My Granny Hibbitt: Ivy Alice Hibbitt, nee Dando
1ST SEPTEMBER
My Granny Hibbitt (Ivy Alice Hibbitt, nee Dando) was born on 1st September 1904 above a sweet and tobacconist shop called the Golden Butterfly in Saffron Walden in Essex.
After moving to Plymouth with her family, she attended Gunnerside School for Girls situated in North Road East in Plymouth. In 1920 she joined the Post Office working as a telephone operator and married my Grandpa in 1931, having previously been engaged to three other men. Way to go, Granny! She later worked in Bond, Pearce, Eliott & Knape Solicitors in Plymouth until she retired from there in 1961.
Much of Granny and Grandpa’s early married life was spent in Tavistock where they rented a bungalow which they named Walden after Granny’s birth place. They retired to the village of East Allington in the South Hams and Gran took a job in a bookmakers in the nearby town of Kingsbridge. She also worked in the village Post Office for a time. I can remember many happy visits to their house, days spent on Grandpa’s little boat on the Kingsbridge/Salcombe estuary, kicking a football in the farmer’s field at the bottom of the garden and walks down by the local stream where there was an abundance of bluebells.
Granny had a funny turn of phrase. She was well-spoken but would mess around with words too, sometimes pretending to be posh (with huge tongue in cheek) and then using poor grammar on purpose just because she liked the sound of it, I guess. Here’s an excerpt of a letter she wrote to my dad in 1950 when dad was presumably away on a course…
“…We are very glad you are coming back and your honourable Father will meet you at North Road Station whence you will proceed to the offices of the most important and highly respected solicitors in the West of England and pick up your most esteemed Mother. Thence to your country home in the wilds of Dartmoor.”
She goes on…
“I am of a most desolate miserable disconsolateness about my Peter Lansdale wot only got 8 points. I had set my heart on him winning it, the poor darling. I expect some beastly, dirty, filthy, lousy, swinish, form of human life in the shape of another speedway rider put his elbows out and pushed my Pete…”
She did make me laugh a lot, did Gran.
After Grandpa died in 1972, Granny stayed on in their cottage until her final year in 1992 when she moved to Plymouth shortly before she passed away.
