Life to the full, despite injuries
When James William Gibbs came home from World War I, he was a changed man.
For one, he had severe and permanent injuries. Secondly, he had a new wife. Yet he did not let the fact that he had lost the lower part of his right leg stop him from living an active life.
His daughter Betty Anderson Trotter said he had joined the Returned & Services League and become a member of the "Wingies and Stumpies" group. He played cricket for a while, loved the ocean and joined the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club, where he was awarded life membership in 1937.
Gibbs was born in India, the son of a Scottish father and English mother, and after his father died he sailed to WA in 1913.
In June 1915, aged 21, he enlisted, giving his occupation as labourer. After training at Blackboy Hill in Greenmount, Gibbs left in September as a reinforcement for the 28th Battalion.
He was seriously wounded in France in July 1916, receiving shell fragments in the face, left arm and right leg and endured many operations, including the leg amputation below the knee.
It was during Gibbs' hospitalisation that nurse Helen Chubb entered his life, and in February 1919 they were married in the parish church in Stockwell, London.
After a brief honeymoon in Scotland, Gibbs and his bride sailed for Fremantle. They bought a house in Cottesloe and had two daughters.
After he was discharged from the army, Gibbs worked as a clerk for the Postmaster-General and then Customs, where he remained until retiring in the 1930s, returning for a while during World War II as a relief officer.
Mrs Trotter said her father spoke little about his war experiences, apart from occasional anecdotes. She said he had been left with a permanent scar on the left side of his face from his wounds.
"As a child growing up I never really noticed it," she said. "He was just my dad."
James William Gibbs died in 1941.
