of visitors from Reading University, one of whom was Elisabeth Empson. Early in 1934 she discovered that she was pregnant. This came as something of a shock to her parents. There was a twenty-year age difference between her and Gibbings, and he was unable to marry her as he was still married to Moira. The couple moved down to Cornwall, where their daughter Vahine was born in November 1934 – they had two more children, another daughter Tiare (1937) and Shaun (1946). Elisabeth's parents came to accept the relationship, and gave the couple the money to build a cottage in the grounds at Waltham Saint Lawrence in 1935. Elisabeth and Gibbings were married in 1937 after Moira finally agreed to a divorce. The relationship was always strained, for much the same reasons that Gibbings's relationship with Moira was strained. He went off, for example, on two trips to Bermuda and the Red Sea, leaving Elisabeth with two young children to look after. A more positive change in his life was his appointment in 1936 as sessional lecturer in typography, book production and illustration at Reading University for one day a week. He was a very good teacher, and encouraged his students by producing a number of books illustrated with their wood engravings, including Fatherless Oberlus (1936), Loftur (1939) and The Diary of W. Lashly (1939), the diary of William Lashly, a survivor of Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole. Gibbings and the river books In 1940 Elisabeth and the two children were evacuated to Canada. They returned in summer 1945, a few weeks before Gibbings set off to the South Seas for well over a year. While Elisabeth was away Gibbings moved into Saint Patrick's Hall, an all-male hall of residence at the university, and settled into a bachelor life that he found very congenial. The teaching and the extra-curricular life were very much to his liking, and there was one factor that led him inexorably into this next phase of his artistic life. Gibbings had begun to take part in natural history trips to the Thames organised by the university. He later wrote: "In the early days of 1939 there arose in me a great desire to find peace beside a river". Along with Patrick and two other helpers he built himself a boat, the Willow, and floated down the Thames. The result was Sweet Thames Run Softly