Sir Roger Gibbs was a financier and philanthropist under whose aegis the assets of the Wellcome Trust, of which he was a trustee and then chairman, rose from £250 million in 1983 to £14 billion in 1999, when he retired. In the words of the Trust’s current chair, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller: ‘scattered around the world are many millions of his fellow-creatures, who have never heard of him but whose happiness and health have flowed from his work at the Wellcome Trust’.
Roger Gibbs was the fourth son of Sir Geoffrey Cockayne Gibbs (chairman of the family firm, bankers Antony Gibbs & Sons) and Lady Helen Margaret Gibbs née Leslie, overseas commissioner of the Girl Guides Association. He had four brothers and one sister. His was a loving family and an idyllic childhood; his academic career, however, was undistinguished. Despite his best efforts, he excelled neither in the classroom nor the sporting arena. A gift for mental arithmetic seemed to be his only talent, although he did earn the good egg cup at Eton, before being sent to Millfield on what was lightheartedly called a ‘free transfer’. At 17, no one, least of all Roger himself, standing just over five-foot tall, anticipated future success, let alone the honorary degrees and fellowships he would later receive.
He grew a foot between the ages of 17 and 19. His father called in a favour to procure him a job as a messenger at a City discount house, Jessel Toynbee. Here the gangling schoolboy found his feet; his feel for numbers and willingness to calculate risks at last came into their own. Within six years he was appointed as a director of Jessel Toynbee and then went on to a post at the stockbrokers De Zoete & Gorton and later Gerrard & National.
It was a brush with cancer in the late 1970s that led to Roger’s commitment to medical charity work. In 1982, he ran the second London Marathon, setting a world record for sponsorship by raising £440,000 for a scanner for Guy’s Hospital, where he had been a patient during his illness; the record stood for over 20 years. ‘No nation but the British would ever produce someone like Roger Gibbs,’ said Chris Brasher, co-founder of the Marathon.
The following year, his friend Sir David Steel, chairman of the Wellcome Foundation (as it was then known), invited Roger onto the Wellcome board. He and Steel oversaw the flotation of the Foundation in 1986. When Roger succeeded as chair in 1989, he pushed through a second sale of shares, raising £2.3 billion. Under his stewardship, the Wellcome Trust (as it was renamed) became the world’s richest charitable foundation, able to increase its funding for medical research from £50 million in 1989, to £400 million in 1999, when Roger stood down. Today it gives £1 billion a year; the projects it has supported include the human genome project and groundbreaking research into malaria and ebola. At Roger’s retirement, having been knighted for services to charity in 1994, his deputy addressed him as ‘the wizard of Wellcome’ and the Trust named its new headquarters on Euston Road the Gibbs building in his honour. Millions of people around the world have benefited from the research his leadership and financial acumen made possible.
Aside from the Wellcome Trust and Guy’s Hospital, a huge number of organisations benefitted from Roger’s time, energy and enthusiasm. Between 2000 and 2006, he raised £40 million for the restoration of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a devoted board member for 26 years of Arsenal Football Club, retiring with characteristically good timing when Arsenal moved from the Highbury stadium to the Emirates, with the undefeated ‘Invincibles’ winning the Premier League. A keen Cresta rider, he sat on the committee of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club for 57 years and served as president twice. Arundel Castle Cricket Club and Swinley Forest Golf Club were just two more of the 50 clubs, charities, hospitals, churches, schools, trusts and institutions he supported.
As his widow, Jane (formerly Jane Patricia Lee), observed, ‘If it hadn’t been for Roger …’ was the phrase most used in the many letters she received after he died. Ever conscious of having been a late developer, Roger spared no effort to encourage the efforts of others. ‘He was absolutely the man he helped others become, with a brilliant knack of making everyone feel important, the young especially,’ remembered James Sunley, president of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club.
Sport was Roger’s great passion: watching it, playing it. As his friend John Barclay said, Roger ‘expressed his optimism and zest for life with his elaborate batting style; forceful, unorthodox and not geared to be long-lasting but endearingly watchable’. It is no accident that Roger was known as a master of the second serve ace.
Endlessly generous, full of wise and useful advice, witty, self-deprecating to a fault, his steely determination was masked by an easy charm that won him friends of all ages from all walks of life. He was a man with manners so impeccable that he would write a thank you letter for a thank you letter. On one occasion, having got back to London from the country after being towed out of a snowdrift by a passing tractor driver, he returned the following morning to leave a token of his appreciation on the tractor driver’s doorstep.
At the centre of a large and close-knit family, adored by his many friends, Roger did not find love until later in life, marrying Jane when he was 70. Theirs was the happiest of unions. He died peacefully at home with his beloved Jane by his side.
Lucy Gibbs
[Wellcome News 6 October 2018 Sir Roger Gibbs, 1934-2018 https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/sir-roger-gibbs-1934-2018 – accessed 21 August 2019; The Times 6 October 2018 www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sir-roger-gibbs-obituary-pmb5vcgx7 – accessed 21 August 2019; The Telegraph 15 October 2018 www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2018/10/15/sir-roger-gibbs-financier-transformed-fortunes-wellcome-trust/ – accessed 21 August 2019]