The oldest person you met

[Various Artist]

The last union widow died in 2003, the last confederate widow in 2008. It's really not that long ago.

I read about those a while back, it's a bonkers demonstration of how it's possible to leap so far back into history in the span of two long lifetimes with just enough overlap to marry – i.e. those last 'Civil War widows' were very old ladies who had, when they were teenagers in the 1920s or 1930s, married veterans then in their 80s who fought in the war as young men in the 1860s. Last I heard there was still one surviving human (the last-known offspring of one of these unions) receiving a pension as son of a Civil War soldier.

All my great-grandparents were born in the 19th century; I overlapped with four of them – born between 1887 and December 1899 – for half a dozen years or more when I was little and they were in or near their 90s. Two were married for 70 years, having had their wedding in the first winter of the Great War, while the other two were classic examples of old ladies who'd outlived their husbands by decades: e.g. my great-gran died when I was 6, whereas the respective great-grandad had died when my dad was 3. I remember all four but was too young to 'know' them per se except for the last, my mother's mother's mother, who lived until I was 12 and is the only person born in the 1800s I can recall actual conversations with.

[Southport Zeb]

About a decade ago I was a volunteer for a scheme that involved visiting elderly people who lived alone. One of the people I visited was a woman who was in her late 90s, so would have been born about 1910. When she found out I was a football fan she told me about her granddad, Jack Southworth, who played for Blackburn, Everton and England (and the Halle orchestra). He was twice top scorer in the First Division (1891 and 1894) and still holds Everton's club record for most goals in one game (six).

[NickSTFU]

..... he looks old, craggy and miserable.

Well, a stint in the front line will do that to you.

That looks like a Grenadier Guards cap badge. Was he a guardsman?

[NickSTFU]

I was born in 1968 and I can clearly remember my maternal great-grandparents. They lived in a cottage that today would be a fine example of one of those 'living history' events we seem so fond of. I particularly remember the hams hanging from the kitchen rafter and great-granddad skinning a rabbit and leaving it to hang. There was no electricity, no phone and every thing was coal and wood and a clothes mangle in the corner of the kitchen. Because we were family we weren't important enough to sit in the parlour. They lived in the kitchen, because it was the warmest room in the cottage.

My paternal great-grandmother was cared for by my grandmother. I remember her sitting in a rocking chair and not saying very much, just smiling and nodding and farting. I have the rocking chair upstairs in my bedroom. I'm told it was a wedding present from when she was married in the 19th century. It's now a dumping ground for 21st century clothes and sundry accessories. It really does deserve more respect than that.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

My paternal Granny was born in 1899 and made it to 2002. Last time I saw her was her 100th birthday. She gained a little bit of local celebrity as the local Gazette ran a piece on her, revealing that she organised a pie & pea supper to buy then schoolboy Wilf Mannion his first football kit. Wilf read it and promptly turned up at the nursing home with a huge bunch of flowers.

That's fantastic.

[WOM]

... just smiling and nodding and farting. I have the rocking chair upstairs in my bedroom.

And they say that on a quiet night, if you listen closely enough, you can hear...

[Paul S]

My great grandmother who died at the age of 95 in 1994. I Knew her well but never thought to ask her about her childhood or what is what like during WW1 with all the men away. The things you wished you'd ask.

[Amor de Cosmos]

My favourite family photo. I'm guessing it was made around 1909–10 during a clan holiday on the Isle of Man. I'm basing that on my Grandmother, who's the young woman in the second row sitting next to the... erm... portly gentleman with the watch-chain. She was born in 1896 and I figure she'd be about fourteen-ish here. My great-Grandfather is at the back. The woman next to him is (probably) my great-Grandmother. I don't know who anyone else is, though it's possible the woman with her arm on my Grandmother's half-sister (she was by far the youngest of ten children.) I do hope the cad in the front row, arm-in-arm with two pretty ladies, is a relative but I can't swear to it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

My great grandmother who died at the age of 95 in 1994. I Knew her well but never thought to ask her about her childhood or what is what like during WW1 with all the men away. The things you wished you'd ask.

So true. On the upstairs landing in my Grandparents' house there was a portrait drawing of a young man in military uniform. I remember asking my Grandmother (see photo above) who he was, she replied "He was a very good friend." Nothing more. She would have been twenty-years-old in August 1914. I drew my own conclusions.

[Eggchaser]

In my professional life, I've met plenty of old, old people. I think 99 was the oldest.

In my personal life, probably my gran, now into her 90s and sadly completely away with the fairies.

[Gerontophile]

You'd think I would be able to do better than Amor, but nowhere near it. I 'knew' a guy who was born in 1894... so 96 at his oldest. My mum's mum was old when she gave birth, but I only met her once before she melted...87, I think. (By all accounts, she was not a nice person. Her husband was the grand dragon of those mad bunch of Northern Irish nutters of a non-catholic persuasion... or so the 'excuse' went, for my mum and dad constantly fighting about religion.)

I have drank* wine that is older than 96.

*tense?

[Gerontophile]

And, excellent thread topic.

[MsD]

Well, this is kinda your specialist subject.

[Artificial Hipster]

My maternal grandfather, born 1894 is the kid immediately to the left of his father (in the doorway) as we look in this picture. He died at 92 so I knew him well. Of course it never crossed my mind to ask him about his own father who was born in a Lambeth workhouse in 1858 and died in this pub in Hulme which he ran for a few years after discharging himself from the army. His first wife died from dysentery in India, my granddad was his first child to his second wife who we assume is the wee Irish lass in the photo.

http://tinypic.com/r/10h6248/9

[Gerontophile]

Cracking picture, AH.

Yes, MsD, you'd think. But no. I tend to only deal with 'in the moment', so I should probably be punished for letting a good chance go awry.

I listen, but stories are not the topic in hand (said a massive squirrel).

[jdsx]

she told me about her granddad, Jack Southworth, who played for Blackburn, Everton and England (and the Halle orchestra).

That's fabulous SZ. In the classical music field, it's quite common to find a player who claims that their teacher was taught by X, who in turn was taught by Y, right back to Beethoven, or whoever. Along (nearly) similar lines,I was a member of an orchestra which played Strauss's Don Quixote with Paul Tortelier playing the solo cello, who had played it under Strauss himself in the late 1930s. And also was in the orchestra playing Elgar's Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin conducting... Menuhin famously played the solo part with Elgar conducting in about 1930....

[laverte]

My great-grandmother, for whom I am sort of named, was probably alive in the 1880s, because the eldest of her 11 children were born around 1904-05. (She herself was the 20th of 21. When I am asked whether I feel sad about being the last of the family line, I like to drop these numbers.) She was pretty much an invalid for all the years I knew her; I remember thinking it amusing that her bed was downstairs, in the living room of a two-storey house.

It was to tend to my great-grandmother during her final, horrific illness that my mother left our home in France for London; she never came back. When Nana died, shortly afterwards, I found myself transported across the Channel, moving into what I had always thought of as her house. This was in 1982; I was eight. Pretty much all I remember of Nana are the things that were still in the house when I lived there – heavily stained tea cups, a knackered green sofa with the sponge bleeding out of the cushions, a knitted bedcover that seemed to me neither soft nor warm enough to sleep under.

For a while, my mother maintained the master bedroom as a kind of shrine to her grandparents; I wasn't officially allowed in there. I doubt it had been redecorated since Nana's husband had died, which I think was not long after world war two, and so it felt totally spooky to me, with its thick wooden furniture just about standing upright and all manner of drapery covering the bed and windows. It was inside a cupboard in this forbidden room that I hid and threatened to cut all my hair off when I could not face going to school any more. I can feel the sleeve of Nana's old mauve dressing gown bristling against my face and the snap-snap of the scissors and my rage growing. (In the end I was lured out, hair intact, by my mother's theatrical weeping.)

A deal was done, I was packed off to boarding school, and now each of the Emma's Rooms in the house was ghostly quiet. Then my mother realised she was not going back to her husband and moved out of the guest room in which she had pointedly stayed during all that time. Nana's wardrobes and curtains went to the tip, and the master bedroom was redecorated with my mother's candles, rosaries, embroidered passages from the gospels and angels cavorting chastely on the dressing table.

Alas, Nana could not be exorcised so easily. This was the heyday of Thatcherism, and representatives of some of the Other Ten, my great aunts and uncles and their breeds, came knocking with a plan to cash in their inheritance. Mother was evicted and re-housed, unhappily. Soon she would be the one locking herself in, weeping (ever theatrically), praying for the last of the family line to come to tend to her.

I, meanwhile, live in a ground-floor flat because I can no longer climb stairs. How amusing is that!

[WOM]

Keep writing!

[Snake Plissken]

Sort of on this, at the Metallica gig last night, at the end of our row, was a white haired woman who was definitely no younger than 80. She clearly couldn't stand for long, so spent the entire gig singing the words and giving it some welly with her arms, practically air drumming at times.

It was one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen at a concert.

[seand]

Great thread this. My wife's two grandmothers are still alive at 92 and 97. The older one enjoyed her seventieth wedding anniversary a few years ago.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

A de C, there are some strong moustaches in that photo. V strong indeed.

[Various Artist]

The spivvy cad in the front row is absolutely fantastic. Expression like the cat who got the cream, and the rest of the milk too.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The spivvy cad in the front row is absolutely fantastic. Expression like the cat who got the cream, and the rest of the milk too.

Yeah. I wish knew who he was. He looks like a character out of Jerome K. Jerome, or maybe early Wodehouse.

A de C, there are some strong moustaches in that photo. V strong indeed.

Indeed. The Edwardians knew how cultivate a proper 'tache without a doubt.

[WOM]

Indeed. Just look at the socks and shoes. He's never spent a lonely night in in his life. Not like the two constipated Young Tories on the right.

[Lang Spoon]

It’s Lupin, from Diary of a Nobody, all grown up and grown bad.