Death cuts 110-year-old ‘link to times long past’
New Zealand’s oldest woman Joan Edith Brennan has died ‘‘peacefully’’ at the grand old age of 110.
Joan Brennan’s son, Barry Brennan, said his mother died on Saturday morning after living ‘‘a very long life’’. ‘‘As well as mourning a loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, as a family, we have lost a link to times long past,’’ Barry Brennan said.
Joan Brennan lived independently until the age of 107 but she went into care following a bad fall in 2019. ‘‘At the age of nearly 109 she successfully underwent a hip replacement operation and learnt to walk again – a testament to her strength and endurance,’’ her son said. Joan Brennan was born on March 10, 1912.
Her mother, Edith Mary Lewis, also lived a very long life, born in 1881 and dying in 1976 at the age of 95.
Lewis was left a war widow after Joan Brennan’s father, Sergeant Henry William Lewis, died of his wounds on the Somme, on May 4, 1917, aged 39.
‘‘Joan would often tell her family how she remembered her father coming home to London on his last leave at Christmas 1916,’’ Barry Brennan said. ‘‘She had a vivid memory of him taking her and her elder sister to the pantomime. She was nearly 5 years old and never saw him again.’’ Facing ‘‘considerable hardship’’ as a war widow, Lewis emigrated first to Australia and then New Zealand around 1922 with her two young daughters.
In New Zealand, Joan Brennan trained as a Karitane nurse and loved caring for children.
‘‘She met her husband, Thomas George Brennan, a ship radio operator, on a voyage back to Britain in 1934,’’ Barry Brennan said.
The couple married three years later and settled in New Zealand.
‘‘They served their new country in World War II when Tom, being in a reserved occupation as a telegraphist, worked ‘at watch’ on the lighthouse on Portland Island, Hawke’s Bay,’’ Brennan said.
‘‘These were very happy times – we did a lot of fishing together,’’ Joan told Stuff in 2017.
After the war they moved to Auckland and settled in Campbells Bay where they lived in the same house for 36 years until they moved to Selwyn Village in 1990.
Thomas Brennan died in 1998, age 89. ‘‘Joan led a very long and full life, and believed in keeping healthy and eating organic food,’’ Brennan wrote. She died peacefully after suffering from a chest infection, he said.