Robert Harrison Gibson was the son of John Gibson and Ann Harrison, he was born at Stratford and baptised at All Saints Church, West Ham. He was a chemist by profession and worked with his father and his partners at their factory at City Mills, he became a partner in the company in 1831. He died of 'decline' at the family home, Tredegar House in Bow, and was buried here on 13th November 1838.

John Gibson was born in Yorkshire and was baptised at Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire on 15th February 1778. His parents were Jonathon Gibson, a labourer, and Betty Pridoms. He was a manufacturing chemist and collector of fossils.

He married Ann Harrison on 1st May 1809 at Great Edstone, Yorkshire. They had five children Robert (above), Hannah, John, Henry & Eliza who were all born in Stratford and baptised at All Saints, West Ham, St John's not having yet been built. Hannah married Rev. Joseph Wix, vicar of Littlebury, Essex. John joined the church and became Rector of Kings Stanley, Gloucestershire. Henry we know little about. Eliza married Rev. Thomas Baker.

The Gibsons lived in Plaistow and Stratford from about 1805-1830. In 1805 he was working at a chemical works in Plaistow and in 1807 he went into partnership with Luke Howard, the meteorologist, and Joseph Jewell running a chemical works in Stratford. Both his business partners were Quakers.

He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society on 4th June 1824. Gibson's main geological work was at two very important Pleistocene sites, Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire and Ilford. In the summer of 1821, while visiting friends near Helmsley, Gibson noticed some bones and tusks among lumps of limestone which had been used to repair a road. He tracked them back to a quarry adjacent to Kirkdale church and soon realised the antiquity and significance of the bones which the quarrymen had thought were modern. Gibson amassed and preserved a large collection of bones, tusks and teeth. Some drawings of his better specimens were sent to Cuvier, the great French naturalist in Paris, to be incorporated into a new edition of his monumental work on fossil quadrupeds. Gibson donated specimens from Kirkdale to the Geological Society, British Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons Museum.

Shortly after his work in Yorkshire, Gibson began collecting fossils from Ilford. In 1824 the entire skeleton of a large mammoth was discovered at Ilford at a depth of 4.8m in a large brick pit. He spent much time and effort diligently collecting and preserving the bones, unfortunately he was unable to reassemble the skeleton estimated to have been at least 4.5m high. In 1833 Gibson donated to the Yorkshire Museum "an interesting suite of bones of elephant, rhinoceros, ox &c. from the diluvium of Ilford." Some of the Ilford specimens, including mammoth bones & teeth and bones of a large aurochs, went to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum where they were destroyed by enemy action in World War II.

By 1833 he was living in Tredegar House, Bow. He was a committed Christian and a practising member of the Church of England. He was elected church warden at St. Mary's, Stratford-Bow in 1836, 1837 and 1838. He was described as "able, polite and impartial".

John Gibson died, after a short illness following a haemorrhage, at home at Tredegar House. He was buried here on 19th October 1840.