At the time of writing, the UK is home to the world’s oldest person, Ethel Caterham (née Collins). She became the oldest person in the world on 30 April 2025 following the death of Brazil’s Inah Canaberro Lucas at 116 years and 326 days. Ethel subsequently became the UK’s oldest ever inhabitant, and celebrated her 117th birthday on 21 August 2026.
The changes that any supercentenarian, anyone living beyond 110 years, will have seen over the course of their lifetime is simply staggering. While she hasn’t spoken at great length about her life to the media, we can still try to imagine how someone in Ethel’s shoes might have felt.
Born in Hampshire in the south of England in 1909, Ethel was the second youngest of eight children and one of around 1.8Bn people on Earth at the time. She is the last surviving ‘subject’ of Edward VII, who died in 1910, has lived under six UK monarchs and seen 20 US Presidents, from Taft to Trump.
Ethel was five when the First World War broke out in 1914 and may have childhood memories of men (and young boys) leaving her village to fight. In the decade after, she would have noticed the lack of young men in the country due to the devastating toll of that conflict.
When she turned 18, Ethel went to ‘British India’ as an au pair for a military family. Upon her return, she met Norman Caterham, himself a military man, in 1931. They married in 1933 when she was 24. Through the 1930s and 1940s, she travelled with her husband to postings in Gibraltar and Hong Kong, setting up a nursery school in the latter following the births of their two daughters. These were the final days of the British Empire, when it was at its largest and most indefensible. After the Second World War, the sacrifices made by colonies gave fresh impetus to independence movements worldwide. India gained independence in 1947, when Ethel was already 38 years old.
Back in Hampshire raising her now teenage daughters, Ethel had reached the age of 50 - the average life-span a woman born in 1909 could expect, (although this figure is heavily skewed by the high infant mortality rates of the early 1900s). Indeed, UK child mortality (the number of children not surviving until their fifth birthday) had fallen from 117/1000 in 1910 to ‘just’ 28/1000 in 1960.
At this point, Ethel may have first started to feel her age, not least due to the rise of hippie culture. She may even have worried that her own daughters might get a taste for ‘sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.’
There were rising geopolitical concerns too. Having survived the First and Second World Wars, Ethel’s generation may have felt like it was all going to happen again in the 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (when Ethel was 53) plunged the world into some of the iciest parts of the Cold War. There was huge unrest in the US, with the civil rights movement and the assassinations of John F Kennedy (1962) and Martin Luther King (1968). This time also brought profound technological change, not least due to the tensions between the US and the USSR. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite was launched in 1957 when Ethel was in her late 40s. Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon a month before she turned 60.
By 1970, the world was already unrecognisable from the one she was born into. The world had shrunk thanks to the jet engine, television, and the international organisations established to steady the world after the Second World War. The population of the world had doubled to 3.6 billion since Ethel was born. The 1970s also brought personal sorrow for Ethel, with the loss of Norman, aged 71, in 1975, an age not unusual for a British man at this time.
In her mid 60s, she possibly imagined that she might join Norman in the next decade or two. But no.... She saw out the rest of the 20th Century and has continued well into the 21st. Doing so, Ethel saw the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (aged 80), the 9/11 attacks in 2001 (aged 92) and the launch of Chat GPT in 2022 (aged 113). She even fought off Covid-19 in 2020 (aged 111). She continued to drive until she was 97 and played bridge well into her 100s. The global population has doubled again to over 8bn and the world is ~1.6-1.7°C warmer on average than in 1909, due in part to a particularly cool 1909.
Asked what her ‘secret’ was in 2020, Ethel said she “Took everything in my stride, the highs and the lows...” which we might interpret as “chill out!” This is a common suggestion of supercentenarians, alongside remaining sociable, keeping mentally and physically active and only eating in moderation. None of us knows what the future has in store, but this advice, from the people that have been there and done that, might be a good place to start in the event that we get the opportunity to enter our second century. Of course, there are things outside of one’s control too. You have to be lucky genetically, not fall foul of any terminal illnesses and always look both ways before crossing the road. I hope to update you on this topic in 2101, when I too could be 117!
