Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Sweet Thames Run Softly by Robert Gibbings Robert Gibbings. Gibbings making notes in his boat the 'Willow' on his journey down the Thames in 1939, RUL. Gibbings's love of river life is illustrated in his eight river books, the most famous of which is 'Sweet Thames run Softly'. In 1939, when England was on the brink of war, Gibbings built a flat-bottomed boat, painted it eau-de-nil green, and armed with a sketchpad and microscope, floated in it down the Thames. The result, an artist-naturalist’s account of life on the river, was an instant hit. ‘Sweet Thames run Softly’ was followed by ‘Coming down the Wye’ (1942), ‘Lovely is the Lee’ (1944), ‘Over the Reefs’ (1948), ‘Sweet Cork of Thee’ (1951), ‘Coming down the Seine’ (1953), ‘Trumpets from Montparnasse’ (1955), and ‘Til I end my Song’ (1957), all illustrated with his own wood engravings. 'Sweet Thames run Softly' has been republished by Little Toller books. To order a copy of this book please click here. Sweet Thames Run Softly. The introduction to the 2011 edition of Robert Gibbings 1940 classic, Sweet Thames Run Softly. Written by Luke Jennings , for Little Toller Books. When picking up Sweet Thames Run Softly, you might wonder if Robert Gibbings is your ideal companion. The river runs a considerable length, and you might consider that his didactic manner, and his schoolmasterly disquisitions on Ovid and Theophrastus, are more than a little creaky to the 21st century sensibility. Some of the book’s descriptive passages are fairly purple, like his description of a dream in which small creatures living in a country lane “all came to me and led me to their nests, drawing aside the sheltering roots and leaves that I might see into their homes”. But Gibbings wins you over. His curiosity, his erudition, and his eye for arcane detail persuade you of the need to continue. He is the kind of man who carries a microscope in a punt, in case, moored in a backwater on a Saturday evening, he feels moved to examine sedimentary diatoms. “Some were crystal clear bordered with gold, some were sculptured like a cowrie-shell, others recalled the cuttle-fish ‘bone’ that we find on our shores”. Turning up a water-lily, he discovers “Aquatic caterpillars… as well as small trumpet-shells, and semi-transparent snails whose cat-like faces extruded as they marched along, seeking what they might devour”. This is science filtered through an artist’s eye, and the result is wonderfully strange. Gibbings was born in Cork in 1889, and grew up in Kinsale, where his father was the rector. He studied medicine for three years before turning to art, eventually studying in London at the Central School and The Slade. During the First World War he served with the Royal Munster Fusiliers and was wounded in the neck at Gallipoli. Invalided home, he married Moira Pennefather, with whom he would have four children. To support his family Gibbings worked as an illustrator, much of the time for the Golden Cockerel Press, based in Berkshire, which produced limited-edition books. In 1924 he bought the Press, and for a time he and Moira enjoyed what would today be called an alternative lifestyle. Gibbings had rejected the devout Christianity of his father in favour of a form of sun-worship, and days of disciplined craft were followed by nights of hedonistic abandon, often in the company of Eric Gill, never a man to back away from sexual experimentation. These lotus-eating days came to an end with the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Depression. The market for privately produced books evaporated, and with it Gibbings’s funds. By 1934 The Cockerel Press had been sold, and Gibbings was living in a garden hut with his son Patrick, Moira having departed for South Africa with their other three children. Despite these diminished circumstances, Gibbings succeeded in wooing and winning Elisabeth Empson, a woman twenty years his junior, with whom he would have three further children. They married in 1937, and Blue Angels and Whales, a record of Gibbings’s undersea explorations in Bermuda, Tahiti and the Red Sea, was published the following year to some acclaim. During the Second World War, Elisabeth and the children moved to Canada, while Gibbings taught book design at The University of Reading. He built himself a punt, the Willow, and as the RAF and the Luftwaffe engaged in lethal combat over the South Coast, floated down The Thames with his sketchpad and microscope. The result of these months of research was Sweet Thames Run Softly , published in 1941. It proved an immediate success, not least because many feared that the gentle world it portrayed was in danger of annhilation. With only a pinch of irony he represents The Thames Valley as Arcadia, and himself as a kind of satyr, cheerfully and lustily pagan. Even a beech- leaf diverts him to erotic thoughts, as he notes how its “delicate downy growth” is comparable to that found in the small of a woman’s back. He tells the story of Pan and the nymph Syrinx and how “with the little goat legs hot on her trail” the nymph turns herself into a clump of weeds to escape the god’s attentions, and it’s not many pages before we discover Gibbings himself, tied up in a backwater, spying “a girl, running fast upstream, and she with nothing on”. He lures her aboard for a cup of tea but she is soon gone, slipping into the river like a naiad. This identification of deep England with the unspoiled, harmonious wilderness of the ancients would have touched a sympathetic nerve in those troubled wartime days. Arcadia was originally an actual region of Greece, cut off from the outside world by mountains, and the name was used by the Roman poet Virgil and others to represent the notion of an isolated, and thus invulnerable, pastoral utopia. “It is those quiet mornings in August that remain in my memory…” Gibbings writes. “…those mornings when the sun rose through the mist like an ivory disk, seemingly without power to shed light or give heat, and those evenings too when darkness veiled the river, and time stood still, so that I seemed to be moving through events, past, present, and future, as if I was walking through a field of resting cattle”. Descriptions like this will resonate with anyone who knows and loves the English countryside. He writes of “the hours soon after dawn when when, except for a herdsman… there would be no sign of life”. Even in the 1940s, the word “herdsman” would have seemed antique when applied to a Berkshire farm labourer, but its use is deliberate. In Greek, the word for herdsman is bukolos, and Gibbings is linking the scene to the “bucolic” works of Virgil and other classical poets. Nazi Germany was not the only threat to the idyll. There was Progress. Giant beeches reduced to planking and transported to factories. In the Chilterns “…trees crash to the ground, three and four to the hour, and, on all sides, there is a wilderness of brown leaves, dead before their time.” Gibbings is enough of a realist to accept this state of affairs; the planking for his punt was once a tree, too. Of countryside “blemished by the marks of man” he suggests either passing through it at night or “mild inebriation”. These are very human reactions, and he soon cheers up. In Long Wittenham churchyard he finds yellow lichen, of which he gathers sufficient “to dye myself a fine purple tie”. He gives us precise instructions, ending with an admonition to wear the finished article “with a grey or blue shirt, and accept the subsequent admiration with humility”. This is typical Gibbings in its balance of the droll, the eccentric and the scientifically precise, and it’s these characteristics which makes Sweet Thames Run Gently so readable. Its title is drawn from Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweete Themmes! Runne softly, till I end my song”, and the line would also provide the name of his last book, Till I End My Song (1957), about the village of Long Wittenham, on the banks of the upper Thames, where Gibbings died in 1958. He wrote of an age which seems distant to us now, and yet there is a sense in which a river is always of the present. Beneath the quiet surface of this account runs a strong, clear sense of life’s renewal. Robert Gibbings. Robert Gibbings (1889-1958) was an Irish artist and author who played a vital role in the revival of wood engraving in the twentieth century. Born in Cork, he overcame opposition from his family to study at the Slade and the Central School of Art and Design. During the First World War he served in the Royal Munster Fusiliers and was wounded at Gallipoli before eventually being invalided out of the army in 1918. He was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers and owned and ran the Golden Cockerel Press from 1924-1933. Gibbings illustrated numerous books on travel and natural history, including Charles Darwin’s ‘Voyage of HMS Beagle’, and wrote a series of bestselling river books, notably ‘Sweet Thames run Softly’. He did a huge amount to popularise the subject of natural history, travelling extensively through Polynesia, Bermuda and the Red Sea to gather inspiration for his work. He was the first man to draw underwater – the illustrations of which filled his Penguin classic ‘Blue Angels and Whales’ – and was one of the first natural history presenters on the BBC. He is buried in the village of Long Wittenham, on the banks of the River Thames. Robert Gibbings. Gibbings, born in Cork in 1889 was the son of a clergyman. He spent most of his working life in England but enjoyed travel and adventure. A founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers he began to gain commissions for book illustration. While engaged on a handsome commission for the Golden Cockerel Press the owner became ill and was forced to sell the business. Gibbings got funds together and bought the press in 1924 and ran it with great success until the early 1930’s when the depression seriously affected the business and it was sold in 1933. During this golden period many fine books were published mostly graced with wood engravings by Gibbings but also many of the finest engravers of the day. The Magnus Opus of the press is the magnificent The Four Gospels published in 1931 in which Eric Gill excelled with his wood engraved illustrations. In 1936 Gibbings was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Typography, Book Production and Engraving at Reading University. With the help of his son and two members of the technical staff at the University, Gibbings boat, the Willow was constructed and he embarked in his trip down the Thames. The resulting book ‘Sweet Thames Run Softly’ published in 1940 was a huge success and was reprinted twice during that year…..and many times since. Following this triumph, he went on to write and illustrate a number of books in the same vein such as Coming Down the Wye, Lovely is the Lee, Over the Reefs, Sweet Cork of Thee, Coming Down the Seine and finishing with Till I End My Song, published in October 1957. He died a few months later in January 1958. Hearty and manly: Robert Gibbings’ Sweet Thames Run Softly. This summer I have the great pleasure of cycling through Oxfordshire country lanes to get to work in the publishing archives that share a building with the Museum of English Rural Life, over the Berkshire border in Reading. I’m being immersed in English country sights, sounds and smells, and am enjoying it no end. (It hasn’t rained much on me, yet.) So the next five weeks of podcast script catch-ups from Really Like This Book will be about nature writing. Today’s is the story of a leisurely punt down the River Thames by Robert Gibbings, an Irish artist and naturalist who was a book designer before the Second World War, and after the war became one of the first British nature presenters for the BBC, the forerunner of David Attenborough. He belonged to a vigorous, manly, hedonistic artistic circle which included the scandalous sculptor Eric Gill, and he ad at least two families of children. The title of his book, Sweet Thames Run Softly ( 1940) is a line from a poem by Edmund Spenser from the 16th century. That’s a pretty good indication of the timelessness of this book, and the timelessness that Gibbings was experiencing when he took his journey. He and some friends built his punt themselves, with no knowledge of boat-building but with good advice from the builders’ yard down the river. It had lockers and a canvas cover to keep the rain off and the chill out, to be Gibbings’ temporary home for several weeks as he worked his way from the source of the Thames in the Chiltern Hills, down to Windsor Castle. Gibbings has so many interests that the journey is a slow one, constantly interrupted by his examination of anything that catches his interest. So the book ranges wildly over most of natural history: from geology to insects to fish to birds to people and to beer. He also tells stories: my particular favourite is the tale of what happened when a zoologist colleague gave him a cigarette tin full of dried South African mud, left over from an expedition he had completed two years earlier. Gibbings put the tin in water, and inspected it every few days, and was amazed and greatly entertained to witness several generations of pondlife and microscopic activity being born, living, dying, sedimenting to the bottom, and feeding in turn new insects and tiny water creatures, that eventually brought about the growth of plants. It wasn’t so much an experiment as seeing the life cycle of plants and animals speeded up. Little Toller Books edition. We also get little outbreaks of poetry and Sir Thomas Malory, and we get a lot of local colour. Dialogue and conversations are recorded as Gibbings encounters odd or interesting people along the river. He does seem to keep meeting girls. There was a naked one swimming in the river during heavy rain, whom he tries to encourage to climb on board the punt for a cup of tea, but she wisely diverts his attention from what she might look like out of the water, by asking him to run down the riverbank to fetch her clothes. When he returns, not having found them (obviously not looking hard enough), she’s on board, safely wrapped up in one of his blankets. They have a nice cup of tea and conversation, but when she wants to leave, she does it again: she asks him whether that little brown bird at the fork of the old oak tree over there is a tree-creeper or a nuthatch. That was an inspired question to ask anyone who prides themselves on their bird knowledge, because easiest to work it out by looking at whether the bird is creeping up the tree trunk, or downwards. While Gibbings was looking carefully for the bird on the tree (which undoubtedly didn’t exist), the naked girl disappeared over the side of the punt and got away cheerfully, dignity and anonymity intact. There was another girl whom Gibbings did not actually approach, but ended up watching though his binoculars because of her situation. She’d marched past him at a fast pace, clearly upset and clearly at the winning end of an argument that she had hoped would go in a different direction. The binoculars came out when Gibbings noticed a very dejected boy sitting on the towpath in the direction from which she had come, looking as if the argument had not gone the way he’d wanted it to either. When the boy jumped up and followed the girl, and met her, and brought her back in a calmer frame of mind, Gibbings was still interested, but I’m glad he put the binoculars away when they entered the wood together. On another occasion he met a third girl, protected by a ferocious man-hating aunt, but she managed to get away one Sunday morning while the aunt was at church to thank Gibbings for getting her dog out of a trap. They talked about the country tradition of hanging dead vermin on a fence to discourage the others. That’s not something we see very often these days, though I did see a barn door in France once that was decorated with the hooves and tails of wild boar. Gibbings’ habit of moving from one story to another is infectious. He’s a very outdoor person, and shamelessly enjoys getting away from civilised routines. He eats and sleeps when and where he wants, and brings any creature that he finds into the boat for inspection. He once stayed for two weeks in a nudist colony, which sounds off-puttingly hearty, and also reliant on good weather. Everyone played good hard games energetically all morning, and swam in the lake morning and noon. Gibbings is endearing in his frank enjoyment of the body, and the briskness of nature, even when it extends to truly bizarre stories about killer duck attacks while mating in flight, or bird-eating rabbits. His stories about the wildlife in London parks are just as curious as his tales from Tahiti. His focus swoops in to hover at insect-scale, and then pulls back to consider the habits of badgers. A typical chapter will follow a train of thought mixed in with the view from the punt. Chapter 7 is decorated with a nice engraving of a Friesian cow grazing, and begins with thoughts about kingfishers and how some come to perch on fishing-rods. We move on to bird camouflage, and then fish camouflage, and the habits of the painted lady butterfly. Gibbings then refers to one of his earlier nature books in which he describes the camouflage of the little owl, the green woodpecker, chrysalids and the red-crested pochard in Regent’s Park. Then we move up a scale with the greed of the heron and how it can be prevented from taking off by the sheer weight of its catch. This brings to Gibbings’ mind the heronry at Henley, their flights to Ireland and the legend of St Columba and the crane. Naturally this brings us to bird migration, and Gibbings’ experiences watching birds as he sailed from north-east England to Barcelona on a tramp steamer. These migrating birds had no fear of the boat or the sailors, and would invade the galley looking for food, and sit on the rail without concern, resting from the gales until the boat reached the Mediterranean. They cleared the ship of cockroaches, and brought out the nurturing spirit in the sailors’ hearts. The unfortunate death of a flycatcher brings to mind a story from Gibbings’ service during the First World War, when he was riding out on the moor in Cork, and saw seven golden plovers fly towards him, blown by a winter gale. Three of them dropped in a row as if shot, and Gibbings was at a loss to work out where the gunman had been, since he had heard no shot. The birds had been decapitated by the telegraph wire. Now that Gibbings is back in Ireland we get an Irish wildlife story, of Tom Raffery, the most classically educated failure of a priest ever, and his version of the story of Pan and Syrinx. Then we have the story of Lord Grey, with only one working eye, but who could memorise pages of classical history at sight, even though he couldn’t see the birds’ eggs in his garden’s nesting boxes. Lord Grey had written a birders’ book that Gibbings had illustrated, and so we hear about the multiple nest-building of moor-hens, and the dangers of even looking for a nest, since our trail will lead cleverer predators after us. All that is one chapter, and as you can see, it’s a right old jumble. But 24 chapters of this kind of writing is a glorious jumble, a total immersion in the wildlife of the Thames with many, many little diversions and tributaries. The edition I have is a new one, from a small press called Little Toller Books, which is absolutely beautiful, a pleasure to hold as well as read. Gibbings’ own engravings decorate the chapters, and a really splendid painting, in lovely angular 1950s Stanley- Spencer style, of three men in sensible mackintoshes and flat caps fishing from a punt on the Thames, makes a perfect cover.