Neighbors Celebrate 101st Birthday On the Same Day–Living Next Door to Each Other For 4 Decades
Two longtime English neighbors are celebrating their joint 101st birthday, born on the same day in 1924.
Josie Church and Anne Wallace-Hadrill have lived side-by-side in Oxford since the 1980s, and the great-grans have celebrated their birthdays together for years.
“I think life has gone quite quickly,” said Josie. “I don’t think we’ve thought much about the time passing. It’s just passed.”
Both women threw themselves into volunteering and creative activities after their husbands died—and the women have been fast friends ever since.
“Anne was very busy when she was younger—so was I—always very productive and creative.
“She did a lot of painting and tapestry, and she was always busy, and I was always busy doing something else, somewhere else, because that’s the sort of life we live.”
Anne, studied English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a radio mechanic during the Second World War. After graduating, she worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary.
“I was always interested in words. It was my trade.”
She was very proud to receive a medal for her service from the Royal Navy last year, described as “long overdue” by the representative who gave it to her.
Josie was trained in nursing for three years at Preston Royal Infirmary and remembers the introduction of the National Health Service.
“In those days,” Josie said, “You had to live (on campus) and you couldn’t get married, and it was very strict. People wouldn’t put up with that sort of life now.”
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Her time in nursing during the Second World War included a “chilling” experience of caring for SS German soldiers she described as “very difficult patients who didn’t wish to be taken care of by us.”
She moved with her husband to Oxford so he could continue his degree after the war.
“Oxford was very strange because each college had a large intake of older people who’d gone through the war and were taking up their university places. So you’d get the old men and then the young 18-year-olds coming in from school.”
They don’t remember the moment they discovered they had the same birthday but they especially enjoyed the celebration of their centennial year arranged for 2024.
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“You do what seems to be needing doing, and then you do that—and then something else takes its place. You just go on from one thing to another.
“We don’t engineer our lives. I think they’ve just engineered us.”
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