Matching Sailor Suits for the Gibson Cousins

Henry Freeman Allen, c.1918
Gibson House Museum (2006.18.20)

Until the end of the nineteenth century, most American children were dressed like miniature adults. Prior to age three, boys and girls alike wore “dresses,” or long shifts that were simple to get on and off and easy to launder. At about three or four, girls began wearing more elaborate dresses, like their mothers, and boys were “breeched,” or put into pants, like their fathers. 

Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, however, specific clothing for children became popular. And one of the most popular, and enduring, outfits for young boys was the sailor suit. Queen Victoria dressed the Prince of Wales, Edward VII, in a custom-made sailor suit in 1846, modeled on a real Royal Navy uniform. The prince’s portrait was painted in this outfit and it set off a craze for sailor suits that would last into the twentieth century. 

The USS Turner Disaster

 

Recently during my summer internship with the Gibson House, archiving a collection of family manuscripts, I was surprised to discover evidence of yet another Gibson family member death at sea, that of Lieutenant Warren Winslow, the twenty-five-year-old son of Rosamond Gibson Winslow (“Little” Ros). (An earlier GHM blog post covered the death of John Gardiner Gibson, Jr. aboard the Lyonnais; see “History Repeats Itself,” January 1, 2015.) Lt. Winslow, a Harvard graduate called to service when he was attending Harvard Law School, was one of the 139 sailors lost when the USS Turner, a naval destroyer, sank to the ocean floor just a few miles northeast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on January 3, 1944.

A series of explosions aboard ship that morning completely wrecked the vessel and started fires that could not be effectively controlled. While the navy later could not determine the exact cause of the first explosion, an investigation turned up no evidence of enemy action or sabotage. The official report could only suggest that stored ammunition on board had something to do with the incident, as the first explosion occurred in an area containing ammunition meant for transfer later that day.

After a sixteen-day voyage on the Atlantic, the USS Turner had anchored a few miles off of Sandy Hook early on the morning of the third and had begun preparations to sail for Gravesend Bay, New York, to transfer its cargo of ammunition to Fort Lafayette in Brooklyn. The sky was overcast and snow was falling in the area. Nearby were other naval vessels, including the USS Stevenson and USS Thorn, which maintained a continuous underwater sound search. These sonar sweeps detected no enemy craft in the area.

So it came as a complete shock when, at about 6:17 a.m., a violent explosion rocked the USS Turner.