Britain's oldest person Bessie dies age 113 in Moorgate care home

Bessie Camm died peacefully in her sleep at Moorgate Lodge Care Home last Friday (11).

She became the oldest person in the UK in July last year and was six weeks short of her 114th birthday.

Bessie reached 113 years and 325 days, which made her the tenth-oldest person in the world known to the Gerontology Research Group which compiles a database of the oldest living people.

Born in Swaledale, North Yorkshire, in 1904, she attended a Quaker School before qualifying as a nurse in 1926 at Darlington Hospital, working as a ward sister and then a theatre sister at Montagu Hospital in Mexborough.

Bessie assisted doctors who worked on surgical cases in the hospital and a consultant, Col Connell, who attended for his theatre list and outpatients clinics.

She later became matron at Richmond Hospital in North Yorkshire, where she worked during the Second World War.

After the war, Bessie worked for five years as an industrial nurse at Parkgate Forge, where her late husband was a metallurgist.

She later nursed former Conservative leader William Hague and once attended a dinner party at his parents’ Parkgate home when he was a young boy.

Bessie married her husband John shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The couple did not have any children.

Following her retirement, Bessie lived in Wath with John and remained there following her widowhood in 1972.  

According to the Oldest in Britain website, the oldest living person is now Olive Evelyn Boar, of Felixstowe, who is 113 years 231 days old.