Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
What’s the secret of living to 105? Here is a clue (5, 3, 6, 9)
Answer: Doing the Mirror crossword A Liberal PM, suffragettes & Villa lifting FA cup...
supporter his whole life and it’s a Labour newspaper. Dad still pays his Labour membership to this day.
“His eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I think the crossword keeps his mind sharp. On his 100th birthday, my daughter managed to get a copy of the Daily Mirror printed on the day he was born – it was such an amazing present.
“We had it photocopied because it was so delicate and I think he may even have tried to do the crossword in that as well.” The front page reported the death of
flight pioneer Samuel Franklin Cody who was killed test-flying his latest design, the Cody Floatplane, which broke up at 200ft and also killed cricketer William Evans.
Arthur was the youngest of nine children, with three sisters and five brothers.
He grew up close to Tottenham Hotspur’s football stadium in North London. He still supports them today.
He moved to Caversham, Reading, for work when he was 24, just before the start of the Second World War, and that is where he met his wife Jessie.
The pair worked for different firms in IN 1913, Herbert Henry Asquith was Prime Minister – and would be the last sitting PM from the Liberal Party.
George V was King and HMS Queen Elizabeth launched at Portsmouth Dockyard as the Royal Navy’s first oil-fired battleship.
The Commons rejected women’s right to vote and suffragette Emily Davison died when the same street and met while cycling in one day. They married a year later in 1940 and spent their honeymoon cycling around Devon and Cornwall – a hobby they shared for six decades.
Soon after they wed, Arthur volunteered for the Army and was stationed in Southampton as an anti-aircraft gunner.
His job was to load large ammunition shells into the guns, which would be used to bring down German bombers attacking oil refineries and ships.
After his unit was hit by a German bomb he was transferred to an army base she ran in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. DH Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and Michael Foot – Labour leader between 1980 and 1983 – was born.
Aston Villa lifted the FA Cup, beating league winners Sunderland, while New Zealander Anthony Wilding won the Men’s Singles at Wimbledon. And a man’s average life expectancy was just 51. in Iceland, where he worked in telecoms. After the war he returned to Reading, where he and Jessie started jobs as clerks for the Royal Corps of Signals, organising military records for over three decades until they retired in the late 1980s.
The pair were both Labour members and voted for them in every election. Two daughters, Wendy and Christine, had six children between them. As well as the six grandchildren Arthur now has nine great-grandchildren and two great-greatgrandchildren, Leo, six, and Lucas, three. Jessie died in 2000, in her mid 80s. Arthur turned 105 on Wednesday and celebrated at the Maples Wellbeing Day Care Centre, in Caversham, with his entire family around him.
Daughter Wendy added: “I don’t know how dad has kept on going. I think it has something to do with the fact he has always been a very active man.
“He won’t ever eat junk food, plus he managed to carry on riding his bike until he was 100, well just about.
“It must have been all the crosswords, around 25,000, that kept his mind fresh.”