John Gibson

Sir John Gibson (14 February 1841–16 July 1915) was a journalist in Wales, the United Kingdom, who spent most of his career at Aberystwyth as editor of the Cambrian News. His book, The Emancipation of Women, dealt particularly with Wales.

Early life A portrait from the Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales. Depicted person: John Gibson – English editor and journalist Gibson was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, on 14 February 1841, the son of a hatter named John Gibson. His mother, Dorothy Gradwell, had worked in a cotton mill before her marriage and appears to have returned to the mills after the death of her husband, also named John Gibson.

Around 1863, her son John Gibson joined the Oswestry Advertiser as a printer and began to write for the paper. The feminist Lady Florence Dixie enclosed The Emancipation of Women in an open letter to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and other major political figures, passionately criticizing their male-supremacist assumptions and opposition to women's suffrage and commending Gibson as a "true man and real – not sham – Liberal". The letter was published in the suffragist newspaper The Woman's Herald in April 1892. Gibson was also a supporter of the atheist and secularist Charles Bradlaugh.

Appreciation Gibson was knighted in 1915, and died on 16 July in the same year, aged 74.