Currently working on the database and feel a need to vent my frustrations. I am filling in the section for Anfisa, Sydney Gibbes' maid who accompanied him to Tobolsk. There is very scarce information about her, apart from Rappaport's description in Four Sisters about her as being “toothless” and “old”. No reference is given for this.
Rappaport also exaggeratedly claims that Gibbes lived in “a hastily converted stone outbuilding near the kitchen - in smelling distance of the pig-swill” whilst at Tobolsk, simply because he did not like Gilliard and didn't want to share a room with him. No reference is given for this either.
The only reference to Gibbes living outside of the Governor's House is given by Evgeny Stepanovich Kobylinski to the Sokolov Report, who stated that "the Englishman did not like to live with anybody else, so he was allowed to live outside" in a "small house near the kitchen".
Furthermore, Gibbes testified that "[o]ur stay in Tobolsk was altogether very agreeable. I did not see anything very objectionable in the conditions of our life." Therefore, even in Gibbes did live in a make-shirt house next to a pig swill, he didn't seem to mind that much.
The relationship between Gibbes and Gilliard is also plagued by a lack of sources across the board. They appear to have had a practical friendship, keeping each other updated with news via telephone and letters. Gibbes would run errands for Gilliard, and the pair teamed up in Ekaterinburg to demand answers over what was happening with the Romanov family. Neither wrote anything overtly critical about the other, though there are rumblings that Gibbes was critical of Gilliard for publishing his memoirs in the years after the Revolution. This was likely rooted in the fact that Gibbes seems to have been an intensely private person, who would not have dreamt of publishing such detailed recollections of the family. Whilst Gilliard published a couple of memoirs, wrote for newspapers, and took a large public role in debunking the Anna Anderson affair, Gibbes returned to England, converted to Orthodoxy, and settled into a deeply pious life.
Essentially, all of the info in that quote on Anfisa is either completely unreferenced, or exaggerated. Big sigh.
Sources:
📍 George Gustav Telberg, Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs, (New York: George H. Duran Company, 1920), p. 42, 105, 106
📍 Christine Benagh, An Englishman in the Court of the Tsar: the Spiritual Journey of Charles Sydney Gibbes, (California: Conciliar Press, 2000), p. 82, 136, 203-204
Photograph of Pierre Gilliard (left) and Sydney Gibbes, ГАРФ ф611 оп.1 д.102 л.86
