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Adrian Gabriel is someone for whom first impressions are very important. This interview was my first impression of Adrian and I found him to be someone who has done a great deal of personal development following tragic circumstances.
Through the loss of his son, witnessing unexpected deaths and blending families including children and dogs, Adrian has certainly lived up to his perception of himself as a “fixer”. Although he credits his emotional development to his life experiences.
“My first wife and I were thrown together in a sense because of an unplanned pregnancy. My twin sons, Samuel (Sam) and Josh, were both in 1991 when I was 21,” said Adrian.
“Sadly, Sam died at nine days old from cot death (sudden infant death syndrome). Not a lot of people know that, but I feel ready to share it now. Sam dying was really hard, but I didn’t realise the effect it was having me for decades."
Pictured: Adrian with his partner Sally, his children Josh (far left), Beth and Harry and his stepdaughter. (Credit: Ben Fiore Photography.)
Adrian continued: “It wasn’t until my uncle died a few years ago that everything came to a head. I broke down at my uncle’s funeral and my partner, Sally, asked me what was happening. While everyone grieves differently, I was showing extreme emotion that was not normal for me.”
Sally encouraged Adrian to seek help and he “begrudgingly” went to the Guernsey Bereavement Service (GBS).
“I have to give full credit to GBS because it is only through counselling that I am able to talk about what happened. Three years ago I wouldn’t even be able to get the words out to say what happened with Sam,” said Adrian.
“When Sam died I went straight into survival mode and work mode. I’ve been carrying a rucksack on my back of emotion and grief.
“I recently read an analogy about grief which resonated with me, it could have been in the Bailiwick Express article about Dominique Ogier. The analogy was that grief is like a ball in a box, initially the ball is very big and will touch the sides all the time.
“Eventually the ball gets smaller and, it is still painful when it hits the sides, but it happens less frequently and takes more movement to make it hit the sides. I would say my grief would be the size of tennis ball in the box now and in time it will keep shrinking to a ping pong ball and so on.”
Pictured: Adrian's study, which houses some of his Guernsey bottle collection.
Adrian explained that, for some time, he and Josh’s mother became “very protective” of him as the surviving twin.
“We were sent to the UK for tests for Josh, but the testing equipment wasn’t the best. He had to have a monitor on him for his oxygen levels, but it would keep coming off. Every time it fell off, an alarm would sound and we would think it was happening again, but it was just the equipment failing,” said Adrian.
“Over time, we did get less protective of Josh. He has had some health struggles recently where continual asthma attacks led to him being in the hospital for 12 weeks, but he’s a relatively tough cookie.”
Adrian said that he has noticed that “as you get older, it takes longer to bounce back and you soon learn the limitations of your body”.
“I started playing rugby at the age of 11. I had never enjoyed football and I’ve never followed it. For me, football is British culture, not Guernsey culture and I’m not a British man I’m a Guernseyman,” he said.
“At around 38 or 40, I dislocated my shoulder in a rugby match and was taken to hospital. I went back to playing too soon because I was young and stupid. I carried on playing and it happened again; I have had eight surgeries on my shoulder since. Hopefully that’s the end of the surgeries now, but it was definitely the end of rugby.”
Pictured: Adrian and his partner, Sally, enjoy being outdoors and walking their dogs.
As well as rugby, has always had a keen interest in motorsports.
“When I was 14 we moved from Castel into town, but I was still going to Beaucamps, so I got a motorbike. It gave me a great sense of freedom,” he said.
“It’s a rite of passage in Guernsey to gain that independence when you’re 14. I like that, even now, because Guernsey is relatively safe and it makes it easy to go off and meet friends to hang out and go swimming or snorkeling or just go for rides together.
“When I was 15 or 16, I used to go and watch my friends at the scrambling track, which is now called motocross. Then I got into marshaling at the hill climb and made friends there. The motorsport community is a great community with friendships and healthy competition.
“I marshaled for 10 or 15 years and there was an accident in which a commentator was injured. He had a stressful time after the incident. One day I turned up to marshal he wasn’t there to commentate and they asked if I wanted to do it. I loved it instantly and it opened doors to UK events where I have commentated at charity motorsport events.
“I’ve stepped away from being involved in motorsport but I still go along to watch. I never race that much, only now and again, because it’s relatively expensive to do competitively. I was bringing up a young family.”
Pictured: Adrian has always been an avid fan of motorsport but prefers local and national events to Formula 1.
After his twins, Adrian had two more children, Beth and Harry.
“I was young and didn’t know any different, it was a case of trying to parent the best we could. I like to think parenting came naturally, although there is no rule book,” he said.
“Life was very segregated between home and work. The children’s mum would look after them and I was working seven days a week. I worked fulltime in the aviation sector and at the weekends I ran a bouncy castle business.
“I remember occasions where I would take Josh and Beth out in the van with me to deliver the bouncy castles in the morning then would have the afternoon free then I’d start collecting them early evening on both Saturday and Sunday. It was tiring but I had a young family and mortgage to pay; I’m sure other people have those same pressures now.”
Adrian said his weekend work delivering bouncy castles was not as fun as it may sound.
“It’s great on a sunny day, but when it’s dark and wet on a Sunday evening and you’re tired, it’s not all it cracks up to be,” he said.
“There would be occasions where adults would have been on them and lager would be spilled everywhere, or when it had been raining and people would think it’s funny to have fairy liquid on it in the rain to make bubbles everywhere.”
Pictured: Scouting has played an "important part" of Adrian's life. He was a Scout Leader and Assistant County Commissioner for Venture Scouts. Pictured is his Queens Scout Award.
Adrian has spent most of his life working in transport and logistics.
“I went to the College of Further Education and did a business studies course and was given a work experience placement with Servisair which then became my first job,” he said.
“It was all about mental arithmetic and physics back then, with manual loading sheets. I would need to calculate the weight of the passengers, the fuel and the take-off and landing weights and the maximum take-off weight. Then you would also have to work out the trim of the aircraft to know where to put luggage.
“I had a bit of training, but at 17 I was putting my signature on a load sheet for 52 passengers. I didn’t seem like a lot of responsibility at the time. Looking back now it seems a bit of a risk, but the maths worked, and it was a circular sum so if you got it wrong, you knew you had it wrong because the numbers wouldn’t add up. You were your own supervisor and that circular sum was the double check.”
Pictured: Adrian has done coasteering with Outdoor Guernsey and credits them for making outdoor activities in Guernsey accessible.
Adrian then moved to work for a specialist freight handling company.
“We were doing niche operations like arranging for a boat propeller to come from Italy or documents across the world. We partnered with specialist people who would buy space on Concorde and we could arrange a 4pm pick up in Guernsey for a 9am delivery in New York,” he said.
“Email had only just started out as commercially available and you certainly attach documents to emails. It was all still wet signatures. There was one occasion where I had a phone call on a Thursday afternoon from a business needing a document to be delivered to Athens on Saturday.
“I explained the earliest I could get it there would be Monday, even by doing something special. They asked if there was another option and I said only if I take it myself and they said ‘sure’. I phoned up my travel agent, got the last flight out of Guernsey and then the last flight out of Heathrow on the Friday night and then was picked up at 08:00 on the Saturday morning.
“I was then dropped off in Athens city centre after the document was delivered and I was left to make my way back to the airport. I followed an American tour group for a while and then brought a map, found the airport and the word for ‘airport’ and went up to each bus timetable and tried to match the symbols for the airport.
“I was back in Guernsey by Saturday night having delivered the document and making a healthy profit on it for my time and the company time.”
Pictured: Adrian with his beloved "scruffy terrier", Monty.
Adrian said that he has always been a problem solver.
“I’m a fixer. I will do emotion but after the event. If there is a problem then I will jump into fixing mode and then I’ll fall apart after. In the case of losing Sam, it was 28 years later, sometimes it’s an hour later,” he said.
“I don’t know whether it comes from being the eldest child, but I have just always been practical and a fixer. I’ve never thought about whether I was a fixer because my sibling was a younger sister rather than a brother. My sister is a person, rather than a female.
“I think over time I have become more protective of my one daughter. She has recently moved to Milton Keynes to be with her partner and I helped her move. It was a great help for me to be able to do something physical to help her move.
“It is hard for me to display my emotions and if there is nothing to fix that is the hardest thing for me to deal with. I took her over in a van; it was a fun road trip and to have time together. Leaving her there was difficult but I was glad that I had been of use.”
Pictured: Adrian with his parents.
Adrian also gave physical help when his families business, Gabriel’s Clothing, closed in 2007.
“My grandfather opened Gabriels’ clothing stores in Fountain Street in 1945. He was a very hard worker, very Christian in his beliefs and a very quiet philanthropist. He did a lot of charity work for the elderly and for people in Romania and Africa. He would donate by sending goods,” said Adrian.
“My dad worked in the shops for 40 or 50 years. He encouraged me to work in the shops too and I did for a couple of months but living with him and working with him was difficult and it wasn’t for me. I did the physical packing up of the shops when the they closed and my dad and cousin did the administration side. Between jobs at the time.
“The properties went onto the market, initially all 10 properties as one block but eventually they were sold off individually. There were two left and one was the one my dad had worked in all his life. I decided to buy it and redevelop it into a five-bedroom home as a base for the children to life if they wanted to, including my stepdaughter.”
Pictured: Adrian at 21 with his twin sons, Samuel (Sam) and Josh. Samuel sadly passed away at nine days old from sudden infant death syndrome.
Adrian said that his children and stepdaughter lived in the home “on and off” until they made their own arrangements, and he eventually sold the family home.
He now lives with Sally and their two dogs.
“Sally and I through work in the early 2000s at Guernsey Post and knew of each other. In 2014 we both moved into town and we both had dogs so we ended up walking our dogs in the same area. It seems a cliché but we fell in love through that,” he said.
“Sally is great and a good sounding board for me. She helps me deal with things that I can’t deal with.”
It seems Adrian has had more than his fair share of “things to deal with”, including witnessing the sudden death of his stepmothers father at the dinner table when he was nine, and the sudden death of a passenger boarding an aircraft when he was 18.
“I’ve never really thought about either of those things having a big impact on me until I went to counselling. I just went straight into fixer mode and did what I could to help at the time. I will never forget, in the case of my stepmothers father, my stepmother asked me to pour her a brandy and I poured a full glass, not knowing that it was meant to be a small amount,” he said.
Pictured: Adrian with his mother. His parents separated when he was young but he had close relationships with both parents.
Adrian recalled a defining moment in his life as being made unexpectedly redundant in 2007.
“I changed tack a bit after being made redundant and took a job with the Education Department as the passenger transport officer. Although it was still transport, my customer base of children with additional needs was very different to my previous customers.
“I met with the schools and some parents because I wanted to learn more about the nature and needs of my indirect customers. That made me realise how difficult life can be for some people.
“Time moved on, I went through a few jobs and found myself working in the insurance sector. A similar thing happened in that I tried to find out what was making the guys tick because, in my view, the operation wasn’t working particularly well. Ultimately, I took it to heart and, on reflection, I think I had a breakdown.
“I didn’t know how to fix myself. It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t fix the problem, and the problem was me.”
Adrian said he “took a step back and realised there were more important things in life than work; you have to look after yourself”.
“I still needed money so I went to a temp agency and asked what they had for an unskilled, unqualified worker. I was placed at Jacksons as a driver and I met someone who was in a very similar place to me. We got chatting and he had a great influence on me and helped me to reset myself and realise that you have to focus on yourself."
Pictured: Adrian with his partner, Sally. They fell in love through walking their dogs together when they both moved to the same area of town.
Adrian said that he still takes the time to enjoy “the good things in life”, which include his family, dogs, being outdoors and collecting local bottles.
“I love dogs. There has always been a dog in our family. From Jack Russells to Labradors and Retrievers. I have a scruffy little terrier now, Monty, who is a ball of fun. He was so tiny when I got him at eight weeks old he was small enough to have fit in a pint glass and was the same colour as a pint of Monty’s so it was the perfect name,” he said.
“A dog makes you go out for a walk and appreciate the cliché that there is not such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing. Get a dog, get out and enjoy life.
“I am definitely an outdoor person. I love everything that Guernsey has to offer. It’s brilliant that the outdoors has been opened up to the masses through Outdoor Guernsey. I’ve done coasteering through them and also done some training with them in the winter months including casualty training. It’s a great excuse to get outdoors and experience life.”
Pictured: Adrian has always had dogs in the family and said walking them is a great way to experience the outdoors.
Adrian said that his love of collecting local bottles has roots in his love of Guernsey.
“I love everything about Guernsey, the people, the makeup and the history. Between 12 and 15 years ago I started collecting bottles. It’s a tangible piece of Guernsey history, I can hold something that someone had a drink out of in the 1800s; for me that, is history in action.
“It’s about people and how people have shaped Guernsey. I probably have 200 mineral bottles, 30 flagons and around 20 ginger beer bottles. The main way to find them now is at auction and they are very collectable. You can make the odd find now and again.
“My second ever bottle was one that I found in four pieces and I glued it back together. It’s one of my prides because it was the first one I found in the hedgerow.”
Adrian said that he was an “island boy”.
“I love to travel, but I love coming home more. I’d never say never, perhaps New Zealand may call my name one day but I have no hard or set plans. One of the most important things I have learned is that, before you can fix anything else, you have to fix yourself first. That really resonates with me. Around that period of time I started the bereavement counselling and I realised I had to fix myself. I’m pretty much fixed now, life is good and happy and I can still fix things.”
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