Ethel Caterham

The world's oldest woman serves as a living rebuke to the absurdity of ageism, writes Barbara Ellen

- Barbara Ellen

On 21 August, Ethel Caterham celebrates her 116th birthday. The British supercentenarian became the world's oldest person when Brazilian nun Sister Inah Canabarro Lucas died aged 116 in April.

By anyone's measure, 116 is a lot of candles on the cake. Caterham was a toddler when the Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1912. She lived through the world wars and she was in her mid-40s for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. She was a month shy of 60 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. She saw the swinging 60s, all the waves of feminism, and every British prime minister since Herbert Asquith.

Born in Hampshire and raised in Wiltshire, Caterham was the seventh of eight children. At 18, she became an au pair to a military family in India. Returning to the UK, she married Norman Caterham in Salisbury Cathedral, where Norman had been a choirboy. Stationed as an army wife in Hong Kong and Gibraltar, she set up a nursery in Hong Kong. She was 97 before she gave up driving. In 2020, at the age of 110, the Guinness Book of Records documented her as one of the oldest people to contract and survive Covid.

Now a great-grandmother living in a Surrey care home, Caterham seems to have no truck with the recurring interest in her advanced age, laughing away the "fuss". Speaking to BBC Radio Surrey in 2020, she credited her longevity to taking everything in her stride, "the highs and the lows", never arguing with anyone ("I listen and do what I like"), and maintaining a positive attitude: "Say 'Yes' to every opportunity because you never know where it might lead."