Family and friends came together at a North Yorkshire care home for the 100th birthday of resident Gladys Kaye.

The celebration, on August 22, came six years to the day that she moved into Benkhill Lodge in Bedale.

Before that, she had lived with family in Sinderby, near Thirsk, after spending most of her life in Deepcar, seven miles North East of Sheffield.

Mrs Kaye had been educated at the local church school until the age of 14 and on leaving school she was apprenticed to train as a tailoress. A few days after her 15th birthday the Second World War was declared.

It wasn’t long before Mr Evans, to whom she was apprenticed was called up for the Army and she found domestic work at a large local house where a boys’ boarding school had been relocated. Then followed a job in the outfitting department at the local Co-op.

Eventually she was assigned “war work” in part of the accounts department of the nearby steelworks. Even office work could have dangers – while carrying out a stock take on the factory floor she and two colleagues narrowly survived when a load of steel girders fell from a crane. Luckily a wall of sandbags took the brunt of the blow. Bruised and shaken, the three were generously given the afternoon off to recover.

Leisure time proved dangerous too, with Gladys and her workmate Winnie getting caught up in an Army range-finding exercise involving live shells while walking in the moors near their home – despite the fact that no warning flags were flying.

The war ended not long before Gladys turned 21. Luckily most of her family survived, although her future husband, Doug, was left disabled following an accident in the steelworks. He and Gladys started courting after the war and were married in the summer of 1949.

Due to the housing shortage following the war they spent the first ten years of married life living with Gladys’s parents Doris and Harry.

Doug, unable to carry on working as a plumber, retrained as a teacher. At Christmas 1959, Gladys, Doug and their young daughter, Sally, moved into a bungalow designed by Doug and built by him with the help of his friends, who like him had learnt trades in the steelworks.