Copy of a portrait of John Samuel Gibbons taken at Featherston Camp

John Samuel Gibbons, service number 70467

This portrait depicts John Samuel Gibbons, wearing the uniform of a Private in a Mounted Signal Company of the New Zealand Army.

John  was born in Auckland on the 5th April 1894 to his parents Mary Ellen and Robert Huia Gibbons. He worked as a self-employed engineer before enlisting in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on 13th September 1917. He trained at Trentham and at Featherston camps, where the original of this portrait was taken,  with the 35th Reinforcements and the Specialist Company of the 36th Reinforcements. John embarked from Wellington on the 23rd April 1918 and arrived at Sling Camp in England for training with the 3rd Reserve Battalion of the Auckland Infantry Regiment on 18 July 1918. On 10 October he was sent to the New Zealand Machine Gun Depot at Grantham for training as a machine gunner.  Following the Armistice he returned to New Zealand where he was discharged from military service at Wellington on 17 June 1919.

Also known as Jack, he returned to live in Auckland where he resumed his work as an engineer, founding the Sunbeam Engineering Company in 1942. He was filmed in 1933 in Onehunga as the inventor of the 'world's smallest motorcycle' that went 40 miles per hour (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, F113817).

He married Violet Roslyn Brown in 1940 and they had one child, Josie. John died in 1957 aged 63 and is buried at Hillsborough Cemetery.