Artist Muriel captured
Local historian Geoff Wright continues his look back at the life of talented Formby artist Muriel Sibley
LAST week we looked into the family history of artist Muriel Sibley, from Huguenots to bricklayers, in fact, a family tree that featured those with a wide variety of occupations.
Everything from dressmakers to schoolteachers, a laundress to an unpaid domestic, from a policeman to an analytical chemist, a railway engine driver and errand boy, and a head postmaster to someone living off private means.
This week we see the Sibleys settling in at Formby village - but, as in life, heartbreak is just around the corner!
Formby bound
Moving on to 1949, a near decade after their marriage, Muriel, 37, and John Sibley, 35, came up from Romford, Essex, to look at marital property in the North West, when John’s highbrow work took him to Liverpool where, certainly by 1945, he had become an industrial chemist.
Muriel then fell in love again, this time with Formby village, and the couple moved there with their five-year-old warbaby son, Paul – born the AprilJune quarter of 1944, in Leicester.
In April 1945 John Hammond Sibley B.Sc (London), had been mentioned in ‘The Analyst’ publication as a new member of the society, following its AGM on Friday, March 9, at Burlington House, London.
The Sibleys soon settled in to their neat semi-detached home in Brow’s Lane (as it was originally called), at number 18, in-between the railway station and what is now the swimming pool, near the old Holy Trinity School.
This tree-lined roadway was then one of Lancashire’s most exclusive residential areas.
Back in 1896 the parish council had renamed the western end of Chapel Lane to Brow’s Lane.
Brows is a Lancashire term for a slope.
Muriel became captivated by the extensive reminders of Formby’s rural history when she moved to the village.
She travelled everywhere on her trusty bicycle and soon set to work on recording by pen, pencil, brush and camera, the many old structures, farm lanes and landscapes, which were representative of the area’s rich past and heritage.
Seafaring journey
We then note that on January 20, 1958 Muriel set sail for foreign climes to visit her sister, Winifred, and to check out a prospective job, in Lagos - although the ship’s register wrongly stated that she was ‘visiting her daughter’.
Mrs Muriel E. Sibley is recorded here as a 45-year-old housewife, and as one of five passengers she is logged as heading to Nigeria, via Freetown, Sierra Leone, on the 6,239-tonne M/V ‘Owerri’ of the Elder Dempster Line.
This shipping company had just about recovered from the war. After trading between Liverpool and West Africa, it lost nearly half of its fleet. Originally consisting of 101 vessels, it was left with 58, when many fell victim to U-boats, whilst others were sunk by German cruisers, hit mines, or met their fate at the hands of raiders.
However, although a general cargo vessel, the 450ft long ‘Owerri’ was, by all accounts ‘a lovely ship,’ which used to carry passengers in a small way, with one deck dedicated just to them, and now in more peaceful times - apart from the isolated threats from modernday pirates - Muriel’s seafaring