90 YEARS OLD

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21211, 6 September 1940, Page 4

90 YEARS OLD

MISS ANNIE CECILIA THEOBALD LINK WITH FAMOUS PAINTER One of Hamilton’s oldest residents, Miss Annie Cecilia Theobald, will celebrate her 90th birthday to-mor-row. A Waikato Times reporter who interviewed her to-day found Miss Theobald sitting up in bed, bright and cheerful, and reading her paper. Despite her 90 years Miss Theobald can still read and write, and keeps up a correspondence with her friends. She reads aloud to her sister, Mrs F. Brooke, who is three years her junior and whose eyesight is failing. Miss Theobald takes a lively interest in world affairs, and having lived through the darkest hours of the Crimean, Boer and Great Wars she is confident that Britain will emerge victorious from the present struggle. Miss Theobald was born at Mark’s Tey Vicarage, near Colchester, in Essex, the sixth daughter of the Rev. John Medows Theobald and granddaughter of Abran Constable, who was the brother of John Constable, the famous landscape painter. When she was five years old her family moved to Henley, where Miss Theobald remembers helping to plant a row of trees. This plantation has now grown so high that it completely hides ihe view of St. Peter’s Church nearby. In 1910 Miss Theobald came to New Zealand in the S.S. Corinthic with, her sister and two nephews. She settled in the South Island at Kaikoura, where she and her sister took an active interest in war work during the Great War. Early Hamilton Coming to Hamilton a few years later she found it a small and straggling township. People told her it was market day, the highlight of the week but Miss Theobald was not impressed with the few groups of people gathered in street. Miss Theobald has a vivid memory of her brother, the late Admiral Charles Theobald, who was a middy on H.M.S. Esk and saw service in New Zealand waters during the Maori wars. One cf her happiest recollections is the Mediterranean voyage she made with her brother, then the youngest captain in the British Navy, to Egypt about 1880.