Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Birth17 Feb 1887, The Vicarage, Ardington, Berks
Death6 Nov 1951, Belle Heather, Bransgore, Christchurch, Hants
General3rd dau. President of English Elkhound Society. Heir, in her issue, to bro. Arthur.
MotherMary Hodgson Gillett (1856-1947)
Notes for Lilian Frances Gillett Trotter
Martin P-L writes:

Lilian Frances 1881-1951

Her grandfather was born a Brown.  He married a Miss Welbank, whose mother's maiden name was Trotter.  Mr Brown changed his name to Trotter by Royal Licence. Their son was Canon H.E. Trotter, who married a Mary Hodson Gillett.  Before she married she kept a diary.  For some reason I have the 1876 edition of it.  I do not think it will ever be published; it is singularly uninteresting.  As Granny Trotter she is vivid in my memory, wearing the same spectacles as the sheep in  Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Lilian, too, left a photograph album, from the same period as her husband's.  Although it includes a visit to Brooklands in 1907, dogs feature a good deal more than cars.  She bred and showed Elkhounds with great success.  I also remember goats, including an enormous one which her kennel-maid rode on; and my personal impression was that she preferred any kind of animal to children.  A goat of hers I tried to milk must have felt the same way.  Visits to her were always full of novelty, whether it was working a searchlight or eating honeycomb or even operating her lavatory, the first I had met with a handle instead of a chain.
She, too, died of cancer, and is buried at Bournemouth.  - MPL
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Her father, the canon, as a Trotter son, inherited the quartered Brown and Trotter arms given to William Trotter by Royal Licence in 1868, though he had a mark of distinction on the Trotter quarters, which mark was to be omitted for the arms of his and his wife’s children as they were Trotter descendants.  One of her brothers died as a child and her three adult brothers died unmarried, as did her sisters.  So she was the only heraldic heiress of these arms, becoming so nearly 30 years after her death.

Had Reginald Cecil been able to know this, he could have borne these arms in an Escutcheon of Pretence (wow!).

Now we can merely add them to all the other P-L arms, placing them in the last three slots, after the Barrington inheritance, as she was the last heraldic heiress to be married.  The impartible Trotter arms are to be followed by the Brown then the Trotter arms in separate quarterings; Brown is first as it is the male line.  - TFPL

In the 1901 census she was living at The Rectory, Whitchurch, Oxfordshire with her parents, aged 14 and born in Ardington, Berks.
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Her birth index:

Name:            Mother's Maiden Surname:
TROTTER, -       GILLETT  
GRO Reference: 1887  M Quarter in WANTAGE  Volume 02C  Page 310
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TFPL, March 2003: I have seen her entry in the record books of the College of Arms.
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TFPL: Feb 2005: In a list of Crufts best (dog) of show, her names appears in 1937 as reserve best of show with her Elkhound "Kren of the Hollow".  The best of show was Lorna Countess Howe's labrador retriever "Ch Cheverll's Ben of Banchory".
There were 9,949 entries that year.  Modern shows have 22,000 odd entries.
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Aug 2008: Jane Nantais (a Hallifax cousin) has found an embarkation record for the 9th January 1931 on the ship Highland Brigade at London for Las Palmas, though the ship was bound eventually for South America.  She was with Ursula and both were surnamed Lybbe on its own with their correct ages.  Curiously the record shows them accompanied by a Veronica Wood aged 33 who was also of Mead House; was she a Lady’s Maid?  They all travelled first class.

Lilian had herself recorded on this ship as ‘married’ though this might have been a defence against marauding males.

They were all resident at Mead House; this shows a fairly rapid move from Rectory Farm after RCL P-L died in March of the previous year.
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Going through my father’s scrap books in 2014 I found he had included the introduction to the 1951-2 year Book of The British Elkhound Society which included as item 1 this:

“Mrs Powys-Lybbe, who was a valued member since 1927, a Committee member from 1932, President for the years 1939 to 1945 and Vice-President from 1948, died during the year.  She had resigned from her position as Vice-President as she was going to join her daughter in Australia.  The Society presented her with a travelling clock and writing case in appreciation of her work.  She was ex extremely grateful to the members for these gifts and was looking forward to joining her daughter.  It was a shock to the members to learn of her death, and she will be greatly missed.”

The introduction also mentions an article by one Mr Holmes who listed all the dogs that she had had or bred and my father pasted this in as well.

The article included the following:

In 1927 she was living at Goldfinch Hollow, Greenham Common, Newbury, Berks.  She called her dogs “... of the Hollow” in reference to this house.  (From some notes about the parish council in 2014, it seems that the house is still in existence as one of the councillors lives there.)

Mr Holmes concludes his three and a half page account with: The name of Mrs Powys-Lybbe is sure of remembrance as on of the most prominent Elkhound Breeders of all time and if this article is a means of perpetuating her memory, which so deserves it, my task will not have been in vain.”

My father added this handwritten note: “I think it was he who lived close to us at Greenham, and first introduced my mother to Elkhounds.  But after 70 years, memory not always perfectly reliable!  APL.  30 Dec 94”.  In 1927 my father was at Downside aged 18, and would have had the odd regime of spending half of each holiday with each of his separated parents.
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Found in the 1939 Register indexed as ‘Pasys-Lybbe’
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On 5th February 1931 she arrived at London on the Highland Chieftain from Las Palmas, having been living at Grand Canary (who?), aged 43 and intending to live in England.  Her proposed English address was Mead House, Bradfield.
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At death this is the new GRO record:

Name:                                   Age at Death (in years):  
POWYS-LYBBE, LILIAN FRANCES WILLETT     64  
GRO Reference: 1951  D Quarter in CHRISTCHURCH  Volume 06B  Page 199

I will look at the death certificate to see if ‘Willett’ was really what was written . . .
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Will notes for Lilian Frances Gillett Trotter
Her Probate Index:

LYBBE, Lilian Frances Gillett Powys of Yed Hill Ringwood Hampshire died 6 November 1951 at Belle Heather Bransgore Christchurch East Southampton  Probate Gloucester 7 December to Ursula Margot Buckland (wife of Druce Hervey Buckland). Effects £8374 18s 6d.
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Arms Generally notes for Lilian Frances Gillett Trotter
How can we prove that she was an heraldic heiress?

The simple answer is that there were six children and only one of them married, this being Lilian, and she had children.

My father, being one of Lilian’s children, knew her brothers and sisters and was able to report that there were no other than the six children of his maternal grandparents.  Further he signed a document to this effect.  However this does not exclude any child who may have been born early and left home in a cloud, never to be spoken of again.

So we need supporting evidence and this can be found in the censuses.

Lilian’s parents married in 1877, their first child, Edith (or Edie as she came to be known, at least in the family) was born in 1878..  Their second, Evelyn, in 1880.  Not unremarkably Edie and Evelyn, only, are both with their parents in the 1881 census.

The next census was in 1891.  By then the other four children had been born and all six children were with their parents at the Vicarage in Ardington, Berks.  There were no more children there.

Finally there was the 1901 census.  If Lilian’s mother had had any more children surely they would be still at home and thus shown in this census.  Further by 1901 Mary Hodgson Trotter was 45 years old and almost certainly beyond the age of childbearing, so no more children will be found in the 1911 census.

In fact the 1901 census has five of the children at home with their parents in Whitchurch rectory with Arthur, the youngest, to be found as a boarder at school (location not shown ont he census page, though).

And the 1911 census includes the cogent information that her mother had had 7 children, six of whom were then alive.  This led to finding a fourth brother, Cyril Henry Gillett Trotter who lived only for five years from 1882 to 1887 - and thus appeared in no census.
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Around 2008 I tried to convince some heralds that Lilian was an ehiress.  I forwarded all the birth, marriage (one only of course) and death certificates to them to support my claim.  I added in some of the wills, notably that of Arthur who was the last to die.  They would not accept this as proof.  They seemed to be wanting a ‘not-married’ ceretificate, which of course is a no-no.  And so I abandoned this claim wiht the College.

Then in 2020 I found that my grandmother’s gt-grandfather, one George Welbank, had actual got himself granted arms in 1808, from the College of Arms.  He had married Anne Trotter who turned out to be the sole child, who had had children ,of her father James Trotter and James had got himself some arms from the Lyon Court in 1803.  So Anne was a heraldice heiress and because her children were of an armiger, George Welbank, those chidldren would inherit both the Welbank and the Trotter arms.  Anne had two children of whom George died unmarried in Canada in 1842, leaving Mary Elizabeth who had married William Brown and had a vast thirteen children most of whom survived.  So Mary Elizabeth Welbank carried the Trotter and Welbank quarterings but her husband was not initially armigerous so the quarterings did not pass on to the thirteen children.  Eventually some arrangements were made that Mary Elizabeth and her husband George Brown would take on the Trotter name and arms and then inherit the Trotter 1000 acres on the west side of Epsom.  William Brown by this became an armigerous George Trotter and their children became armigerous also and inherited the Trotter, Welbank and the modified Trotter arms of their father, not to mention the special quartered Brown-Trotter arms specially granted to them (see the Royal Licence for details).  Just to complete the picture William Trotter, as then then was, trotted off to The Lyon King and said he was George Brown and could he have granted to him the arms that had been invented for a Brown cousin of his.  Yes said Lyon and agreed to start the Grant from William’s father george Brown.  Another quartering for the pot!

The children of Mary Elizabeth and George Trotter included Rev Canon Henry Eden Trotter who thus inherited all these arms and quarterings.  He married and had a wholesome seven children of whom six survived to adulthood and included Lilian, our paternal grandmother.  Apart from Lilian none of them married so when the last of her siblings died, Lilian became, in 1979, ther heraldic heiress of her father Henry Trotter and thus carried and passed on, from 1979, the right to all those quarterings to her children and their descednats which were the five offspring of her only son Antony, us, and then to our descendants.

In December 2020 I had established the Welbank arms with a herald and decided that the time had come to get back to establishing that our grandmother was the heir to all this heraldry.  Remarkably he saw no problem in doing this so I bundled up all the certificates and wills again and delivered them for close examination.  For a modest fee he agreed to put a Trotter pedigree into the College’s record books with the record for each of Lilian’s adult siblings stating that they were unmarried at death.  Documents were exchanged between us in early January 2021 and in later the same january I expect to sign the final Trotter pedigree as true to the best of my knowledge and belief.  Granny Lybbe, as we knew her, is now a heraldic heiress in the eyes of the College.

A final move will be to get a pedigree scriven by the college to show both these Trotters and all the P-L descendants with their arms and make copies for treasuring around the family.  With luck this pedigree will be slow enough in being produced that Sophie and James’ Bump will have emerged and can then be included on that chart.
Notes for Reginald Cecil Lybbe & Lilian Frances Gillett (Family)
One of the marriage records for him on FreeBMD calls him ‘Powys-Lysse’; told ‘em.
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The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser of Sat 16 May 1908 had this notice on p. 10:

“Marriages:  POWYS LYBBE--TROTTER.--On the 12th inst., at St Mary’s Whitchurch, Oxon., by the Arch-deacon of Oxford, assisted by the Rev F.W.T. Greenwood, vicar of Market Drayton, cousin of the bridegroom, Reginald Cecil Lybbe Powys-Lybbe, of Hardwick House, Oxon., to Lilian Frances Gillett, youngest daughter of Canon Trotter, Rector of Whitchurch.”
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Last Modified 30 Jan 2022Created 14 May 2022 by Tim Powys-Lybbe
Re-created by Tim Powys-Lybbe on 14 May 20220