BRITISH CENTENARIANS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 33, 2 November 1929, Page 31

BRITISH CENTENARIANS

EN MORE ANXIOUS THAN WOMEN TO LIVE LONG s

n response to the advertisement ich he inserted in the “Times,” askfor authentic information as to * % .ng centenarians in the British Isles, . Maurice Ernest, secretary of the ntenarian Club, 03 Cromwell road, uth Kensington, has received cominications concerning about twenty rsons who have lived to be a hundred ; teen being women and five men. >ey are mostly in country districts, d are widely spread over the Kingm.'

Dr. Ernest estimates that the number centenarians now .surviving in the •itlsh Isles, including N. and S. Trend, totals approximately 200. He is received a large number of letters om people who are anxious to join ,e club, the object of whose members to live to be a hundred. Many ive written from Germany and Swltjrland and other parts of the Conment. “You would be surprised,” said Dr. Irnest to a representative of “The Oberver,” “at the number of people /ho are anxious to be longved. Even young people of twentyve write to me and speak as if they ere on the verge of becoming centenrlans, and express a wish to perpetite their existence on this globe. It curious to note that it is chiefly the en and not women who are most in-

terested in living ' long, although women, as a rule, live longer than men. Even young men between twenty and thirty years of age write to me, wishing to know the secret of how to become centenarians.” Dr. Ernest recalled that this is not the first unofficial census of the kind that has been undertaken. In 1880 the late Sir George Humphrey, the president of the British Medical Association. made a similar suggestion, when addressing tbe annual meeting, and he sent out to thousands of doctors a questionnaire, the result of which was to show there were 5” centenarians then alive in the British Isles. The data collected showed that there were more women of a hundred who had been married and had had families than otherwise.

The average expectation of life had. said Dr. Ernest, undoubtedly gone up in the past fifty years, owing to hygenic nnd other improvements; but while more people lived to an advanced age now than formerly, the latest figures showed that there were actually fewer centenarians than thirty or forty years ago. This might be due to the fact that the Census authorities were now more strict than they were then, or to fewer people reaching their century, .although, they, survived to a. ripe old aga. *