in the New Zealand militia. They had several children, including Alice Anne (born 1880), Hinermarama (born 1882) and Philip Arthur Osborne-Gibbes (born 1884)—who would become the Fourth Baronet. A civil servant, the Third Baronet had entered the New Zealand Department of Education in Wellington in 1871 as a clerk. He rose to become the head of the entire department, laying the foundations of the country's modern public education system during his 16-year term in office. (See T.J. Bertram's 1993 biographical article on the Second Baronet, cited below, for an assessment of his career as Secretary of Education.) The Third Baronet was a Freemason like his father and a keen sportsman. He died in Wellington on 29 September 1931. His surviving brother, Philip Osborne-Gibbes, a retired Gilbert Islands trader, died in a Sydney hospital three years later without male issue. The Fourth Baronet was born in Wellington on 17 May 1884. He wed Mabel Jeanetta Warner in 1913. Their marital union did not produce any children, however, and consequently the Osborne-Gibbes Baronetcy became extinct with the death of the Fourth Baronet on 8 February 1940 (although descendants of the Second and Third Baronet, through various female lines, are still living in New Zealand and Australia). The Fourth Baronet was a veteran of military service with the New Zealand armed forces during the First World War but unlike his predecessors, he had never felt comfortable with his aristocratic title, believing that it was an anachronism in a modern democratic society such as New Zealand's. Early history of the family The surname of Gibbes is of Norman origin. The forebears of the Barbados baronets can be traced back to 14th-century Devonshire. Belonging to the landed gentry, they intermarried with other propertied families and grew in importance during the reign of King Richard II of England. They possessed a semi-fortified stone manor house and barn complex named Venton and raised livestock near the edge of Dartmoor. The British Listed Buildings' Website states that: "The Gibbes were notorious local insurgents, who maintained a small private army from about 1501 to 1549." During the Tudor era, members of the particular line of the Gibbes family that is the subject of this article left Devon for the neighbouring county of Somerset, and are recorded in official documents as possessing a considerable amount of property in and around the small northern Somersetshire town of Bedminster. The Gibbes expanded