Audrey Roberts from Newbury celebrates 100th birthday

HAPPY 100th birthday, Audrey!

Winston Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer and John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first television pictures when Audrey Evelyn Roberts was born.

Mrs Roberts celebrated her centenary at home with her family in Newbury on Monday, April 7, having received a congratulatory card from His Majesty King Charles and Queen Camilla.

She was born in the Gloucestershire in 1925 and as a young girl during the war worked as a trainee mechanic at RAF Little Rissington.

There, she worked on all the warplanes and has many vivid memories, including setting up tappets on the spitfire merlin engines, and one dark night staying late to prepare two Lysander aircraft to drop agents behind enemy lines in occupied France.

She married after the war but her pilot husband was killed in an air crash in 1950.

Mrs Roberts also worked at Greenham Common in the communications centre and remembers having to pass the womens’ peace camp in order to get to work.