Lucy Grace Dibble

Background

Lucy Dibble was born on October 3, 1902, in Basingstoke, United Kingdom; the daughter of George Dibble. Lucy had sisters.

Education

Lucy Dibble was exposed to travel and learning from an early age. Lucy was home-schooled by her mother until age nine. Her father took her on weekend walks and taught her how to identify animals and birds. When her mother accepted a job at Bearsted school, Dibble and her sisters were expected to serve as models to the other students. As a child, Dibble took yearly trips to her mother’s home in Gloucestershire.

Academically, Dibble did well, attending Maidstone Girls’ Grammar School on scholarship at age twelve. There she studied a diverse curriculum, including literature, music, art, chemistry, French, Latin, and geography. It was at Maidstone that she developed a desire to teach in India. Dibble studied at Homerton Training College in Cambridge, England, and "was one of only five women studying for the Cambridge Diploma in geography at the School of Geography". In 1929 she received a Bachelor of Arts.

Career

In 1934, Dibble started teaching at Wolfe Junior High School in Winnipeg, Canada. Four years later, in 1938, she achieved her goal of teaching in India when she accepted the position of a teacher advanced of English and geography at St. Mary’s Training College in Poona, India.

For nearly the next three decades, Dibble worked as an educator and administrator in a variety of locations, including six years teaching Geography at the United Missionary College in Ibadan, Nigeria; three years as principal of the Women’s Teacher Training College in Ilesha, Nigeria, and four years teaching English at Queen’s School in Ede, Nigeria. When she tried to find teaching positions after returning to England in 1961, "she was dismissed as too old". Dibble did eventually secure a job at Dane Court School for Girls in Broadstairs. In 1964, she experienced a recurrence of River Blindness (onchocerciasis), which she contracted from the bite of "a beautiful fly" in Nigeria in 1961. The disease forced her to undergo a rigorous medical treatment regimen to prevent total blindness. A year later, in 1965, she retired from teaching.

Her first book, the two-volume set of Return Tickets, was published in 1968. Dibble’s books are written in diary format and include many of her own photographs as illustrations.

Return Tickets covers Dibble’s life from her early childhood to 1968, the years during which the majority of her travels took place. The first volume describes her life from childhood to 1959. In the book, she describes some of her earliest journeys, from a trip to Oberammergau, Germany to see the centuries-old Passion Play to visits Italy, France, and Norway.

In 1933, Dibble visited Egypt, and some of her descriptions of this trip reveal what a naive traveler Dibble was at the time. Dibble describes the traditional bartering with merchants as an "unpleasant way of shopping," and explains that visitors to mosques have to put on slippers "primarily because they are places of worship, and also to keep the beautiful carpets clean, for when the Moslems pray they touch the ground several times with their forehead." During her trip, she rode a camel from the pyramids to the Sphinx, traced the religious history of Israel, toured Lebanon and Turkey, and visited ancient Greek sites such as the Parthenon and the Acropolis.

When Dibble accepted a position at General Wolfe Junior High School in Winnipeg, she made getting there an adventure, traveling down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa before continuing by rail to Toronto and Winnipeg. For Dibble, almost any chance to travel brought with it an opportunity to explore. When she used her "return ticket" to later go back to England, she diverted eight weeks from the trip to visit the Hawaiian Islands, Japan, and China.

Dibble’s travels and work in the late 1930s and early 1940s brought her into contact with the effects of World War II. On a visit to Nuremberg, Germany in 1936, she observed the spectacle of the city’s hosting of the National Socialist Congress, and abundant "soldiers, airmen, Storm Troopers, and Hitler Youths, wearing the red Nazi armlet," she wrote. While teaching at St. Mary’s Training College in Poona, India, she experienced "censorship of letters, disruption of mails, shortages (including paper), and the sinking of the Yorkshire, with tennis partners on board". The war delayed her departure from India for four years.

In 1946, Dibble accepted a teaching position in geography at the United Missionary College in Ibadan, Nigeria. It was the start of fourteen years of living and teaching in that country, with other positions at the Women’s Teacher Training College in Ilesha and Queen’s School in Ede. She spent her time in Nigeria studying natural history and collecting specimens for her students, learning languages such as Yoruba and Hausa, and traveling throughout Nigeria, the Sahara Desert, and areas such as Benin, Enuga, and Mount Cameroon. She returned to Europe during the summers and traveled to Sweden, France, and Spain. At the end of her last assignment in 1959, she spent three months exploring Africa, marked by trips up the Congo, visits to Victoria Falls and the grave of Cecil Rhodes, and cultural dismay at the juxtaposition of apartheid and modernization in South Africa.

The second volume of Return Tickets continued the narrative of Dibble’s life and travels, with a focus on her activities from 1959 to 1968. She relates her travels in New Zealand, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Malta, Sri Lanka, and other countries. She continued to study languages and the natural history of the places she visited. When she returned to England, she gave talks and slide presentations on her experiences in Nigeria, and discovered, to her disappointment, that "there was not the all-absorbing urge to learn as I had known in Nigeria."

She began taking driving lessons at age fifty-nine and passed her driving test at age sixty, even though she had driven in Nigeria where a license was not required, Ferriss said. Health problems affected her throughout 1964, including a bout with onchocerciasis, or river blindness, which she had contracted in Nigeria. In 1965, she retired from teaching and focused on activities such as gardening, language study, the cinema, and considerable travel to locations such as Nigeria, the Mediterranean, Jerusalem, Italy, Egypt, Greece, and Portugal.

Dibble’s next book, More Return Tickets, appeared in 1970, and continues her descriptions of her travels, with diary entries for each voyage with brief narratives of Dibble’s life. Her entries and remarks become more involved, relating minute details of her travels and domestic life. The book details her return to India in 1969, where she contracted ptomaine poisoning but quickly recovered to continue her tour of temples, caves, and sites along the Ganges River. India had changed since her first visit, and she was struck by the drastic differences between the rich and the poor there, as well as in Nepal.

Dibble’s next book, Return Tickets to Southern Europe, was published in 1980. For the first time, she limited a book to a specific region, rather than covering her travels in chronological order. Included are descriptions of her trips to Italy, Greece, Sicily, southern Sardinia, and southern Spain. Again presented in diary form, the accounts track her tours of ruins, gardens, and churches, emphasizing her special interest in mosaics. Dibble writes about her reactions to ancient artworks she saw in Rome, such as Michelangelo’s Pieta. She discusses literary history and the works of writers who had visited the ancient Roman sites before her, including Keats, Dickens, and Shelley.

Dibble includes the story of a very brief "courtship" she had in Greece in 1971, when she was approached by an amorous and insistent middle-aged man, who proposed marriage and entreated her to get off at his bus stop.

Return Tickets to Scandinavia, published in 1982, again finds Dibble focusing on her travels in a specific region. The book also includes some previously published material from the original Return Tickets. The inclusion of the earlier descriptions allows Dibble to contrast her life and thoughts between visits to a particular' place, especially in terms of her advancing age.

Return Tickets to Yugoslavia includes daily chronicles of several trips to Yugoslavia between 1976 and 1983. Dibble returned to areas that she had visited in the 1930s, focusing on the religious past and history of conflict in the region. At the time, she was able to travel easily throughout Croatia, Serbia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro, although "political disturbances" prevented her from visiting Kosmet Province. Although Dibble continued to travel in the 1980s to such places as Vienna and Tenerife, she focused more on activities closer to her home in Broadstairs, England. In 1987, recurring heart problems put her in the hospital for nearly a week.

Dibble’s next book, No Return Tickets!, appeared in 1989, and marked "a significant departure". In the book, Dibble reminisced about her life before she became a global traveler, including material originally published in Return Tickets on her early childhood. Similarly, her next two books, Return Tickets to Africa, published in 1992, and Return Tickets to Asia, from 1993, present previously published material on those regions.

Two books of photography followed: Return Tickets in Pictures for Armchair Globetrotters in 1993 and Return Tickets in Pictures for Globetrotting Naturalists in 1994. They include large numbers of pictures taken by Dibble during her extensive travels, along with brief essays describing the subjects and the places she’d been. Return Tickets to Sacred Places, from 1996, also contained re-printed material from earlier volumes.

Achievements

• L. Grace Dibble called herself "La Petite Anglais Vagabonde" ("the little English vagabond"), and with this unassuming and demure sobriquet, she engaged in a lifetime of travel, teaching, and writing. Her thirteen travel books, all interlaced with the recurring theme of "return" or round-trip tickets, detail her journeys through Europe, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, Africa, the United States, and Asia—more than sixty countries in all.
  
  At their best, Dibble’s books offer comprehensive portraits of major sites, supported by information about the historical background and contemporary social, industrial, and agricultural practices. Her thirteen books are a testament to her stamina and to her unflagging desire to learn and teach about the world. As Dibble herself said, her books convey her "inexhaustible thirst for fresh geographical and natural history knowledge," and "the attraction of islands; the love of new adventures; the love of the heat and color of the tropics; the fun of meeting people of other races and nationalities; and the fresh scope for photography."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Return Tickets to Sacred Places 1996
  • Return Tickets to Asia 1992
  • Return Tickets to Africa 1992
  • Return Tickets in Pictures for Armchair Globetrotters 1993
  • Return Tickets to Yugoslavia 1984
  • Return Tickets to Southern Europe 1980

Personality

Even though Lucy traveled widely and in exotic locations, one would be hard-pressed to call Dibble an adventurer. She stuck to the beaten path, choosing organized tours rather than striking out on her own. Still, she was always indefatigable, driven by a compelling urge to learn and to teach about the world.

Connections

During Dibble’s 1975 trip to Tunisia, she was asked for the first of many times why she was traveling alone, without her husband. Dibble had never married, and when asked when she would, she only responded that she was too old. Dibble stresses the advantage of traveling alone, explaining that it is easier to meet other people.

Father:

George Dibble