PS: MEET THE LEAP YEAR CENTENARIAN WHO’S ONLY ENJOYED 25 BIRTHDAYS
BEING old is so last century when you’re about to celebrate your 112th birthday. Although he was born on March 29, 1908, was six when the Great War started and is now the world’s oldest man, Bob Weighton looks at least three decades younger.
Despite living in Hampshire, Bob is a proud Yorkshireman from Hull, still boasts a full head of hair and has a distinguished air about him.
And he remains distinctly unimpressed at being the world’s most ancient person since the former title holder died in Japan last week.
Because he’s more than that – climate change warrior, Japanese speaker, political animal and artisan craftsman – and the erudite centenarian is committed to saving the planet. “It’s good to see young people taking an interest. All power to Greta Thunberg,” he says.
Having been retired for 47 years, Bob is an avid reader.
The bookshelves on the walls of his cosily cluttered flat are lined with heavyweight tomes on politics and history.
“I retired at 65. It was far too early. I can’t think why people want to retire at 65 or think that 67 is an imposition.”
He still lives independently, cooking for himself in a sheltered housing complex in Alton.
The secret to Bob’s longevity is his zest for life, but he still misses his wife of 50 years, Agnes, who died from heart failure in 1995.
Bob’s normally gruff exterior crumbles only for a moment when he remembers Agnes. He swallows hard and says: “Agnes was a marvellous woman. It’s been 20 years or more, but I still miss her.”
THE couple, who met in 1933, had three children. Bob now has 10 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren. He has to pause to count them all in his head, and is also a little unsure of how long ago his son, Peter, passed away.
“I think it was four or five years ago Peter died. “My eldest child is David…” he pauses, before adding: “It seems funny referring to him like that when he’s over 80.”
Fit as a fiddle, despite having had two serious operations, including one for suspected stomach cancer, Bob says: “On the whole, despite the conditions I’ve been through, I’ve been fairly fit.When I left the Far East before the Second
World War, I was down to about 12 stone, which is very thin when you’re 6ft tall.”
One of Bob’s greatgranddaughters gave him the yellow number plate “Bob III” for his walking frame, but when Bob was a young boy there were no cars on the streets of Hull – only horses and carts.
“My father Arthur was a veterinary surgeon and looked after all the horses in the city, and my mother Eliza Pitts was a housewife.
“Sadly she only lived
Auntil she
GREAT-grandmother has just celebrated her 25th birthday – despite being born in 1920.
Hilary Don-Fox turns 100 today but, as a Leap Year baby, only gets to see her actual birth date once every four years.
Hilary, a resident at Bupa’s Mellowes care home in Gillingham, Dorset, has lived through four monarchs and 18 prime ministers since she was born on February 29, 1920.
She thanks strong family ties for her long life and has some solid advice for younger was 55, when she died from breast cancer. She wouldn’t have needed to die nowadays.” The women’s generations – encouraging them “not to let anything stand in their way”.
Hilary said: “While some people worry about getting older, for me it’s a privilege as I’ve always been surrounded by family and friends. “People often ask me about my secret for a long life, and I tell them it’s that family come first. “Get that right and you’ll have enough support to weather anything life throws at you.” suffrage movement had started around that time, but Bob’s mother had her hands full with seven children. “We had no electricity, and Granny was the matriarch of our family having lived most of her life in the reign of Victoria.
“I was six when the First World War started, and I remember soldiers marching through the streets and the Zeppelin air raids. We were bombed in Hull as well as London.
“Of course the balloons didn’t have the carrying capacity of a bomber plane, it was just a chap leaning out of the window and dropping a bomb. But they set things on fire and during the first raids I remember hiding under the stairs in the hallway. Neighbours and relatives lost many boys in the war and when I reached my teens when the war ended – we became the Never Again generation.
“Then the Wall Street crash in 1929 caused the Great Depression, and the whole of Britain gradually ground to a standstill.”
Following in the footsteps of his engineer uncle, Bob spent three years in the shipbuilding industry on Tyneside hoping that would be his career.
“When I came out of my apprenticeship there were absolutely no jobs and the Jarrow March happened about that time. I wanted to do something for world peace, which looked as if it were about to be shattered after the Russian revolution in 1918, and Hitler on the rise in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. So I volunteered to go abroad to teach.”
Bob joined a missionary project in 1933 and went to teach English in a Taiwan boys school. Before he left, he attended a course in Birmingham to learn about his host country, and met Agnes.
AFTER courting for just four months, Cornish girl Agnes left for a dangerous position teaching in Ghana, after her predecessor died of disease. “That area of West Africa was then known as the White Man’s Grave because we had no protection from the diseases,” says Bob.
“Fortunately Agnes survived and she went back to England and met my father for the first time, who was feeling a bit low after my mother had died. So Agnes had the idea to bring him out to see us get married in Hong Kong.”
They married four years later having not seen each other since they first met, with just occasional letters to keep their love alive.
The couple moved to Canada and then America to wait out the war, and he worked as an engineer and translator before moving back to the UK in 1946.