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The Gibbes, later Osborne-Gibbes Baronetcy, of Springhead in Barbados, was a title in the Baronetage of Great Britain. It was created on 30 May 1774 for Philip Gibbes, a wealthy Barbadian plantation owner, lawyer, and author of books dealing with the management of slaves and sugar estates. He also chaired the West India Planters' and Traders' Association. ==The First Baronet== Sir Philip Gibbes, the First Baronet (1731–1815), was a cultivated, well-read English gentleman. His friends included Jeremy Bentham, John Wesley and Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke. He also conversed extensively in Paris during the 1770s with Benjamin Franklin on the subject of the American Revolution. The First Baronet was considered to be a humane slave owner and an enlightened economic manager by 18th-century standards and the influential 1789 autobiography written by the ex-slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano contains a positive description of him. A member of London's Middle Temple, he was appointed to the Barbados legislature, advising the island's governor in Bridgetown on legal matters. According to the Website of the British Museum, he designed and privately issued copper penny and halfpenny coins for Barbados in 1792 in order to help satisfy the island's need for small denomination units of currency. The coins were minted in England, as was an earlier issue inititiated by the First Baronet in 1788. The First Baronet had been born into a life of colonial privilege in St James' Parish, Barbados, on 7 March 1731 and baptised that same year. Subsequently, he studied law in England before returning to the West Indies to take up his father's sugar estates. In his capacity as the head of the principal lobby group representing the interests of the Caribbean plantation owners, he was received by King George III and the Prime Minister, Lord North, and enjoyed ready access to senior politicians in London, where he leased a town house at 4 New Burlington Street from 1798 onwards. He acquired a country house, too, at Tackley in the English county of Oxfordshire. The First Baronet's health deteriorated in old age and he was afflicted with a severe loss of eyesight. He died at Springhead House on 27 June 1815, while under the care of a trusted plantation manager, and was buried in the grounds of St James Church, Barbados, where his tomb can still be seen. At the same church, in 1753, he had wed Agnes Osborne—the only child and sole heiress of another Barbadian planter of English origin, Samuel Osborne. (County Kent was the ancestral home of the Osbornes; the family established a presence in Barbados in 1634 with the arrival of Richard Osborn() in St James' Parish.) Lady Gibbes predeceased her husband, dying in London in 1813. The First Baronet and Lady Gibbes had four children, all born on Barbados. They were raised largely in England by Lady Gibbes so that the First Baronet could concentrate on his business and political affairs in Barbados, London and Bristol. During the 1780s, she and the children resided near Wolverhampton—at Hilton Park (the ancestral seat of the Vernon family) in rural Staffordshire. The children of the First Baronet and Lady Gibbes were, in chronological order: Philip (a Cambridge University graduate and judge on the Barbados bench) and Samuel (a sugar planter), both of whom married but predeceased their father in 1812 and 1807 respectively; Elizabeth (who wed Charles Abbot, 1st Baron Colchester in 1796); and Agnes, who remained a spinster. During the early 19th century, the First Baronet became estranged from his two sons. He criticised their standards of behaviour in letters written to his daughters and expressed disapproval of his younger son's choice of bride. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Osborne-Gibbes baronets」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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