LONDON, Aug 30: Florence Reeves, who at 111 was among the oldest people in Britain, has died, her local member of parliament David Amess said on Tuesday.
News of her passing came just a few hours after the announcement in the Netherlands of the death of Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, 115, recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘oldest person’.
A Guinness World Records spokesman said Britain’s oldest person is Lucy Victoria d’Abreu, born in 1892 in what was then British-rule India.
Reeves was born on February 17, 1894, and until last May lived alone in a bungalow in Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend-on-Sea, east of London.
“She was very active until a few months ago,” said Amess, from the opposition Conservative Party, who remembered her as a ‘keen supporter’ of the suffragette movement in the early 1900s to extend the right to vote to women.—AFP
