Hilda Bynoe

Who was Hilda Bynoe?

Dame Hilda Louisa Bynoe, DBE was governor of Grenada between 1967 and 1972.

A doctor and Hospital Administrator, Bynoe was, so far, the only woman to have been governor of one of the British Dependencies, Hilda Bynoe was the first woman Governor of a Commonwealth of Nations country, becoming Governor of Grenada, Cariacou and Petit Martinique. She spent most of her adult life as a teacher and doctor of medicine in Trinidad and Tobago.

Born in Crochu, Grenada, West Indies, Bynoe was educated at the village school, where her father, Thomas Joseph Gibbs, was headmaster and where her mother, sister and aunts had at one time or the other been teachers, and at St. Joseph's Convent, the island's only Roman Catholic Secondary School for girls. The first few years of adulthood were spent as a teacher at the Convent of St. Joseph in San Fernando, Trinidad, and later at Bishop Anstey High School in Port of Spain, Trinidad, as a science student. In 1944 she left for Europe to study Medicine and graduated from the University of London's Royal Free Hospital, then the London School of Medicine for Women, in 1951.