Podcast: Freda aged 106, met Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather and feels '200-years-old'

The 106-year-old Freda Hodgson, who met Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather King George V, says she feels like she’s 200-years-old, as the oldest of nine care home residents who have made it into the 100+ club at Whiteley Village.

Freda Hodgson has no less than 52 great grandchildren and has met King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace when she was presented as a debutante at the age of 16.

She remembers talking with Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother Queen Mary and the "three feathers" in her hair which she wore when she was presented to the King and Queen. She recalled how Queen Mary called her "charming".

Freda is the daughter of a baronet Sir William Willoughby Williams, but she just missed out on inheriting a castle because she was a girl. Strangely, she doesn’t really care because she confesses Bodelwyddan Castle in Denbighshire was too “draughty”.

She and fellow centenarian 101-year-old Dorothy Gayler both live at the retirement community Whiteley Village in Surrey and have spoken about their long and active lives on Episode 4 of carehome.co.uk’s 'Let’s Talk About Care' podcast.

Born a year before the start of WWI, Freda remembers hearing the bomb blasts outside during the war as she hid in the basement of her home.

She met the love of her life, only to be told that they had no future because she was Church of England and he was Catholic.

The 106-year-old has lived a life of extreme privilege as well as hard times. She is haunted by memories of her own daughter’s death.

Her eldest daughter died in 1979 when the aircraft she was in was shot down by terrorists. She talks about “terrorists” firing bullets at her home in Rhodesia, southern Africa, before Robert Mugabe’s rise to power.

Fleeing Zimbabwe, she left behind tobacco farmlands and her life there to go back to a Britain run by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986. But she arrived back in the UK with only £1 in her purse because of exchange controls.

Freda Hodgson moved into Whiteley Village more than 30 years ago.

Whiteley Village in Surrey is a charitable care organisation, where many people with limited financial means live on average five years longer than the general population.

This is an achievement Dr Alison Armstrong, the director of community and foundation at Whiteley Village, talks about in the podcast based on the analysis of a hundred years of data collected at the home.

The charity was set up to help the ‘aged poor’ and celebrated its own 100th birthday in 2017. Whiteley Village in Walton-On-Thames is set in 220 acres of land with residential and nursing care, extra care apartments and more than 260 individual cottages where people live independently.

Fellow resident Dorothy Gayler is 101-years old and told carehome.co.uk she moved to Whiteley Village after her 76-year-old daughter Sandy Harriman moved into a cottage there.

Another 99-year-old has just celebrated his 100th birthday on 18 December and the village hopes to add to its growing crop of nine centenarians.

Also a guest on the podcast is senior care worker Maria Baligasa who said she loves to make residents, including Freda, look and feel good and felt “no pressure” caring for people aged over 100.

While the secrets to longevity may depend, as Dr Armstrong says, on "many factors", 106-year-old Freda believes her long life is simply because she is “stubborn”.

To listen to Let's Talk About Care's Episode 4: 'Freda & The 100+ club' podcast click here