Coral Hankey never thought of herself as brave until the day her shop was robbed.

In the Eighties, she ran a second-hand store called Encore on Rural Hill in Paget.

“Two boys came in on pedal bikes,” the 85-year-old said. “They must have been 13 or 14.

“They must have somehow cased the place before hand because they knew that we kept our cash in a Tupperware box in the drawer. This kid came over and said that his mom had got something on hold.“

When she went to open the cash box, he reached over the counter, put his hand in and grabbed the cash that was in there. The pair fled on their bikes.

She was a sporty person and competed regularly in the annual Bermuda Badminton Association championships. Now she put all her athleticism to work, chasing down the thieves.

“I caught up to one of them and grabbed his back pocket,” she said.

All she succeeded in doing was making his bike wobble. The thieves still managed to ride away.

“Money started coming out of his pocket,” she said. “It wasn’t much money because we had never earned that much in the store to begin with.”

She tried to flag down traffic to get someone on wheels to chase the boys but nobody stopped.

Later, she was asked to identify one of the boys from a police line-up. He was so young, he had to have his mother present.

“They never caught the other boy,” she said. “I don’t think either of them was ever charged.”

She started her shop in 1978 with two friends Judith Stewart and Kamla Wakefield.

“Kamla didn’t stay with the store long,” Mrs Hankey said. “It had been Judith’s idea but she left after five years when she and her husband moved overseas.”

Running the store was a lot to manage on her own, so she closed it in 1986.

She inherited the entrepreneurial spirit from her father, Tom Sayers.

“He was very creative,” Mrs Hankey said. “He would find bikes at the dump, repurpose them and rent them out to tourists. Then he started sewing men’s jackets, without any experience.

“Later, he ran a cedar-working business on Front Street called Tom Sayers Handicrafts, making cedar souvenirs. He was also the manager of the air conditioning department of General Electric. He did it all without any college education.”

Mr Sayers came to Bermuda with the British Navy in 1930 and worked in submarines. His wife, Ann, followed a year later with their son, Roger, who was a baby.

Mrs Hankey was born in Bermuda, 21 days after the start of the Second World War.

She and her younger sister, Sylvia Selby, spent their early years in the spar yard in the Royal Naval Dockyard in Sandys, where their father was a caretaker.

They lived in many places in Bermuda but one of the most idyllic was a property called Seaforth in Elys Harbour, Sandys.

“I could not have had a better Bermuda to grow up in,” she said. “I don’t know how my father was able to rent Seaforth but there was acres and acres of land, cows, and a beach.”

She went to Warwick Academy but transferred to BHS when she won a Bermuda Government Scholarship.

“BHS was the only school that had a finishing exam,” she said. “Warwick Academy brought them in the same year I moved out.”

Mrs Hankey was heartbroken to have to leave Warwick Academy.

“I didn’t want to leave a mixed school to go to an all girls school,” she said. Her new classmates did not make the transition any easier, teasing her about things like the type of socks she was wearing. Her response was to focus on her academics.

“I was not miserably unhappy there, in fact I rather enjoyed the challenge of proving myself worthy,” she said.

She loved water ballet and took a class at the Eagles Nest Hotel in Pembroke with around 20 other girls. She was also good at sports and was supposed to compete in long jump in the Commonwealth Games.

“However, I was in the boy stage and I could not stick to the training,” she said. “So I gave that up.”

Mrs Hankey achieved strong Cambridge examination results at BHS, which put her in the running for college.

“At the end of our schooling, we all had to go up for an interview with Marjorie Hallett, the headmistress,” she said. “She was a very prim and proper lady.”

Dr Hallett was displeased when Mrs Hankey told her she was not going to college because her father could not afford it, especially because he was also paying for Mrs Hankey’s younger sister, Sylvia, to go to BHS.

The summer after graduating from BHS, Mrs Hankey found a job working at the Bermuda News Bureau under manager Colin Selley. The organisation was a division of the Trade Development Board, precursor to the Tourism Department. They organised events such as beauty pageants for tourists and would create articles and other media materials to promote Bermuda.

“This was the Fifties,” Mrs Hankey said. “At 17, I was put in charge of the photo files, which took up a whole wall with these great big file cabinets. It was quite a responsible job for somebody that young.”

When the summer ended, she became Mr Selley’s secretary.

“I helped with interviews and that sort of thing,” she said. “It was very enjoyable being at the News Bureau.”

She remembered going out in the dead of night to see yachts coming into Bermuda as part of various races.

Once, she was sent to the beach to interview beauty pageant contestants.

“The social society editor said, Coral just look for their rings,” she said. “The ones with the biggest rings would be likely candidates for the front pages of the society columns of the newspapers overseas.”

The woman with the biggest rock on her finger won the beauty contest, because it brought Bermuda the most attention.

One of Mrs Hankey’s tasks was to touch up photographs.

“I was quite good at it,” she said. “All I used was a fine brush and India ink. A few luminaries wanted the wrinkles taken off their faces.”

Today, she loves making collages with her iPad.

“I am working on a Christmas one, right now,” she said.

Mrs Hanky married teacher Maurice Hankey in 1960 and they had two children: Steven Hankey and Janice Bucci.

“We loved to cruise and did 39 trips together,” Mrs Hankey said. “I would like to do that 40th trip before I go.”

Mr Hankey died in 2021 after 61 years of marriage.

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