Sibyl Hathaway

Sibyl Mary Collings was born in Guernsey in a house that once belonged to John Allaire, her privateering great-great-grandfather, whose business dealings brought the fief of Sark to his daughter, Marie Collings. Her parents were William Frederick Collings and his Montreal-born wife Sophie (née Moffatt). Collings was born two years after her notoriously intemperate father inherited the fief from his father, William Thomas Collings. She had one sibling, a sister named Doris. == First marriage ==

At the age of 15, Sybil fell in love with Dudley Beaumont, a British painter who could neither shoot nor climb cliffs, and who her father therefore considered a "weakling". Her father made it clear that he was adamantly opposed to the relationship, but Sibyl continued to see Beaumont. By 1901, after a raging argument, her father dragged Sybil out of her bedroom at midnight and threw her out of the seigneurial residence barefoot and in a nightgown. In her 1961 autobiography, Sybil wrote extensively about her relationship with her first husband. Dudley Beaumont, who served in the British Army as an officer during the First World War, died on 24 November 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. His death left her a pregnant widow with precarious finances. Neither her father nor her father-in-law, the army officer William Spencer Beaumont, were willing to give financial support to the widow and her six surviving children. She learned German and started working for the YMCA in Cologne. She also worked for the British Army of the Rhine and raised prize cattle. == Accession and remarriage ==

William Frederick Collings died on 20 June 1927, and was succeeded by his widowed daughter. Towards the end of his life, he stopped requesting from the inhabitants the payment of tithes, wheat and poulage (a feudal tax of two chickens). Upon her accession, the new dame immediately reasserted her feudal rights, and even noted: "They always give me the skinniest and oldest [chickens]". Robert was not aware that the marriage made him jure uxoris seigneur of Sark, his wife's co-ruler, until they set foot on the island. Hathaway's strong personality, however, ensured that she had the final say in the matters of government; while her husband attended government meetings as seigneur, she accompanied him to "give advice". Lecture tours in the United States, aided by her second husband's connections, were part of her efforts to promote tourism and bring more revenue to the island. == Second World War ==

Hathaway's tenure as seigneur was interrupted by the German occupation of the Channel Islands in the Second World War from 3 July 1940 until 8 May 1945. While some inhabitants of other Channel Islands were evacuated, Hathaway declared that she would not leave her island, and prevailed upon all native-born islanders to remain as well. Many other German officers in charge of the Channel Islands were also of noble extraction, and Hathaway exploited their "stiff German formality" by making it clear that she "expected to be treated ... with the rigid etiquette to which they were accustomed in their own country." When Germans ordered that all the Sarkese be instructed in German, the Dame offered a room in her residence as a classroom for the children of the island. Her husband was deported to Ilag VII in Laufen in Bavaria in February 1943, where he remained for the rest of the war. According to British historian David Fraser, Sibyl did not raise her objection to a series of antisemitic orders that had been previously issued by the German authorities, which concerned among others her Czech Jewish friend Annie Wranowsky. Islanders suffered shortage of food in the last months of the occupation. Hathaway organised a raid on German grain stocks and saved many families from starvation with her secret potato hoard. She made sure the garrison cleared up the island of land mines. Her experience of the German occupation inspired William Douglas-Home's play The Dame of Sark. Hathaway's manner of receiving Germans has been described as both impressive and overly cordial. == Postwar years ==

Following the war, Hathaway continued to promote Sark's tourist trade and advocated building a new harbour. In 1949, she and her husband welcomed Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh (later Queen Elizabeth II) and the Duke of Edinburgh, who opened the new harbour. The same year, Hathaway became Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Sibyl and Robert Hathaway's happy marriage ended with his death in 1954, to Sark's first seigneur, Hellier de Carteret, Hathaway was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire at Buckingham Palace. She then jokingly referred to herself as a "double dame". However, soon after her quatercentenary, her daughter, Douce Briscoe, died in 1967, having struggled with alcoholism for a long time. In 1969, Hathaway became increasingly worried by the Royal Commission on the Constitution's intrusion into her affairs. At the same time, she had a sharp dispute with the Chief Pleas, claiming that its members violated the laws they themselves had passed and that their misconduct threatened to make her tourism campaign futile. She shocked the islanders by announcing her intention to resign the charter of the island back to the Crown "in somewhat the same way as the Hereditary le Mesurier Family did in Alderney" and to recommend that the government be taken over by Guernsey. The threat was effective; regulations were suddenly enforced much more strictly. By the beginning of the next year, Hathaway retracted her announcement, having been persuaded "by an enormous number of letters and requests". ==Death==

Cyril Beaumont died in 1973, becoming the fifth child Dame Sibyl outlived. Early next year, the 90-year-old gave her approval for the stage presentation of William Douglas-Home's play The Dame of Sark, inspired by her experiences in the Second World War. She looked forward to meeting Celia Johnson, who was to play the title role, but died suddenly at the Seigneurie of a heart attack on 14 July 1974. Sark remained "the last bastion of feudalism", as she proudly put it, ==References==