Thomas Field Gibson

He was born to Thomas Gibson Snr and Charlotte née Field (who was Sir Francis Ronalds' aunt) at 2 Canonbury Place Islington – his maternal grandparents and an aunt and uncle were living at No 6 and No 3 Canonbury Place respectively.[2][3] His paternal grandfather (another Thomas Gibson – a laceman and banker) was associated with Sir Richard Arkwright’s commercialisation of mechanised cotton spinning through his brother-in-law Samuel Need.[4]

Gibson's schooling was with Unitarian ministers John Potticary in Blackheath (where Benjamin Disraeli was a classmate) and James Tayler (father of John James Tayler) in Nottingham.[5][6] In adulthood he resided in Bloomsbury; Hanger Lane, Wood Green; Elm House in Walthamstow (the birthplace of William Morris); Westbourne Terrace, Paddington; 10 Broadwater Down, Royal Tunbridge Wells; and finally in Fitzjohn's Avenue, Hampstead. He married twice: to Mary Anne Pett and then to Eliza Cogan, daughter of Unitarian schoolmaster Eliezer Cogan,[7] and his only child, Mary Anne, was born the week before her mother and namesake died.[1]

Gibson became a freeman of the Weavers' Company and took over his father's silk manufacturing business in 1829. From his warehouse in Spital Square, work was put out to several hundred weaving families in the Spitalfields area. He also employed weavers in Halstead, Essex and was a partner in the Depot silk throwing mill in Derby.[4][1][8]

Gibson was in addition "a patron of geology",[14] being elected a fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1847 and serving on its Council.[15] Staying at his beach house at Sandown on the Isle of Wight, he found the type specimen of an important extinct plant species at Luccombe Chine in 1856–57. Studied by Joseph Dalton Hooker, Director of the Kew Gardens, John Morris, the geology professor at University College London, and Unitarian scholar James Yates, it was then characterised by William Carruthers of the Natural History Museum, and later named Cycadeoidea gibsoniana after the finder.[16] Gibson also presented a paper to the Geological Society on the Iguanodon femur he found on the island.[17]

Like his extended family, Gibson held Unitarian beliefs. His father chaired the meeting on 26 May 1825 at which the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was formed to provide national co-ordination of Unitarian issues and both he and Gibson Snr presided at the annual meeting at different times.[18] Gibson Snr was also part of the group that successfully lobbied Parliament in 1828 to repeal the Sacramental Test Act that prevented Nonconformists from holding public office,[19] and chaired the controversial meeting of the committee of the South Place Chapel in 1834 that accepted the resignation of their minister William Johnson Fox – Fox had formed a close relationship with his ward Eliza Flower and separated from his wife.[1][20] Gibson was on the South Place chapel committee as well.

He and his father were joint executors for the renowned Unitarian minister Thomas Belsham. Gibson helped his friend and third cousin Edwin Wilkins Field[2][3] as a trustee of the Hibbert Trust for the first 25 years of its existence; its purpose was to support Nonconformist scholarship.[21] He was also on Wilkin Field's committee that built University Hall as a memorial to the passing of the Dissenters' Chapels Act in 1844 and is now the home of Dr Williams's Library.