Growing up in a tenement yard, Basil Gibbons would have had direct knowledge of broken families and would have seen how the absence of opportunities denied the young the possibility of developing their potential.
The death of his older brother at an early age and two murders in the yard are events which gave Gibbons a glimpse of the “darker side,” but at 61 what he remembers most about the yard is that despite the negatives, it also had a “harmony, and whenever someone died or somebody was sick everybody come together to help.”
In fact when he moved out of the yard located in Drysdale Street, Charlestown at age seventeen and moved to