Sharon Lippell was born, in Derriford, in 1951, and was the first daughter born to Terri and Billy Lippell. William Lippell was a self-made man who went to a local Ragged School which he left having received a very basic formal education. He later went on to teach himself a great deal more through his own reading and resources. Having already lost his father when he was four, his grandmother also died while he was still a young man and although they had never been particularly wealthy his grandmother left her him a legacy of 400 gold sovereigns, which the enterprising William used to help set himself up in business – as a builder, developer and estate agent.
In 1959 he and his own young family moved into Heathfield Farm on the northern fringes of Plymouth and Sharon Way was soon afterwards laid out and named in honour of his daughter, just as other Lippell developments, would commemorate other children – Princess Avenue at Plymstock his second daughter Sheila and Simon Close his son. Lippell Drive, of course, is a more general family reference.
Interestingly enough the relatively modern use of the Christian name Sharon comes via the name of a flowering shrub – rose of Sharon, coined in the late-nineteenth, early twentieth century – from a biblical place-name in western Israel; “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (Song of Solomon, 2.1).
