▶Date of birth: 1813         Place of birth: Stoke Damerell, Devon

▶Father:  Henry Gilbart     Mother: Helen Paramore

▶Spouse(s): Augusta Maria Wathen       Date(s) of marriage:    9 November 1837     Place(s) of marriage: Woodchester, Gloucestershire

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican), Schoolmaster

▶Lifestory: William Gilbard combined his life in the Church with teaching students, both at Cheltenham College and then at a school centred around his own household. He was born in 1813, in Stoke Damerell, Devon, the third son of Henry Damerell, merchant, of Stoke Damerell, and his wife Helen (née Paramore). In 1831 he matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, BA 1835, MA 1837. He was ordained Deacon in 1836, and Priest (both Exeter) in 1838. In 1837 he married Augusta Maria, youngest daughter of Obadiah Paul Wathen Esq., of Woodchester, who lived in Pittville from 1841 and was the father of Pittville clergyman the Revd. J. A. Wathen.

Gilbard was preferred to the curacy of St Mellion in Cornwall in June 1839, though his wife gave birth to a daughter in Painswick, Gloucestershire in 1840. After a short while in Cornwall he took a schoolmastering post, in 1841, as Second Master at the Cheltenham Classical School (also known as the Cheltenham Proprietary School, but soon afterwards as Cheltenham College), which he left in 1842. In 1844 his family lived in Belmont House on Winchcombe Street in Cheltenham, and in 1845 he became the first recorded resident of Percy House, Wellington Square, in Pittville.

Continuing his vocation as a schoolmaster, he advertised in 1845 for pupils for the school he was establishing, claiming that “his pupils being freely admitted into the domestic circle, the comforts of the Home are combined with the advantages of a Public School”. In 1847 he transferred his school, along with its pupils, to his new residence at Woodchester Lawn, in his wife’s village of Woodchester, in Gloucestershire, “lately in the occupation of Lady Gifford”; the 1851 census shows that eight boarding pupils lived in his household at that time.

But in the following year he returned to clerical duties, and was preferred to the curacy of St Mary’s Hospital, in Bath; his wife died of typhus fever at Stoke Damerell in 1853, aged thirty-four, and in the same year he is noted as a Curate of Stoke Damerell. In 1858 he appears in the annual Clergy List without a clerical affiliation, and by 1861 he was a “clergyman without cure of souls”, and he had moved back with his children to live at 3 Park Row in his home village of Stoke Damerell in Devon.

Ten years later he had moved to Devonport in Devon, where he died the following year at his home, 5 Keppel Place, at the age of fifty-eight. He was buried at the Church of St Andrew with St Luke, in Devonport, and his estate was valued at £1,500 for probate purposes.

▶Moved to Pittville from:  Winchcombe Street, Cheltenham      Moved from Pittville to: Woodchester

▶Date of death:   3 August 1872     Place of death: 5 Keppel Place Devonport

▶Date of burial:   6 August 1872      Place of burial: Church of St Andrew with St Luke, Devonport

▶Notes:  Cheltenham Chronicle 7 August 1845      ID: 14796

Contributor(s):  John Simpson