ASTONISHING PEOPLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 November 1940, Page 7

ASTONISHING PEOPLE

’ A VERY OLD MAN. What follows must be taken with a grain of salt. Many people believe it. It may be true. Apparently the facts are these:— Thomas Parr, always known as “Old Parr,” was born two years before Bosworth Field, that is in 1483. He died in 1635, and was, therefore, 152 years old when they gave him a place in Westminster Abbey, where you may read his inscription to this day. We are told that he was the son of John Parr of Winnington. a village near Shrewsbury, and he is said to have cultivated a small holding there for the greater part of his long life. He married his first wife when he was 80, burying her when he was 112. After mourning her ten years he married a second time, living another 30 years as peacefully and contentedly as any man in England. He was a great sleeper, and also a great eater, being ready at any time to eat anything set before him. For half his life he lived on.his reputation—that' of being an old man. and his portraits show him to have been, at least for the last half century, a bald-headed man with a long white beard, dark brown eyes, and shaggy eyebrows. But for a silly fellow there is no telling how much longer Old Parr would have lived. The silly man was Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who heard of him, and determined to carry him off to London and show him as a curiosity. So to London he went, met Charles Stuart to whom he boasted he had lived while ten kings and queens had reigned, and lived a luxurious life. That killed him. Removed from his easy ways, his home comforts, his plain fare, Old Parr went to pieces in double quick time, dying at Lord Arundel’s house. A' post-mortem examination made by the great William Harvey revealed the fact that all his organs were in a remarkably good state of preservation.