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Biography
John Harington Gubbins was born 24 Jan 1852 in Agra, Bengal, India to Martin Richards Gubbins and Harriet Louisa Nepean.[1][2] He was their 6th child. Within the year, he had a little brother Joseph Gubbins. He was baptized 2 March 1852.[3]
He was a British linguist, consular official and diplomat. [4]
J. H. Gubbins went out as a member of the Japan Consular Service in 1871 and stayed till 1908. He was Japanese Secretary at the British legation. His greatest contribution to history was in the British response to one of the major issues of Japanese political and diplomatic history in the Meiji period, treaty revision.
In retirement he taught Japanese studies in Oxford University, and was the author of several authoritative books. He was the prototype of the scholar-diplomat so often found in East Asia in earlier times who combined a policy-making role with great expertise about Japan. Gubbins was described by a commentator as one of the four (along with Satow, Brinkley and Chamberlain) ‘in the firmament of our countrymen who have made themselves masters of the various problems of our Far Eastern Ally’.
John Harrington was educated at Harrow. He took the examination for the Far Eastern Consular Service and was sent out to Tokyo in 1871 as student interpreter in the Japanese language. He became highly proficient in the language and published A Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese words in the Japanese language in 1889.
He became Japanese secretary at the British legation in 1889 to add to his other responsibilities for the language training of new recruits to the legation and the consular service and also to the army and navy language staff. General F. S. G. Piggott, himself an army language officer at the time, makes these comments on Gubbins: Behind a somewhat austere manner was a fund of kindliness and humour from which many generations of consular and service language students benefited.
He was employed in London at the Foreign Office from February to July 1894 in the Aoki-Kimberley negotiations which resulted in the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation (July 16, 1894).
Gubbins seems to have formed a special bond with Hugh Fraser, the minister in Tokyo from 1888 to 1894, possibly because of their family connections with India. In a conversation with Fraser’s wife, Gubbins showed remarkable modesty. Mary Fraser reported that he had told her that ‘though he has been working at [the Japanese language] for seventeen years, though he has translated three dictionaries and is now publishing one of his own . . ., he feels that many life-times would not put him absolutely in possession of the whole language as it is used by the learned Japanese today’.
Despite having no university degree, Gubbins was awarded an honorary Master's degree in Arts (MA) from Balliol College and was made Lecturer in Japanese language at Oxford University (1909-12).
He died 23 Feb 1929 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His will was probate 30 May 1929.[5]
Sources
- ↑ India, Select Births and Baptisms, 1786-1947, ancestry.co.uk, Reference ID v 81 p 4, FHL Film Number 498990
- ↑ Cambridge University Alumni, 1261-1900, ancestry.co.uk
- ↑ "India Births and Baptisms, 1786-1947", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FG33-72R : 5 February 2020), John Harington Gubbins, 1852.
- ↑ Wikipedia:John Harington Gubbins
- ↑ "England and Wales, National Index of Wills and Administrations, 1858-1957," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPLZ-CPXK : 17 September 2018), John Harington Gubbins, 30 May 1929; citing Probate, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Great Britain.; FHL microfilm .
- Watson, Charles B. B. “Supplement to 'Alexander Cowan of Moray House and Valleyfield (Founder of A. Cowan & Sons), His Kinsfolk and Connections;” FamilySearch. Accessed October 19, 2020. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/419176-supplement-to-alexander-cowan-of-moray-house-and-valleyfield-founder-of-a-cowan-sons-his-kinsfolk-and-connections?viewer=1.
