'Everything in moderation - even brandy': Betty celebrates 104th birthday with fish, chips and champagne
An incredible woman is turning 104
From running through the streets of Southampton to get her wedding dress safely into an air raid shelter before the big day, to joining St John’s Ambulance during the war - Betty Cowley has certainly got a tale or two under her belt.
And now this remarkable Southsea lady is getting ready to celebrate her 104th birthday with fish and chips, and a bottle (or two) of champagne.
Speaking about her birthday, Betty said: “It’s just a figure. I’m not having 104 candles - I haven’t got enough puff. I’m just me. I’ve done as I want to. I think I’ve had a wonderful life, I really have.”
She said the secret to her long and happy life is that she has lived by her motto: “Everything in moderation - even brandy.”
Betty, who was born in Eastleigh on May 14, 1922, was taken in by her grandmother, who ran The New Inn pub, in West End, at the age of two after her mother died. By the time she reached the age of 15, she had finished school and got her first job at Southampton Airport before joining St John’s Ambulance during the war.
She met her husband, Ken, who was stationed in Portsmouth with the Royal Navy, at a local dance hall where she “already had her eye on him”, before he asked her to dance. The pair married in 1944 in Southampton before moving to Liss Road, Portsmouth, where she gave birth to her eldest daughter, Pamela, at a naval nursing home in Droxford in 1946.
She said: “After I was married, I was fed up with Ken coming into Portsmouth and having to come home to Southampton so I came down one day and found two rooms. I’d get up in the mornings, clean our rooms and then go out for a walk along the beach. I had to go through Mrs Morgan’s (their landlady) living room to get to the kitchen to cook our meals - it was no holiday, it was awful really when I look back but we were alright in the end.”
She recalled how she would take daily strolls along the beach and Canoe Lake while Pamela was in the pram.
Pamela, now 80 years old, said her parents moved around quite a bit and, at one stage, briefly living in an old Nissen hut with Betty’s brother and sister-in-law.
Betty said: “We squatted in an old RAF hut. We lived rent free, electricity free, water free and then the council took over. It was all there because the RAF used to use it, they moved out and we moved in. It was a wooden building.”
Once Ken left the Royal Navy, they moved into a council house before moving to London where she took up cooking classes and learnt how to make spaghetti from scratch, which was unheard of at the time.
Ken and Betty were married for 67 years before he died in 2011. Pamela said they were devoted to each other throughout the decades.
She said: “She would run to the air raid shelters with her wedding dress to keep it safe and the days she was working, her grandmother would take it with her. It’s incredible.
“She’s been a very good mother, she was very talented and was an artist. She did tapestry and was a very good cook, and she would do amazing dinner parties. Despite being strapped for cash she ensured we never wanted for anything.
“We moved in 2013 to be near our children and we discovered some houses were being built in Milton Road so we moved there and got mum a flat pretty much next door. When we told her we wanted to move she said ‘I’ve lived in Portsmouth and now I’ll die in Portsmouth.’ She’s living independently but has carers come in four times a day.”
Pamela said it feels “surreal” celebrating her mum’s 104th birthday.
“I’m an old lady but I don’t feel it because I have still got my mum. My friends have all said it’s amazing. We’re very close because we’ve lived near each other for years so I see her every other day”, she explained.