April 4, 1940
ABERDEEN BON-ACCORD AND NORTHERN
CRUDEN BAY BOASTS AN “OCTOGENARIAN STREET”
Top—Green Street, Cruden Bay, which might be aptly re-named “Octogenarian Street.”
Right—Mrs John Summers is going to give her youngest grandchild a sweet out of the bottle she has treasured for 48 years (see story).
Left—Mrs Elizabeth Phillips, another Green Street octogenarian.
The “Grand Old Ladies Of Buchan”
(Special to “Bon-Accord.”)
FOUR octogenarians—Mrs John Summers, Mrs Elizabeth Phillips, Mrs Elizabeth Noble, and Mrs Alexander Masson—all live within a radius of thirty yards in the same short street in Cruden Bay.
A “Bon-Accord” reporter interviewed the four “grand old ladies of Buchan” at their homes in Green Street.
Mrs Phillips, 2 Green Street, will be eighty-five this year. She proclaims that she is quite hale and hearty, and attributes her longevity to the strenuous life she led in her younger days.
A Buchan woman fifty or sixty years ago, she said, had to rise some mornings at one or two o’clock to help to push the fishing boats down to the sea. After that she had to go looking for bait, and when that was collected she might attend to her house and children.
Mrs Phillips, a native of Usan, likes nothing better than to “hae a crack” with her friend Mrs Summers.
One of their inevitable topics of conversation is the conduct of the war. The heads of the Nazi party they have dubbed “Hilter,” “Goggles,” and “Heliotrope”—otherwise Hitler, Goebbels, and Ribbentrop.
Mrs Phillips has a lengthy string of descendants. She has twelve of a family, six girls and six boys, seventeen grand-children, and twelve great-grandchildren.
Mrs John Summers, 4 Green Street, although totally blind, still gets about the house and does much of her own work.
She has lived in the same house for more than forty years, and is herself eighty-one.
She was born at Cairnbulg, and for more than forty-five years worked all over Scotland, Shetland, and Orkney as a fish-gutter.
Mrs Summers accepts her disability placidly. “It is God’s will,” she says.
“The De’il tak’ ‘im,” was her answer when the reporter broached the subject of Hitler. “He’s an evil cratur, an’ he’ll get fat he deserves.” A sentiment which the whole country echoes.
One of Mrs Summers’s most prized possessions is a bottle of sweets which she has treasured for over forty-eight years. She got the sweets from a young man about to join the Navy, she had them bottled, and they’ve never been opened since.
The other octogenarians, Mrs Elizabeth Noble and Mrs Alexander Masson, reside at 6 and 7 Green Street respectively.
Mrs Noble is eighty-nine and Mrs Masson eighty-three.
