Hamilton Alexander Roskeen Gibb was a Trustee of the Gibb Memorial Trust for many years and made an important contribution to the meetings of the Trustees, as he did in so many other areas. Apart from the fact that they both came from Scottish families and shared a surname, he had no connection with the E. J. W. Gibb in whose memory the Trust was founded. He held distinguished professorships at Oxford and Harvard and received a knighthood as a reward for his achievements, but he always seems to have felt himself as something of an outsider among scholars of classical Arabic who dominated the field when he was a young scholar. His abandonment of the Laudian Chair of Arabic in Oxford, probably the most prestigious position in Arabic studies in the UK, and his move to Harvard seems to have been a reaction to what he felt were the hidebound and very traditional attitudes he encountered in the Oriental Institute.

He was born on 2 January 1895 in Alexandria where his father was farm manager for the Aboukir Land Reclamation Company. While there is no indication that he learned to speak Arabic as a child, it is possible that early memories encouraged an interest in Oriental studies. He was educated in that most august of Scottish educational establishments, the Royal High School in Edinburgh and, like many of his fellow pupils, he seamlessly moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1912. Here he embarked on a course in Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. The First World War naturally interrupted the course of his academic progression, and he served in the Royal Artillery in France and Italy. His services meant that he was entitled to funding to do a research degree, and he chose not one of the ancient universities, but the School of Oriental Studies in London as it then was (the African bit which gives us SOAS was added later). This had only been founded three years before, in 1916, and provided the opportunity for broader study than the somewhat narrow philology of Oxford, Cambridge and other centres. In London he studied under Sir Edward Denison Ross, founding director of the school, about whom he wrote a warm and appreciative obituary, and my first predecessor as Professor of Arabic, Sir Thomas Arnold, who appointed him as Lecturer in Arabic.