612 
The late Sir B. T. Brandreth Gihhs. 
organisation which he served, from simple membership upwards. 
He was elected to membership of the Council in 1848. He 
was appointed Organiser of its Annual Exhibitions in 1843. 
He subsequently occupied for a time also the office of Secretary. 
He became one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society in 1871 ; 
and he was called to the Presidential Chair during the year 
before his death. He requires a biographer — himself an original 
member, and an active spectator and historian of the great work 
which the Society has witnessed and promoted — who might thus 
have watched with interest his whole career, throughout its more 
than forty years ; and I ought to be better able than I am to 
undertake the task which has been allotted to me. Although, 
however, present at the first Meeting of the Society at Oxford, 
and already one of its members — present also, except in 1840, 
1842, 1848, and 1854, in every one of the Showyards in which the 
Society has since made its annual display, and actively engaged 
at all of them since 1843 as a Reporter of everything in which 
the agricultural reader might be expected to take an interest — 
it was not till some years after the commencement of Mr. Brand- 
reth Gibbs's connection with the Society that I came to know 
him personally. I remember the faces and the voices of many 
of our great leaders present at the Oxford Show— the homely, 
kindly presence of the late Earl Spencer, our first President ; the 
sonorous voice of the late Duke of Richmond, who succeeded 
him ; Mr. Pusey's pale and anxious, somewhat absent-looking 
face ; Mr. Handley's hearty jollity ; Baron Bunsen's staid and 
placid countenance ; the voice, good-nature, and the humour, of 
the Rev. Dr. Buckland — a distinguished row, seated, as they were, 
with others at the dais, on the occasion of the Banquet given to 
the Council at that Meeting : Daniel Webster also, evidently a 
great power both bodily and intellectually ; Sir Thomas Acland, 
bright-eyed, eager-looking; and Sir James Graham — all of them 
speakers at the Banquet on the following day in one of the 
College Quadrangles. These were men and faces likely to 
impress themselves on the memory ; and perhaps it is not sur- 
prising that, in comparison with them, I do not remember the 
young man then already busily engaged in the Showyard, whose 
serviceableness and activity had attracted the attention of the 
President ; engaged as he was in assisting his elder brother, 
Mr. Humphrey Gibbs, to whom the Stewardship of the Yard 
had been committed. Mr. Brandreth Gibbs, entering thus, con 
amove, on the multifarious duties which belonged to the office 
which he ultimately held, as Honorary Director of the Annual 
Shows, served a capital apprenticeship during his first few 
years under the direction of his very able brother ; and thus, no 
doubt, he early acquired both the bonhomie which enabled 
