honour has concluded their reminiscence about Robert Burns, they then request the audience, “Raise your glasses… the toast is…. to The Immortal Memory.”

The final act at a Burns’ supper and at Hogmanay, on New Year’s Eve, throughout much of the world, is of course singing the famous farewell “Auld Lang Syne.” This is one of Burns’ songs that even sassenachs know.

Most of the local magazines have a combined December/January issue which means that only the Villager, Basinga and the Kempshott Kourier publish in January. The Basinga placed our report in their Basinga Extra online version rather than within the printed version.

The Kempshott Kourier for December is included this time as it arrived too late to be included in the report about our publicity in December and in what has become their usual lateness their January edition was only received this last weekend.

A different venue for our Christmas lunch this year, moving to the Mill House at Swallowfield. This proved to be very successful with good food, pleasant surroundings and of course, excellent company.

It was good to see new member Tony Allen and his wife Jan and some neighbours of Alan May who stood in to replace Geoff and Ann Twine as they had to cancel through health reasons at the last minute and also Derek and Elizabeth Roberts who went down ill a few days ago. Hopefully they will all recover in time for Christmas.

The photographs this year were taken by various people on each table and have come out well. Click on any photograph to enlarge.

Once again thanks are due to Alan and Liliane May who have arranged everything for today’s celebrations and proved what a professional team they are. Thank you from our members.

A good month for our publicity that appeared in the early part of December in the local magazines, and we got a small (and edited) version in the Basingstoke Gazette of 8 December of the review by our President Alex Marianos that I used as copy for the three magazines that have a January edition. I had also sent this review to the Basingstoke Observer, but they did not run with it in their 8 December issue so we shall have to wait for it in their next one in two weeks on 22 December.

The image of the CommunityAd front cover for the Overton, Oakley & Kempshott is shown larger than reality purely because of the space available. It should be A5. Whereas the Old Basing Winter magazine (also a CommunityyAd publication) is A4. However we must be grateful that both sizes of these magazines gave us a double page spread.

The eagle eyed of you will have noticed that the Kempshott Kourier for December is not shown as it has only gone to print today because, so I am told, the editor was stuck in east Africa having had his passport, money and camera stolen whilst on holiday.

The Victoria Cross is the highest and most prestigious gallantry medal awarded to any member of UK armed forces following action “in the presence of the enemy.” It is inscribed with the words “For Valour.”

As the name indicates the award was created by Queen Victoria to recognise the actions of any service personnel, of any age, length of service or rank. The original recipients in 1857 were veterans of the Crimean War and the story goes that the metal used for all VCs is from Russian cannons seized at Sebastopol. In recent years an alternative opinion has emerged that Chinese cannon were used that were captured during the dubious Opium Wars.

What is known is that only 10 kgs of the original metal exists which is held under guard at the Royal Logistics Corps base at MOD Donnington near Telford. This is reckoned to be sufficient for another 80 or so Victoria Crosses.

This was all outlined by Nick Saunders, the latest speaker at the Probus Club of Basingstoke. He is a part time archivist in the Royal Hampshire Regiment in Winchester as well as WW1 battlefields guide while continuing his studies working towards a master’s degree in local history from the Open University.

His particular interest is the award of the Victoria Cross to three members of the Hampshire Regiment during WW1. (The regiment only received its Royal honorific in 1948). They were all Second Lieutenants and were very young.

In 1915 2nd Lt George R D Moor was only eighteen years old during the Gallipoli campaign in the Dardanelles, which today is in modern Turkey.

Things were going badly for 2nd Lt Moor’s 2^nd battalion of the Hampshire regiment. Of one thousand men they had been reduced to only three hundred and lost five commanding officers in six weeks. A detachment of a battalion on his left, which had lost most of its officers was rapidly retiring before a heavy Turkish attack. Recognising the danger to the rest of the line he dashed some 200 yards and stemmed the retirement, led back the men and recaptured the lost trench. What emerged from the talk was that this young officer shot dead four men which no doubt encouraged a rethink on behalf of the retreating troops. He died of the Spanish flu on November 3^rd, 1918, aged just twenty-one. As well as the V.C. he had also been awarded the M.C.and Bar.

On 31^st July 1917 2nd Lt Denis GW Hewitt was in command of a company at Ypres and after capturing his first objective he advanced but was hit by shrapnel that set alight signal flares in his haversack. He put out the fire by rolling in the deep mud of the battlefield and despite his severe burns he led the company forward under heavy machine gun fire, capturing and consolidated his objective. He was killed by a sniper while inspecting the consolidation and encouraging his men.  His body was lost on the battlefield and his name is engraved on the Menin Gate. He had been educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst and was aged just nineteen.

Not being a success at grammar school, 2nd Lt Montague SS Moore had been privately tutored before attending Sandhurst. While at Ypres on 20^th September 1917 his actions earned him the Victoria Cross and subsequently the Croix de Guerre.

He was in command and dashed ahead of some seventy men who were met with heavy machine gun fire which caused severe casualties with the result that he arrived at his objective some five hundred yards on with only a sergeant and four men. Undaunted he bombed a large dug out and took 28 prisoners, 2 machine guns and a light field gun. Gradually more officers and men arrived, to number about sixty. They defended the position under constant fire for 36 hours using enemy rifles and bombs and beat off several counterattacks. By this time his force was reduced to just ten men. 2^nd Lt Moore eventually got away his wounded and withdrew under cover of a thick mist. He was only eighteen years old.

Such courage was soundly appreciated by the members of the Probus Club of Basingstoke who enjoy a variety of talks at their monthly business meetings.

The Probus Club of Basingstoke was represented at the Basingstoke Remembrance Sunday parade by David Wickens and Chris Perkins MVO who laid a poppy wreath on behalf of members.

One other notable Probus member present was Paul Miller in his capacity as the Mayor of Basingstoke & Deane BC.

A good result with the report about the RAF Mountain Rescue Service from forty years ago with full pages in the Rabbiter, Kempshott Kourier and Villager (the Villager spread the report over two pages but reduced to fit on A4 for this scan). The Link ran the short version of the report and the Basinga ran it in their Extra web site while the CommunityAd for Bramley & Sherfield ran it as a full A5 page.

The Bramley Magazine did not feature our report and neither (I suspect) did the Loddon Valley Link.