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| Belle Castle Baptist Church |
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| Inez Knibb Sibley |
Inez Knibb Sibley was born on November 5, 1897 at the Belle Castle Baptist Mission House in the parish of Portland, the second daughter of Rev. William Peto Sibley and his wife, Mary Jane Sibley, nee Fray. Her father, who was pastor in the Belle Castle circuit from 1891 to I918, was the son of Rev. Charles Sibley, an Englishman who had come to Jamaica in 1824 as a missionary from England and who was pastor in the Balaclava circuit in St. Elizabeth.
Inez Sibley’s mother, Mary Jane Sibley, was the granddaughter of Rev Ellis Fray, Sr. and Mary Ann Fray (nee Knibb). Inez was proud to be the great grand-daughter of the celebrated British Baptist missionaries William and Mary Knibb.
Like her elder sister, Doris, Inez Sibley attended Westwood High School when Rev George Henderson was manager of the School. To get to Westwood, Knibb Sibley wrote, “we had to drive to a small town known as Manchioneal, which was about 6 miles from Belle Castle. From the Manchioneal Harbour, we took a small coastal steamer to Rio Bueno Harbour in Trelawny. There we were met by Mr. Veira's coachman, who drove a buggy. He drove us the rest of the way to the school.”
Knibb-Sibley identified Miss Ramsden as her favourite teacher at Westwood. Miss Agnes Ramsden was the English woman, who in 1918 married Rev Sidney Helwig, pastor of the Second (now Calvary) Baptist Church, Montego Bay. She would later participate in the meeting in Bethel Town where the Jamaica Baptist Women's Federation was formed in 1922.
Inez was a lover of history and she was a prolific writer on things Jamaican. Her books include Baptists of Jamaica, 1793 to 1965. (Kingston, Jamaica: Jamaica Baptist Union, 1965), and Dictionary of Place-names in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1978). Knibb Sibley also wrote Quashie's Reflections (Kingston, Jamaica: Bolivar Press, 1968). This work was written in Jamaican Creole. In addition, she had numerous columns published in the Gleaner, Jamaica’s most popular daily newspaper. Her articles mainly focused on subjects related to Jamaica’s history. She offered an historical account of Bequests to Education in Jamaica, the Keswick Convention in Jamaica, folk songs of Jamaica and, in 1955, she told the story of the lives and contributions of wives of governors of Jamaica in Women in the History of Jamaica 300.She also provided a history of church-sponsored schools in Jamaica. In 1978, the Institute of Jamaica awarded Knibb Sibley the prestigious Musgrave Medals for literature.
In old age, Sibley and her sister went to live in Mandeville and were active in the Mandeville Baptist Church where Inez Sibley helped establish a branch of the Jamaica Baptist Women’s Federation. She was finishing the book "Memories of Life in Jamaica" when she died in Mandeville on June 23, 1986.
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