A former cotton mill worker has celebrated her 100th birthday.
Hilda Boast, of Henley House in Accrington, joined with friends and family to celebrate her centenary with an entertainer and a buffet for all the residents and family members on February 8.
She said she was thrilled to receive her congratulatory message from the Queen and commented that it was ‘worth keeping’.
Hilda was born in 1916 and is the eldest and only surviving sibling of the six children of William and Jane Cornwall, of Newark Street in Accrington.
She attended Sacred Heart School and worked in the then thriving cotton mills in the town for most of working life. However, during the Second World War she worked at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Darwen as part of the war effort.
In the early 1960s she went down to London to protest against cheap imported cotton as she felt that this would kill the cotton industry in Lancashire that she worked in.
In 1936 Hilda married her childhood sweetheart Arthur Boast and they had three children, Keith, Joan and Michael, and even at 100 she is still a devoted mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
