Second Partner of Robert Gibson
The description of Elizabeth being my step GGG Grandmother is calculated by my genealogy database. I consider the term not accurate as Elizabeth either died or was “out of the picture” before my GGG Grandmother married Robert Gibson.

Of Denmark Hill [which is now located in the London Borough of Southwark]
of Calcutta

Baptism date courtesy Christopher Rack

Scotland Select Births and Baptisms
June 8, 1759 Robert Gibson, father George Gibson, Slains, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The East India Register and Directory 1804
Bengal, European Inhabitants
Gibson, Robert, taylor Cossitollah street, Calcutta, 83
Gibson, George, coach-maker and undertaker, ditto
Gibson, William
Gibson, Charles W. mariner
Gibson, John Europe shopkeeper, ditto, 81
. . .
Wooden, E. Dacca

The Asiatic Annual Register: Or, A View of the History of Hindustan (1807) In Departure of Europeans for Europe. September 1806 aboard the Phoenix, Captain John Ramsden - Mr Robert Gibson, Mrs. Robert Gibson and child Miss Anne Gibson.

His name was on the list of Names of members of the United Company of Merchants of England, Trading to the East Indies, 1815 [The Honourable East India Company]
Robert Gibson, Esq. 26 Lombard Street

from https://www.dulwichsociety.com/the-journal/winter-...ouse-on-denmark-hill
Lost Houses of Dulwich: John Ruskin’s house on Denmark Hill

By Alison South

In this year of the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth, there are many events and writings which have celebrated his life and times, his works and impact. For almost 50 years of that life, from 1823 to 1872, John Ruskin was associated with two local houses, 28 Herne Hill and 163 Denmark Hill. The Denmark Hill house, which subsequently came to be known as Ruskin Manor, was leased from the Dulwich Estates Governors by his father in 1842 and relinquished by John 30 years later in 1872.

While much has been written about John Ruskin’s life during the family’s occupancy, the house however, was built in 1794, almost fifty years earlier, and was demolished in 1947 over 150 years later. The Ruskin tenure is therefore just part of of its story. Access to the leases in the Dulwich College Archives has enabled us to investigate the other occupants and to understand a little of their lives.

There were eight families who leased the property pre and post Ruskin; Watson, Belcher, Gibson, Liddiard and Ewbank preceded them and Druce and Wilson followed. The leases before 1842 were all held for 10 years or less and those from the Ruskin period onwards were held for around 30 years. It was not a cheap house to acquire and everyone who leased the house was comfortably established and aged at least 40 years, most were over 50.
. . .
Robert Gibson ‘late of Calcutta’ was the leaseholder from 1817, aged 57. He paid £6,000 to Andrew Belcher for the lease. He appears to have spent most of his working life in India, where he was described as a ‘tailor and habit maker’ and as a ‘tailor to the Ecclesiastical Registrar’. His two daughters were born in Calcutta in 1798 and 1811 and he may also have married there.

During the time he was resident in the house, Robert Gibson had business premises at 26 Lombard Street. He prepared his Will in London in 1820 at which time his son, also Robert, was living with him in Denmark Hill. Robert senior died in Calcutta in 1823 and is buried there. His widow, Ann continued to lease the house until 1826.
The lease was next assigned to John William Liddiard from 1826. He was born in London in 1778, married Maria in 1803 and had five daughters born between 1805 and 1817.

The Schedule, which forms part of the lease, is an early version of the fixtures and fittings list seen in current house sale and purchase transactions. It tells us that the upper floor rooms had stoves and roller blinds, brass finger plates and handle bell pulls. The hall had a ‘fine large bronze figure on carved pedestal’ and the library a ‘range of Japanned Library book cases’. Outside, the Pleasure Ground had two alcove summer houses with seats, there were ‘mellon frames’ and a green house.
. . .
It is totally ironic that the 21st birthday present John James Ruskin gave to his precocious son in 1840 was Turner’s painting, ‘The Slave Ship’ which the young Ruskin had much admired. It was hung in the hall of 163 Denmark Hill when the Ruskins moved into the house from nearby 28 Herne Hill in 1842.

John James Ruskin was a wine merchant, and the house into which the family moved was larger than their house on Herne Hill with more room for entertaining, servants’ quarters and a growing collection of paintings, especially by J M W Turner. There were only thirty-two years left on the lease and so the cost was far less than thirty years earlier (£4,800 as against £7,350). When he died in 1867, it was assigned to his son as the beneficiary of his will. John Ruskin left five years later and the residue of the lease was assigned for just £1000. The Ruskins had held the lease for longer than anyone else up to then.

Ruskin had mixed feelings about his time on Denmark Hill. He liked the position, in the 1860s still “quite in the country” after coming up from Champion Hill. In his autobiography Praeterita Ruskin describes the grounds of Denmark Hill: “The house on Denmark Hill... stood in command of seven acres of healthy ground (a patch of local gravel there overlying the London clay); half of it in meadow sloping to the sunrise, the rest prudently and pleasantly divided into an upper and lower kitchen garden; a fruitful bit of orchard, and chance inlets and outlets of woodwalk, opening to the sunny path by the field, which was gladdened on its other side in springtime by flushes of almond and double peach blossom”. He found it “a quiet place to walk in all the year round”.

His mother delighted in managing the small farm, with its cows, pigs and hens. He was particularly fond of the view to the south-east from his bedroom window at sunrise, a view which he often painted in watercolour. However, he also said he was not happy there, “never at ease in a fine house”, and regretted the building developments around him. The Crystal Palace “a cucumber frame between two chimneys” opened in 1854, the same year as his difficult marriage was annulled; and the houses being built on Sydenham Hill destroyed the view from his window; Dulwich was declining, he said, its fields becoming “black, cindery, infinitely small”. Offered a house on Lake Coniston, he moved as soon as his mother had died.
. . .
n 1946 the Ruskin Manor estate was the subject of a Compulsory Purchase Order. The site was acquired by the London County Council to go some way to house some of the thousands of Londoners made homeless by the bombing of London in WW2. With the compensation from the order Dulwich College was able to press ahead with its plans to rebuild the war-damaged science block.

end of quote

Will dated February 25, 1820

From the Gibson Family Tree by Christopher Rack
Inventory if the Estate & effects of the late Robert Gibson
October 7, 1823
Amount of Cash in the Bank of Hindustan 105241 pounds 8 shillings 9 pence
Amount of Bonds and Notes Due by the Concern of Robert Gibson & Co 236730 pounds
Amount of Charles MacKenzies Bond due November 30, 1823 5639 pounds 5 shillings 4 pence
Messr. Taylor & Co. account Sales Sundries 764 pounds 12 shillings 9 pence
Value of the House & Premises in Cossittollah rented by Mess. Robert Gibson & Co. 60000 pounds
Amount of Robert Lowthers Bond 2364 pounds 2 shillings
Amount of James Roglis Bond 2515 pounds
Total 413,255 pounds 2 shillings and 10 pence
Anne Gibson, Executrix
Robert Gibson, executor
[This amounts to about 76 million Canadian Dollars buying power in 2013.]
[Note this would be his estate in India only. Also later another 30000 pounds were discovered by his son Robert Gibson.]

from Allen’s Indian Mail, and Register of Intelligence
Probates and Administration of Estates
Robert Gibson, late of Denmark Hill, in the county of Surrey, and of 26, Lombard Street, London, in that part of Great Britain called England, but formerly of Calcutta, in the East Indies, Esq. to the registrar of the Supreme Court. Frith, Sandes, and Watts, proctors.
[Note Lombard Street was the the location of many head offices for UK banks until the 1980’s][26 Lombard street was the London office of the Bimetallic League in 1894]

From Allen’s Indian Mail Bengal Volume 3
Probates and Administration to Estates
Robert Gibson, formerly of Calcutta, but late of Denmark-hill in the County of Surrey, In England, tailor, to his Ecclesiastical Registrar. Judge and Vignon, proctors.

From the Oriental Magazine and Calcutta Review 1823, deaths, on the 6th of February Mr. Robert Gibson, of the firm Robert Gibson and Co. of Cossitollah, aged 65 years. [Cossitollah was a wide street in Calcutta. Some of the businesses on the street were Chinese shoemaker, English Confectioners and English tailors. There is a tailor on Cossitollah by the name of Gibson & Co. ][Cossitollah Street is now called Bentinck Street which is in central Calcutta and is off the Lal Bazaar.]

See the notes for Theophilus Howkins on a dispute about some of the proceeds from his will.

From The Law Journal Michaelmas 1849 to Michaelmas 1850.
Howkins v Jackson

Robert Gibson the elder being entitled to considerable real and personal estate both in this country and in India, by his will dated the 25th of February 1820, bequeathed among other things, to his trustees therein named, 7000l. 3l. per cent. upon trust, to pay dividends thereof to his daughter, Ann Gibson, during her life, and after her death, in trust, as to the capital, for her child or children, if more than one, equally between them. And the other said testator thereby gave all his real and residuary personal estate to his trustees upon trusts for conversion, and out of the proceeds thereof to pay his debts, &c and to invest the residue; and to stand possessed of one-third part thereof upon the same or the like trusts as were therein before declared 7000l. 3l per cent consols, bequeathed in favour of his daughter, Ann Gibson, and her children; one other third part in trusts is favour of his other daughter; and the remaining one third part upon trust for his son Robert Gibson the younger, whom he appointed one of his executors. Ann Gibson, the testator’s daughter, shortly after the date of the will married T. Hearsey. who died in January 1822. leaving Ann, his widow, and an only child of the marriage Ann Gibson Hearsey, him surviving. Robert Gibson, the testator, died in 1823, and his will was proved both in England and in India by Ann Gibson his widow and Robert Gibson the younger only.

In 1830. Ann Hearsey, the widow, intermarried with William Howkins, since deceased, and she afterwards died in January 1839, leaving her husband, W. Howkins, and her only child Ann Gibson Hearsey, her surviving; and shortly after her death, W. Howkins took out letters of administration to her estate. In February 1839, Ann Gibson Hearsey intermarried with the defendant, Alfred Jackson, and by a settlement, executed previously to that marriage, reciting that Ann G. Hearsey, as the only child of her mother, was entitled, amongst other things to a sum of 12 589l. 1s. 7d., 3l. per cent etc.

later on in the text it says In 1839, W. Howkins was in considerable pecuniary difficulties.

Also later in the text In the early part of of the year 1842, it was for the first time discovered, that in May 1825, Robert Gibson the younger, as such executor as aforesaid, had received in India a sum of 12000l., part of a larger sum which was owing to the testator at the time of his death, but which was not included or mentioned in the accounts rendered by him in 1838, but was fraudulently concealed by the said Robert Gibson, and applied to his own use.

And still later In June of 1846 W. Howkins died etc.

Decree reversed. The bill was dismissed.

India Deaths and Burials
Robert Gibson, buried 6 February 1823, Calcutta, Bengal, India, age 65, tailor.

From the Bengal Obituary or a Record to Perpetuate the Memory of Departed Worth
by Holmes and Co.
39, Cossitollah, Calcutta
1851
Park Street Burial Ground [Calcutta]

Sacred to the Memory of Robert Gibson,
of Denmark Hill, Surry [as spelled], who departed this life
6 February 1823.
Born in the parish of Slains, Aberdeenshire,
North Britain, A. D. 1759

Sacred to the Memory of
Mr. Richard Pauling,
who died 20th October 1822, aged 39 years.

Sacred to the Memory of Mary Pauling,
relict of the late Richard Pauling, who departed
this life on the 22d March 1824, aged 28 years.

Memoriae Sacrum Gibson
Obit September 1st, Anno Domino 1813,
Aetatis suae 24

Also to the Memory of
George Thomas Gibson,
who departed this life the 5th of Dec. 1826,
aged 43 years.

end of record

See the Wikipedia article on the cemetery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Street_Cemetery