“Thank you, Mister Jeeesby!” the bar waiter called out as he scanned the tables of the Waldforf Astoria’s Bull & Bear, trying to identify which of his customers had left him such a good tip.
I raised my hand to acknowledge his thanks. He had just mispronounced my surname – big time, in the full hearing of the Friday evening crowd – but I smiled; I was used to it. Anyway, he was a nice guy, and I felt mellow after a couple of strong cocktails.
That was in 1998. Almost forty years earlier, on my first, nerve-wracked morning at secondary school near my hometown in Scotland, another American also mispronounced my name during his roll call of the new pupils.
“Brenda Greezby,” the Rector announced in his Mid-Atlantic twang to the whole school assembly. I remember my cheeks burned as several hundred pairs of eyes turned to look for the girl with the funny name.
In all the years between that fateful school day and that noisy night in Manhattan, and in all the years following, the miscalling never ceased. In my lifetime, few people have ever been able spontaneously to pronounce my surname correctly after reading it. Even fewer have been able to spell the name correctly after hearing it. Yet it’s a very simple name, composed only of five letters – G-I-S-B-Y – with no hidden vowels or extra consonants to trip one up. Perhaps it’s too simple; deceptively simple, compelling people to throw in an additional letter or two in order to... well, to complicate it.
When I was younger, I felt that I had been cursed with that peculiar surname, and I often dreamt of having a regular name, one that everyone knew how to pronounce and spell. But bad pronunciation and spelling aren’t the only problems; the name is just so damn unusual! Look up any telephone book for the Edinburgh area, where I live, and you’ll find two or three Gisbys listed at most. The same applies elsewhere in Scotland, in the whole of Wales and in most of England. It’s only when you reach the south-east corner of England that you begin to identify little clusters of Gisbys, the biggest cluster occurring in the Kent area, where the name in Britain apparently originates.
My mother told her children that the name was Norwegian, our father having come from a long line of seafarers who originally hailed from Norway. She was prone to some romantic ideas was my old mother, God bless her soul – she also claimed that on her side of the family we were descended from the Kings of Ireland and therefore had royal blood running through us – but she may well have been correct about that Norse derivation. Think of the Vikings invading Northern France and being transmuted into the Normans, whose army goes on to sweep up the Kent coast on its way to the conquest of England, and you might conclude that it was all possible.
Whatever its derivation, the name Gisby is scattered thinly across this vast globe. Or so I thought until I joined Facebook recently to help market The Bookie’s Runner, a little biography of my late father that had just been published. On Facebook, I met a cousin from England called Phil Gisby. I also found that there were Gisbys everywhere – not only in England and Scotland, but in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. They seemed to be coming out of the woodwork! One enterprising young Australian Gisby has even set up a Facebook page called Worldwide Gisby Empire. The most common comment from Gisbys joining that page is: “We are not alone!”
I had known about Phil Gisby before finding him on Facebook. He had spent some time researching the Gisby family history and had already been in touch with a couple of my siblings. I have to admit that up until then I had been only vaguely interested in Phil’s research. Then we got to communicating.
“It’s all fascinating stuff. Some of our friends have said we ought to write a book about it,” wrote Phil. “Maybe you’re the man...” he added.
Now I was more than vaguely interested. Phil put together and sent me a document summarising the results of his research so far. The document focused on our great-grandfather, Charles George Gisby (who was born in 1859 in Margate, Kent), his two marriages and the children from those marriages.
“I don’t think there’s a story in most of it,” Phil noted glumly at the end. “It’s pretty much all names and dates.”
I tended to agree with him at first. Then I read the document a couple of more times and grew excited. In those pages from Phil I began to discern the bones of a tremendous family saga, a saga rich in colour and drama. Wars are fought in the course of it. There's a memorable patriarch. There are untimely, mysterious and tragic deaths. There's a plane crash and an accidental suicide. And there's a larger-than-life cad and bounder, one who could teach George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman a trick or two. All wonderful ingredients!
The upshot is that Phil and I have agreed to collaborate on the production of a book about the Gisby family, with Phil supplying the research and me the words. Its working title is The Five Sons of Charlie Gisby. It’ll take us a good while to put it together. Who knows, though, we might end up with a bestseller on our hands, a saga to rival John Jakes’ The Kent Family Chronicles. Well, maybe not...
But whatever happens, Phil and I will do our utmost to make sure that more people in this world know how to say our surname and how to spell the damn thing!
