A resident at a Winchester care home recently celebrated her 101st birthday. 

Amy Lanham, who lives at Brendoncare Park Road, celebrated the milestone on Tuesday May 30 with her son Tony, his wife Marion, daughter Jean, her husband Geoff and their daughter Jemma. 

Born in Cheshire, Amy had eight brothers and sisters. As the eldest daughter, she acted as the surrogate mother to the other seven and helped with the household chores. 

Her father suffered trench fever during World War I and went to Boulogne to recuperate.

When she left school, Amy took a job as a seamstress in a shirt factory, working mainly on collars. At the start of World War Two, a friend asked Amy if she would like to meet a young man called Mervyn who had taken lodgings with her widowed mother. 

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He had travelled up from Bournemouth to start a job in a munitions factory near Warrington. They married in 1941 but did not have a honeymoon, deciding instead to save up for a lorry that Mervyn needed for his job working for the War Agricultural Department of the War Office. 

Amy and Mervyn moved to Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk during which time they had Jean in 1942, and later returned to Amy’s parents in Warrington where Tony was born in 1944. 

In about 1946, while on a trip from their Norfolk home to see Mervyn’s sister and brother in law in Ringwood, they stopped at Chandler's Ford to break the journey and liked the area. 

They visited an estate agent and bought a plot of land in Kingsway there and then on which they had a bungalow built. Mervyn, who had started a landscaping business, got permission for four more properties in Hocombe Road.

The couple later bought an old farmhouse in France and retreated there so he could recover from ill health. 

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Returning to England, they bought a smallholding along Easton Lane in Winnall, which they made into their home, though they still spent six months living abroad each year.

The couple then moved to Romsey and after selling their French farmhouse, they bought an apartment in Benidorm in Spain where they lived. After Mervyn died in 1994, Amy moved back to Poole for a time and then to Lions Hall in Winchester when she was 90 and looked after herself there until she was 100. She came to Brendoncare Park Road after a spell of illness. 

Alexandra Alupei, deputy manager of Brendoncare Park Road, said: “We all love Amy and it was such a pleasure for us all to celebrate her special birthday.”