Sculptor, letter-cutter and carver, born in Hammersmith, London. His father was Herbert William Cribb (1863–1929), a graphic artist and cartographer working for the process engraver and typographer, Emery Walker (1851–1933). In 1906, on Walker’s recommendation, Eric Gill (1882–1940), then operating from a workshop in Hammersmith Terrace, agreed to take Cribb on as a pupil. In 1907, when Gill and his family moved to Ditchling in Sussex, Cribb accompanied them and in 1908 was elevated to apprentice. Gill was clearly impressed with Cribb’s abilities for, when Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) asked him to design the inscription for his Oscar Wilde tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, it was Cribb whom Gill sent to Paris in September 1912 to carve the inscription in situ. Cribb completed his apprenticeship in 1913 and, following Gill’s example, converted to Roman Catholicism. Now Gill’s most trusted assistant, he was not only executing many of the sculptures and inscriptions designed by Gill, but also supervising the work of others in the workshop. He was senior assistant on Gill’s Stations of the Cross cycle for Westminster Cathedral, shaping the stones and roughing out the designs from 1913 until he was conscripted in May 1916. A bombardier in the Royal Sussex Regiment, he was wounded at Thiepval on the Somme in October and returned home to recuperate in a Brighton hospital. He returned to the front in January 1917, but in May was transferred to the Royal Engineers as a draughtsman, working on the layout of temporary railway tracks for the transport of supplies. On a visit home in December 1917, he married Agnes Weller, the nursemaid in the Gill family home. At the war’s end he stayed on in France, working on the planning of war grave cemeteries, collaborating with Gill’s younger brother, MacDonald Gill (1884–1947), on the design of the standard war grave tombstone and also on the design of some of the many regimental badges to be carved on them. In August 1919 Cribb returned to Ditchling to find that Gill had begun planning a religious community of craftsmen. Gill and his wife had already become members of the lay Third Order of St Dominic, and now Cribb and his wife did the same; the community, known as the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, was formally instituted on 18 July 1920, with Cribb one of its founding members. He followed the Guild’s tenets throughout his life, working by hand, eschewing power tools. Cribb now worked with Gill on his commissions for war memorials, including those at Ditchling (1919–20); Trumpington, Cambridgeshire (1921); and Dunmow, Essex (1921). The memorial tablet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1919–20), is unusual in that it is one of only three pieces that Gill signed, and here his initials, on the tablet’s righthand corbel, are given equal prominence to those of Cribb on the left. Cribb’s independent work is in a style influenced by Gill and by the Romanesque carvings he had seen in France. His first large-scale commission was the design and execution of the inscriptions and surmounting Crucifixion group on the war memorial designed by Leonard Stokes for Downside Abbey, Somerset (1922); assisting Cribb on cutting the inscriptions were Albert Leaney and Cribb’s brother, Lawrence. In 1924, when Gill and his family left Ditchling for Capel-y-ffin in Wales, Cribb took over the stonemason’s workshop at Ditchling, while his brother moved to Wales to become Gill’s senior assistant. Cribb nevertheless continued to execute occasional work for Gill, for example, Gill’s Stations of the Cross (1924–25) for the Church of Our Lady and St Peter (RC) at Leatherhead, the designs for which Gill sent by post from Wales. Cribb’s own first set of Stations was for Hawkeshead Priory, Staffordshire (1928), but his most prestigious set was for the new Roman Catholic Cathedral in Plymouth (1956). His increasing workload necessitated his taking on his own assistants: Noel Knapp-Tabbenor in c.1932 and Kenneth Eager in 1945; and in 1941–42, he trained Gill’s nephew, John Skelton. Many of Cribb’s works are to be found in churches throughout Sussex, including, at St Wilfrid’s (RC), Burgess Hill, a figure of St Wilfrid over the west door, above the altar carved oak figures and a cross, and flanking the chancel stone reliefs of saints; at St Theodore’s (RC), Gossops Green, a relief of St Theodore on the exterior east wall; at Our Lady Immaculate and St Philip Neri’s (RC), Uckfield, a figure of the Virgin over the entrance; and at St Margaret’s, Ditchling, carved screens around the south chapel in memory of the Ditchling-based painter, Louis Ginnett (d. 1946). This last was designed by the Brighton architect, John Leopold Denman (1882–1975), for whom Cribb also carved sculptural decorations for some of his secular buildings, notably, in Brighton: the Citizen’s Permanent Building Society (now the Allied Irish Bank), with reliefs of the building trades over the ground-floor windows including a relief portrait of Denman (1933); Regent House, with relief portraits of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert (1934); and the Herald Building (part of Pavilion Buildings (1934). A small selection of Cribb’s works, along with his wood-carving tools, are to be found in the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, and his polychrome Portland stone figures of Saint Thomas Aquinas and St Dominic are in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. He died on 6 November 1967 and is buried in Ditchling Churchyard, his tombstone inscription cut by Kenneth Eager.
Bibliography: N. Antram and N. Pevsner, Sussex: East (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2013, pp. 74, 171, 190, 202, 206, 209, 275, 325, 326, 486, 638, pl. 105; D. Attwater, A Cell of Good Living, London, 1969; J. Collins, Eric Gill: The Sculpture, London, 1998, pp. 64, 70, 105, 128, 147; J. Cribb, ‘Joseph Cribb (1892-1967)’, in R. and J. Cribb, Eric Gill and Ditchling: the Workshop Tradition (Ditchling Museum), 2007 (reproduced on The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic website); R. Cribb, ‘Workshop Practices and the Making of Sculpture: Authorship and Collaboration in the Work of Eric Gill, 1909–1940’ (PhD thesis, University of Brighton), December 2013; R. Cribb, ‘The First World War and the business of making sculpture: Joseph Cribb, apprentice, craftsman and soldier’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 25.1 (2016), pp. 65–79; F. MacCarthy, Eric Gill, London, 1989, passim; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 30, 48–49; E. Williamson et al, Sussex: West (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2019, pp. 96, 174, 324, 463, 740.
Terry Cavanagh, October 2012
