Britain’s oldest person, Gladys Hooper, has died at the age of 113.
Her son, Derek Hermiston, confirmed that his mother, a former concert pianist, had died at the nursing home where she lived in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
Hermiston, 85, said: “She passed away, she just faded, 113-and-a-half is a good old age.
“We saw her this morning [Saturday], she seemed reasonably well, she was sleeping. We had left her for just about an hour when they called us to tell us she had passed away.”
When she celebrated her last birthday, the great-grandmother said: “I don’t feel very different to when I was 75.”
Hooper broke a Guinness World Record last year when she became the oldest person to undergo a hip replacement operation, which was carried out by consultant orthopaedic surgeon Jason Millington at St Mary’s hospital in Newport.
Following the operation, she moved into the Highfield nursing home in Ryde from a flat connected to the home of Hermiston, 85, where she had lived for 12 years.
Hooper was widowed in 1988 when her husband, Leslie, who was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps in the two world wars, died. She had another great link to aviation as she was good friends at college with Amy Johnson.
Born Gladys Nash on 18 January 1903, she was brought up in Rottingdean, Brighton, East Sussex, and went on to study at college. She became a concert pianist in London and played with famous bandleaders of the time such as Jack Payne, Debroy Somers and Maurice Winnick.
She also started what is thought to be the first car hire company in the capital and later ran Kingscliff House school, now Brighton College.
According to the website Oldest In Britain, the next oldest person in the country is Bessie Camm, who is 112 years old and is from Rotherham. The Gerontology Research Group had listed Hooper as the 12th oldest person in the world.