Word: sibyle
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Nearly all 560 subjects of the medieval fiefdom of Sark gathered last week around a gnarled oak tree in their parish churchyard to mourn Dame Sibyl Mary Collings Beaumont Hathaway, 21st Seigneur of Sark. She had died suddenly of a heart attack in her palatial home on Sark at the age of 90. During almost five decades of rule over the minuscule (4½ sq. mi.) Channel island, Dame Sibyl had labored to keep the 20th century at bay in what she pridefully called "the last bastion of feudalism in the modern world...
What brought him forth was a controversy that had been building since the announcement on Dec. 7 that McGraw-Hill would publish The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, and LIFE would print excerpts from it. In one of the oddest consultations since those of the Cumaean sibyl, Hughes (or a man purporting to be him) spoke from Paradise Island for 2 hours with reporters arrayed before a telephone amplifier in a California hotel. The disembodied voice denied any knowledge of the book or its author. Later Hughes' agents sought an injunction to prevent its publication...
...m.p.h. speed limit. Sark's pubs pose another problem. Though the drinking hours (8 a.m. to 11 p.m.) compare favorably to those in Britain, residents often carry on past closing time-and some of those residents are members of the parliament. "I feel it becomes unbearable," Dame Sibyl said, "when the very laws that are made by the Chief Pleas are broken by the members themselves...
After making her abdication speech, Dame Sibyl retired to her comfy manor house to sulk. Her butler told callers that she was not at home. But the Dame's problems were far from solved. Guernsey's head of government, Sir William Arnold, announced that "the people of Sark must make up their own minds. Knowing Sark people as I do, I think they will wish to continue going their own way" Dame Sibyl's great-grandmother paid $14,400-for Sark in 1852. It was now beginning to look as if the Dame could not even give...
...Sark has had the privilege of self-rule since 1565, when Helier de Carteret was named Seigneur de Sark by Queen Elizabeth I. His descendants ruled until 1713, when the island was first sold, and in 1730 it was purchased by the Le Pelleys of Guernsey. Dame Sibyl's family took control by foreclosing a mortgage on the Le Pelleys...