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Re: Queen mother (of Britai...

Louis Epstein
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SubjectRe: Queen mother (of Britain) has died
FromLouis Epstein
Date2002-04-03 04:19 (2002-04-03 04:19)
Message-ID<XEtq8.95440$VJ1.7675076@bin3.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com>
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Newsgroupsalt.fan.tolkien
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m <poo@nowhere.com>wrote:

m
The Queen Mother lived to the age of 101 which is fantastic.

That means that she would have been born in the year that Queen Victoria died and has seen almost all of the last century and two years of this one.

She was born in August 1900,Queen Victoria died in January 1901. Technically the Queen Mother lived through the entire 20th century (Jan 1 1901 to Dec 31 2000...the 20th hundred of years,there was no year 0).

I had a cousin who died in December 2001 and was born in April 1897... also saw the whole 20th century,but what really gets me is that she remembered her great-grandfather(my great-great-great-grandfather) who was born in 1808!

She would have been a teenager at the start of the first world war. By that stage Tolkien would have been fighting in that war and will have seen almost his entire school class killed.

The Queen Mother will have seen horse drawn transport change to motor vehicles. Likewise she will have seen the same destruction of Englands countryside and woodlands that lead to Tolkien writing The Lord Of The Rings.

I hope I live to the age of at least 100.

March 2002 also saw the death of Nellie Bradley, perhaps the last person in the UK born before J.R.R. Tolkien...she was born September 1889, new oldest-so-far-proven Brit Jessamine Nicholls was born later in January 1892 than JRRT was. And the death of Maud Farris-Luse,oldest documented person in the world(born January 1887,married 1903).

It is still possible that someone older than Mrs. Nicholls will be found in Britain,as Amy Hulmes(1887-2001) had her family records produced only after Nellie Bradley had been prematurely recognized.

At present the world's oldest person is Japan's Kamato Hongo(September 1887),followed by Australia's Christina Cock(December 1887).

The Elves would weep at our inability to last a single *yen*...and the line of Elros certainly outlasted our eldest.

In terms of the reigns of monarchs,none have ever managed a century back through ancient Egypt... but there is a man in Spain whose mother died in 1889,and a woman in Belgium whose mother died in 1893...so if those mothers had been monarchs, it would have been possible.

-=-=- The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again, at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.