Welsh woman marks 110th birthday with viral TikTok fame
She is the oldest person in Wales and now she may be the oldest person on TikTok. Amy Hawkins has become a star of the social networking site after her great-grandson posted a video of her singing on her 110th birthday.
The former dancer made her debut on the site earlier this week singing the music hall song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and her family have posted several videos since, including one in which she performs a dance with her 14-year-old great-grandson Sacha Freeman.
Hawkins said on Friday the experience had “brought us all together” as views of the videos continued to rise. “I suppose it’s nice,” she said of her newfound fame, adding she was struggling with her hearing despite being “only 110”.
Four generations of her family live together in their home in Monmouthshire, in south Wales, and Hawkins’s daughter, Rosemary Morris, said she was glad they could be close by during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Morris said: “I can’t imagine how awful it must be for old people on their own without anybody to come to or hug. It just doesn’t bear thinking about, to be honest.”
She said the family had always had a close relationship. “And I think that’s really why Sacha did it because he knows a lot of his friends in school aren’t seeing their grandparents. He doesn’t even see them any more because there’s nobody in school.”
Sacha worked behind the scenes of his great-grandmother’s fame and also appears in one video.
Morris said: “He decided it would be a good idea to put grandma on the TikTok to share her with everybody else, basically. She was a dancer back when she was 14, which was an awful long time ago. She does not quite understand what TikTok is but she does the internet. But I suppose it is a lot to cognise at 110.
“She is aware of [the success] and she understands to a certain extent. She takes it in her stride really. She is not terribly fazed. She has always been very quiet and shy and retiring. She is not flamboyant in any way, shape or form.”
Hawkins turned 110 on Sunday and celebrated surrounded by her family. She was born Amy Evans in Cardiff on 24 January 1911, but spent most of her childhood in nearby Newport. She had five brothers and a sister, Lillian, who is 101.
In her youth, she was a dancer and toured with a dance troupe. In 1937, she married George Hawkins, a sign-writer, and they lived in Newport. During the second world war, Amy Hawkins served as a fire-watcher for her local neighbourhood, meaning she was responsible for keeping an eye out for fires lit by Axis bombs.
In an interview with the South Wales Argus to mark her 110th birthday, Hawkins was asked if it was more than just coincidence that she and her sister had lived past 100. She joked that it was because they “never go to the doctors”.