Centenarians are less of a rarity than they used to be, but there are believed to be only eleven people in the U.K. who have survived their 110th birthday, witnesses to one of the most transformative periods in the whole history of mankind.

When Hermione Cock came into the world, the motor-car was still a rich man’s toy and the Wright brothers were only just poised to develop the first fixed-wing aircraft. She grew up in an English countryside where the horse was still dominant, recalled the shock of the Titanic disaster as if it were yesterday and experienced the terror of a Zeppelin raid. She took the jet-age in her stride, but felt that credit cards were only useful as ice-scrapers.

A certain disdain for the pace of innovation could be forgiven someone of her seniority. At the time of her recent death at Shrewsbury, aged 111 years and 237 days, she was the second oldest person in Britain and one of the world’s 50 or so authenticated ‘supercentenarians’.

She was born Hermione Hawkins on 1 March 1904, to a family of prominent Dorset farmers. Their holdings were at one time considerable, stretching from the outskirts of Dorchester almost to Chesil Beach. A relative, Catherine Hawkins of Waddon, had been Hardy’s inspiration for Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd.

Hermione’s father, John (‘Jack’) Hawkins, was dashing, romantic and unconventional. A landless younger son, he had been recruited by Dr Cecil Reddie, founder of the ‘New School’, Abbotsholme, as its Gardening and Farming Master.

Abbotsholme, in Staffordshire, was a progressive boy’s school which encouraged ‘co-operation rather than competition’, and the Farming Master had a key role. All the boys were put to work on the school’s 140-acre farm, with classes suspended during haymaking. The rigours of Abbotsholme soon overwhelmed one of Jack Hawkins’s frailer pupils, Lytton Strachey, who barely survived two terms at the school.

The autocratic Reddie abhorred womankind in general, and refused to employ married men. With a newly acquired wife and son, Jack became agent to his cousin, John Ward, on his 3,800-acre Red Lodge estate at Braydon, Wiltshire. It was in the agent’s suitably home-spun residence, ‘The Bungalow’, that Hermione was born.

Her mother died a year later from the effects of a complicated birth. Hermione and her elder brother John, known as ‘Buster’, were brought up by their kindly maternal grandmother (an admiral’s daughter and niece of the 12th Earl of Huntingdon) and their two maiden aunts, Madge and Blanche Whicher, in a cottage in nearby Purton.

Hermione recalled a blissful rural childhood, the aunts reluctantly complying with Jack’s progressive views. On one occasion, he summarily removed from the person of his daughter several layers of petticoat that he deemed unnecessary.

He insisted, too, on their running around barefoot, though this was considered shameful by conventional Edwardians. In elementary schools at the time, a child turning up without shoes could expect to be caned; poverty was no excuse. Hermione vividly remembered an encounter with an angry passer-by, who denounced her negligent parenting and declared her blameless aunt Madge to be a ‘very wicked woman’.

Madge adored Jack and was a model of devotion and self-sacrifice, deferring her own marriage, to Colonel Albert Canning of Restrop House, until her sister was dead and she herself was 75. She loved the children as her own and took them to stay with their numerous relatives, including a nonagenarian great-aunt born in 1822.

Buster, Hermione and their beloved Aunt Madge outside Purton Church, c.1910

Another pre-Victorian that Hermione knew was the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (born in 1834), the author of numerous best-selling books and the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Baring-Gould’s son had married their cousin, so the children were duly presented to him at Lew Trenchard, his manor-house on the edge of Dartmoor. On an inspection of his cabinet de curiosités, a back-scratcher consisting of a carved ivory hand on a stick was brought out and inserted under Buster’s shirt. To great consternation the stick emerged without the hand, which had become detached.

Jack, meanwhile, had returned to Abbotsholme, but his remarriage in 1914 obliged him again to resign. Installed on a farm in Derbyshire, he was in a position to reclaim his children, whose removal from the cottage in Purton was described by Hermione as ‘traumatic’.

Whilst Buster had proceeded from Abbotsholme to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, Hermione was sent to Bedales, ‘the noted school for the children of all the worst cranks in England’. Its founder-headmaster, John Haden Badley, had been Reddie’s right-hand man at Abbotsholme, but had not shared his aversion to women, and, indeed, had left in order to marry.

Unlike Abbotsholme, Bedales was a co-educational school, a concept that was deeply shocking to most people. Despite its liberal reputation, Hermione remembered that boys and girls were strictly segregated and that Badley, ‘the Chief’, imposed iron discipline.

As at Abbotsholme, the aim was to re-create a pre-industrial idyll, albeit at the expense of modern convenience and comfort. There was an insistence on daily cold baths, on keeping windows open in all weathers, on earth closets and, notoriously, on naked bathing in open cold water. The masters commonly wore beards and sandals, and a typical meal might consist of a banana.

Many, however, found the environment liberating and Hermione’s distinguished contemporaries included Frances Partridge, John Wyndham and Sir John Rothenstein. Her closest friend from Bedales was the Hampstead thinker, Margaret Gardiner.

Staying with the Gardiners in Kensington in 1917, Hermione was caught in a daylight Zeppelin raid and, underestimating the danger, hurried home with the younger children. Their angry father, Sir Alan Gardiner (the Egyptologist who later assisted Howard Carter in the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb), instructed her in future to make for the nearest air-raid shelter.

In 1919, Jack Hawkins installed his family at Broom Hall, Shrewsbury, and in 1927, aged 23, Hermione married James Cock, whose family (originally Koch) ran a centuries-old tannery in Barker Street. The bridegroom wore spats, while Hermione had swathed a family veil round her face and ‘looked like a 14th-century nun. The most beautiful bride I ever saw,’ wrote her aunt. ‘She looked like an angel.’ The honeymoon was spent skiing in Chamonix, which in 1924 had hosted the first Winter Olympic Games.

The couple resided for a while with Jim Cock’s mother (Shrewsbury’s first woman mayor) at Cruckton Hall. The presence there of Jim’s ‘Uncle Ted’, the monocled former Home Secretary Sir Edward Shortt, guaranteed a permanent police guard. However, by the late 1930s they were settled with their three children in a large country house called The Grange, adjacent to the ruined Roman city at Wroxeter.

During World War II, while Jim served as an army officer in Africa, Hermione volunteered as a St John Ambulance nurse at the Shrewsbury Infirmary. The couple were married for nearly 57 years and lived in and around Shrewsbury for the rest of their lives. Hermione relished her regular trips to America to see their son.

Hermione had a remarkably calm, gentle and kindly nature and an artistic temperament, and was sustained by a deep faith. She spent her last years in a nursing home, piling up royal telegrams, but her longevity had become a curse, especially as her failing eyesight and hearing had left her increasingly isolated.

She came from a family of long-lived women, including her beloved aunt Madge, who died aged 99. Curiously, her fellow Bedalians, Frances Partridge and Margaret Gardiner, lived to 103 and 100 respectively. She is survived by her two daughters, and by many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her son and a granddaughter predeceased her.

Hermione Cock, supercentenarian, was born on 1 March 1904. She died on 24 October 2015, aged 111.

The photograph above was signed and dated precisely a hundred years ago by my great-grandfather, Cyril Mumby, on the very day that he was wounded on the Western Front.

A former captain of militia (the 3rd Leicesters), the 35-year-old Cyril had rejoined the Special Reserve on 20 August 1914, soon after the outbreak of the war. After training in England, he had been ordered on 21 October to join the British Expeditionary Force in France, made up of regulars and reservists like himself.

Cyril had crossed by night from Folkestone, and had been attached to the First Battalion, the Lincolnshire Regiment, part of the 9th Infantry Brigade. It was an appropriate posting for someone with Lincolnshire ancestry. Raised in 1685 as the 10th Foot, the Lincolnshire had been collecting battle honours since Blenheim. With considerable apprehension, Cyril was joining them in their temporary billet in the village of Rouge Croix, south of Armentières.

Despite their legendary efficiency and ésprit de corps, the men of the Lincolnshire presented a shocking sight. In the action of the past few days, they had suffered no fewer than 144 casualties, yet were called forward again that very afternoon. Cyril’s first grim taste of action was an attack on Neuve Chapelle. Advancing under heavy machine gun fire, scores of the Lincolnshires were hit, their casualties amounting to a further fourteen killed, 74 wounded and seven missing.

It had been raining heavily. Barely able to keep themselves awake, the survivors huddled overnight in hastily-dug trenches that amounted to little more than muddy ditches. When the battalion eventually withdrew before dawn, it was to spend most of the day marching wretchedly through the rain to their billets.

The following morning they advanced on Kemmel, where the landscape was unspoilt as yet and seemed more picturesque. The battalion was to reinforce the line around Messines against a formidable assault by the Germans, who were bent on breaking through to the Channel ports. On 1 November, they were ordered to re-take the village of Wytschaete, which they achieved with further heavy casualties. Cyril survived the engagement, but five of his brother officers were killed and three were wounded. Formed up on the road by the Colonel and acting Adjutant, fewer than a hundred men answered the roll call. Astonishingly, the number of dead, wounded or missing, in all ranks, now totalled 293.

Refitted and reorganised, if not fully recovered, the gallant unit received orders on 5 November to move ‘at five minutes’ notice’. Detailed as reserve battalion, the Lincolnshire sheltered from heavy shell fire in dug-outs on the Menin road, mere holes in the ground. Mud, water, rain, frost and snow combining with murderous shell fire, the regimental historian considers their predicament to have been ‘without parallel in the history of the British Army’.

The British having been driven in a desperate battle from their trenches, the Lincolnshire and other reserve battalions were now sent to recover that ground. That is how my great-grandfather found himself in the Nonne Bosschen (‘Nun’s Wood’), on the north side of the Menin road, into which the enemy had fallen.

About a hundred yards short of the German line, the Lincolnshire halted and set about digging new trenches, but were unable to penetrate below the roots of the trees. For three days they huddled in shallow, water-logged ditches, easy targets for the German machine guns. Then, on 9 November, in pouring rain, they heroically beat back repeated onslaughts by the massed enemy, his final attempt to break a way through to Ypres and the coastal towns.

The succeeding days ‘were days of almost indescribable misery, when only the inherent cheerful disposition of the British soldier kept his soul alive amidst desperate conditions’. The trenches had been flooded by the heavy rain. Liquid mud mingled with blood and gore. Relentless shelling on 12 November accounted for 29 casualties. On 13 November, there was more of the same. My great-grandfather had time to sign and date a studio portrait of himself that he had had taken in Ypres, and to post it off to his sister, Isabel, in England. I have it now and it is the one illustrated above.

A novel form of trench-mortar, the Minenwerfer or ‘Minnie’, had been turned against them, the first of its damaging shells exploding in soft ground near a burying party and spattering it with mud. Heavy rain fell and Cyril, in the forward trench, was knee-deep in mud and water.

Suddenly, Cyril found himself on the receiving end of a shell. The next he knew he was concussed, the sound of the blast ringing in his ears. The shrapnel had torn into both feet, cut up his face and knocked out a tooth. A stretcher party hastily carried him away and he was transported, in agony, to a field hospital, where his wounds were classed as ‘severe’. His wife and mother were both informed by telegram. Four days later he was taken to Boulogne and, much to his relief, embarked on the troopship Carisbrooke Castle for England.

Cyril’s recovery was slow and it was not until March 1916 that he was declared ‘fit for light duty’. Determined to be of service, he re-trained as a Railway Transport Officer and, in October 1916, returned to France, to see out the war there as an R.T.O. Based in Rouen, his work was to issue movement orders, order waggons, certify demurrage bills. The Armistice was signed in November 1918, but two years later Cyril was still in uniform. Promoted to Major in 1919, he obtained his longed-for release in April 1921, by which time he was Deputy Assistant Director of Transport, British Troops, France and Flanders, a survivor, but greatly affected by his ordeal.

Cyril’s period of active service had left him permanently disabled, his business career and his marriage both in ruins. He would not have been human if not profoundly damaged psychologically by his experiences. The decimation of the gallant Lincolnshires that he had witnessed – in spite of which they had remained an effective fighting unit – must have haunted him for the rest of his days. He died in 1938.

Men of the First Battalion, The Lincolnshire Regiment, in the trenches at Nonne Bosschen, 11 November 1914. Cyril Mumby was in this trench on 13 November when a shell landed nearby, causing 'a terrific explosion'.