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Kent’s Sporting Memories Oral History Summary
Interviewee: Sandra Hibbert
Interviewer: Michael Romyn
Date: 13 August, 2019
Location: Sandra’s home in Hawkinge, Kent
0:00 Name, place and date of birth (Margaret Sandra Hibbert; Ancoats, Manchester; June 1943); the circumstances of Sandra’s parents’ meeting; her early life in Folkestone; her grandmother’s butcher’s shop in Sandgate; as a four-year-old, taking her baby brother into Sandgate alone in a pram, scaring her mother; parents got a three-bedroom council house in Cheriton; she attended Stella Maris primary school (Catholic), until age 11; remembering her ninth birthday, and the picture of the Sacred Heart she received from a nun at school as a present, which she still has today; after leaving Stella Maris, Sandra attended Harcourt School for Girls.
12:40 Sandra recalls enjoying school despite her and her friends being relatively poor – ‘people didn’t have money’; her father made her a gym slip; the various activities she took part in school, such as baking and sewing; playing rounders and hockey at school; the ‘beautiful’ gym at Stella Maris; the entertainers of her youth.
20:36 Life post-school – finding jobs in the local paper, and her first position as a sales person at Bata shoe shop: ‘I left school on a Friday and got a job on the Monday’; leaving Bata to work at True-Form shoes, where she stayed for three years, despite being unhappy there; moving once again to work at Tesco, where she met her husband Glyn on a company outing.
30:36 Going dancing with her friends in Folkestone as a teenager – ‘I was always very lucky, boys would ask me to dance’; getting married to Glyn in October 1964; going to work at Dorothy Perkins, before having her first child, Simon; Sandra describes her first home with Glyn, a spacious flat near the Folkestone coast; moving again once the baby was born to be on one level; having a second son, Danny, and going back to work at Dorothy Perkins
43:40 Sandra describes putting her name down and getting a council house in fortuitous succession – ‘It was beautiful, modern, open-plan…the rooms were a good size’; buying the house under Right to Buy, and selling it several years later to move to a house on Dover Road; later, moving to a bungalow in Hythe, before eventually moving to Hawkinge.
47:25 Being introduced to badminton by a colleague while working at Mademoiselle’s boutique in the 1970s; playing badminton at Folkestone Sports Centre, where the badminton club was quite elitist and hierarchical, but where she continues to play together; working at Portex, a manufacturer of single use medical equipment, where she was promoted to the position of quality assurance inspector; the gifts, cards and well wishes Sandra received when she left Portex after ten years; taking on yet another job at a shop selling ornaments in Folkestone.
56:30 Playing badminton only intermittently while working at Portex; becoming more serious about the sport when she turned 50; Sandra describes playing badminton with her colleagues at Debenhams, before she started at Portex; her success playing badminton for the sports centre club; her preference for doubles, rather than singles.
1:01:57 Sandra describes the coloured peg scheme used by the badminton club to denote ability; the social life at the sports centre facilitated by the lack of drink and drive laws; Sandra describes the sports centre in the early years as ‘middle class’, but that now it is ‘for everybody’
1:07:50 Sandra’s first impressions of the sports centre – ‘It was very, very good. Because it was the only one around. Nowhere else had a sports centre’; becoming life members at the centre; how the social side of things have diminished at the centre; Sandra describes the cafeteria – ‘that was a fantastic place, massive…it was a good laugh’ – and the nights they spent there drinking and socializing; various social activities that were held at the centre such as bonfire nights, dances and craft fairs.
1:13:00 Playing away games with the badminton club across Shepway and surrounding areas, and the various opponents she came up against.