08/27/2026
Life, lived well and still going. Happy Birthday 🎂
She Was Born When Edward VII Was King. Today, She Just Celebrated Her 117th Birthday — And Her Secret to Life Might Surprise You.
In a quiet care home garden in Surrey, England — a garden the staff lovingly renamed "Ethel's Garden" in her honor — a woman blew out candles on a cake this week that most of us will never live to see.
Ethel Caterham turned 117 years old.
Let that sink in. She was born in 1909, in the tiny village of Shipton Bellinger, five years before World War I began. The Titanic hadn't sunk yet. Edward VII was still king of England. She is now the last known person alive from that entire decade — the 1900s.
But Ethel's story isn't really about numbers. It's about a life lived quietly, fully, and on her own terms.
At just 18, she boarded a ship alone and sailed to India to work as a nanny for a military family — a remarkable act of independence for a young woman in that era. She later returned home, and in 1931, at a dinner party, she met a man named Norman Caterham. They married two years later at Salisbury Cathedral.
Norman became a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, and their life together took them across the world — Salisbury, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, where Ethel rolled up her sleeves and built a nursery school for local and British children alike.
They raised two daughters, Gem and Anne. And then, as so often happens to those who live the longest, Ethel had to say goodbye to almost everyone she loved. Norman passed in 1976. Both her daughters have since died too. She outlived nearly her entire generation.
And still, she kept going. She drove her own car until she was 97. She played competitive bridge well into her hundreds. In 2020, at 110 years old, she survived COVID-19.
Today, Ethel is a grandmother to three and a great-grandmother to five. Last September, she sat across from King Charles III and told him — with the kind of playful honesty only 116 years can earn you — that "all the girls were in love" with him when he was a young Prince of Wales.
This year alone, at 117, she's had a list of "firsts" most of us would never expect from someone her age: petting a llama for the first time, and holding hands with a King.
So what's her secret? No strange diet. No miracle routine. Just this:
"Never arguing with anyone, I listen, and I do what I like."
That's it. That's the whole philosophy of a woman who has outlived a World War, a global pandemic, her husband, both her children, and nearly everyone she started life with — and still wakes up looking forward to what's next.
Maybe that's the real lesson in Ethel's 117 years. Not the years themselves, but how she carried them: without bitterness, without noise, just quietly doing what she loved and letting go of what she couldn't control.
Happy birthday, Ethel. Here's to whatever firsts next year brings. 🎂👑
