A LONDON-born woman who lives in Trowbridge celebrated her 100th birthday with family and friends at a party on Saturday.

Mrs Annie Williams (nee Hart) and her twin brother Maurice were born in Islington towards the end of the First World War.

“Maurice was older than me by about 15 minutes,” recalled Annie, who now lives in the Romney House Care Home in Westwood Road, Trowbridge.

“We also had two older sisters, Trixy, who went to Australia, and May. I was the baby, the youngest in the family.”

Mrs Williams was brought up in Islington and Hackney and, like many other girls in that era, left school aged 14.

She went to work in Godfrey Phillips Ltd’s East End factory making cigarettes and tobacco.

She later left to work for Alfred Polikoff’s factory in Mare Street, Hackney, which made raincoats for the Burberry fashion chain, and uniforms for the British forces.

“My job was in the accounts department. I had to keep a check on the stock levels and when they got low, I told them when they needed to place orders for more materials from the woollen mills in the north.”

At Polikoff’s, Annie met the man who was to be her first husband, John Williams, a labourer.

Their only child, Malcolm, was born in 1942.

The family stayed in London throughout the Second World War, enduring the Blitz.

Malcolm recalls that he used to dash over the road from his primary school to his mother’s workplace to have lunch in the works canteen.

“I used to wait for her to finish at lunchtime and then we would go down to the canteen for a free lunch,” he said.

After the end of the war, her husband died when Malcolm was just four years old and Mrs Williams re-married, this time to Emrys John Williams.

“I managed to marry a man with the same first and last name. Although his name was Emrys, we used to call him John,” Mrs Williams said.

Mrs Williams retired in the late 1960s and she and her husband moved out to the London borough of Leytonstone, to a larger house.

“But I soon got bored after I had finished redecorating it and went to work for a friend from Polikoff’s who had opened up his own tailor’s shop,” she added.

When the government wanted to compulsorily purchase their home to make way for a new motorway, the family moved out of London to Ilford in the London borough of Redbridge.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Mr and Mrs Williams sold up and moved west to Trowbridge, where they lived in a bungalow in Victoria Gardens.

She continued to live there following her husband’s death in 2011. By this time her son Malcolm had moved to live in Australia, and Mrs Williams sold the bungalow 10 months ago to live in Romney House, where she is cared for by its staff.

She celebrated her 100th birthday with a visit from Malcolm, and a group of close friends, and her party afternoon featured music from the Sing-alongs, champagne and whisky.

Her gifts included birthday greetings from the Queen and Esther McVey MP, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.