Sheila was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1932 to Sydney Parnell Skinner and Margery Mary Davey. When Sheila was very young the family moved back to her father’s birthplace of Bishopsteignton. The house on Fore Street that the family moved to became Sheila’s home for the rest of her life.
As a girl Sheila fell in love with the theatre during an annual coach trip to the pantomime in Exeter. She later took to the stage herself in various drama groups in Teignmouth and Newton Abbot, and later became instrumental in the formation of the Bishopsteignton Players and the village’s Children’s Theatre.
In 1951 Sheila was crowned Bishopsteignton Carnival Queen, and 35 years later the village’s most Glamorous Granny (pictured above)!
Sheila was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1932 to Sydney Parnell Skinner and Margery Mary Davey. When Sheila was very young the family moved back to her father’s birthplace of Bishopsteignton. The house on Fore Street that the family moved to became Sheila’s home for the rest of her life.
As a girl Sheila fell in love with the theatre during an annual coach trip to the pantomime in Exeter. She later took to the stage herself in various drama groups in Teignmouth and Newton Abbot, and later became instrumental in the formation of the Bishopsteignton Players and the village’s Children’s Theatre.
In 1951 Sheila was crowned Bishopsteignton Carnival Queen, and 35 years later the village’s most Glamorous Granny (pictured above)!
Sheila spent a while working at Bitton House at the end of the 1940s, as secretary to a Brigadier Drayson, and stints as a school dinner lady. Shelia was also an Akela for the cub scouts, and left generations of village children with happy and fond memories of their ‘Aunty Sheila’ as she became known. In 1953 Sheila married David Reginald Robbins, and had two children, Gaynor and David. In 2014, Sheila received the British Empire Medal for all her services to the village. In Yvonne Hellin-Hobbs’s tribute to Sheila, she describes her as a “…wonderful woman, much loved throughout the area, who made an enormous contribution to the lives of her fellow villagers. She will be fondly remembered and much missed.”1