Rebecca Clark 104 years old, Wood Green, 1912

Click "View Full Size" below text to enlarge

Rebecca Allen was born in Oving, Buckinghamshire in 1808. Originally trained in lace-making and straw-plaiting, she worked in those occupations until she married master butcher Charles Clark in 1830 at the age of 22. They were to have twelve children, the last in 1857 when Rebecca was 49 years old.The couple seem to have stayed in Bedfordshire until the 1860s when they moved to St Neots in Cambridgeshire. Charles had retired by the end of the 1870s and the couple stayed on in St Neots. 

In 1911, Rebecca was widowed and living with her son Harry and his family above his butcher shop at 164 High Road, Wood Green, on the corner of Buller Road, just south of Lordship Lane. A few doors up was farrier Henry Chesser.

As to Rebecca’s age; never mind the well evidenced facts relating to the year she was born, towards the end of her life she was claiming to have been born in 1804. By the time of her death in 1914 she was being celebrated as 'London's Oldest Inhabitant'. One wonders if she or her family had shifted her birth date in order to claim this title.

The information printed on the photo probably followed her version of her age and so was probably taken in 1912. A contemporary newspaper report suggests that something of a fuss was made of her birthday in 1912. So I wonder if this photo was taken on that occasion. A newspaper report of her at that age said, "She retained her faculties in a most unusual degree, being able to walk unassisted up and down stairs, to thread needles, and hear even minute noises."

Rebecca died in July 1914, just weeks before the start of the First World War at the venerable of age of 106. Whilst not the 110 years that she claimed, it was still an incredible age for a working class woman born just eight years after the end of the eighteenth century.

She requested to be buried in her home village of Oving. There were apparently two cars serving the funeral, one from "a Wood Green timber merchant". We might reasonably assume that this was one-time Harringay timber merchant James Alsford, who had moved to Wood Green, on Lordship Lane, just round the corner from Harry Clark's butcher's shop.