St Catherine’s resident Winifred McKittrick has celebrated her 103rd birthday with a trip out in a chauffeur-driven car around the North East.
Winifred, known to everyone in our Newcastle care home as Mrs Mc, was whisked away at the weekend by her daughter, Pat Graham, for a tour of the local scenery. The birthday date itself, 30th October, was celebrated at St Catherine’s with members of her family and a reunion of a dozen Co-op “punch girls” who came to visit their former supervisor, Mrs Mc, on her special day.
The ladies, who worked using a mechanised punch card system and sorted cheques in the offices at the Newgate Street Co-operative store, all agreed that Mrs Mc was a very good boss. “We all had such a happy time. It was like one big happy family and she was like a second mother,” they said of their time working with Mrs Mc in the 1950s at the Newcastle store.
Mrs Mc, who came to the North East from near London when she was four-years-old, brought up three daughters on her own after her husband was killed in World War II.
“She is fiercely independent and nothing beats her,” says her granddaughter, Anne Marie Ingram, who attributes her grandmother’s longevity to her self-sufficiency and can-do attitude.
Anne Marie said: “Before she moved into the care home earlier this year she lived alone in a three bedroom house going up and down the stairs without a stair lift. She’ll say you just have to help yourself – and get on with it!”