Believed to be the oldest person on the Sunshine Coast, Emilie Shaw celebrated her 106th birthday on July 9 at Shorncliffe in Sechelt.
Emilie was born in England in 1909 and is known as The Amazing Emilie by her large international fan club of family and friends.
“She is totally on the ball and has a wonderful sense of humour,” said daughter Fran McGuckin of Halfmoon Bay. “She still enjoys church, occasional bingo, doing her ‘chores’ in her room, the odd scratch ticket, and all she wanted for her birthday was to walk again.”
Emilie came to the Sunshine Coast at the age of 100, moving into her own suite in Fran’s log home in Halfmoon Bay.
“She said that living here was the best two years of her life, until she fell … in late 2011 and 2012 with hip and pelvic fractures and spent five months in hospital in Sechelt, where she contracted terrible pneumonia and other viruses,” Fran said.
“The doctors gave her up for palliative care. But she is too tough to quit, and after begging the doctor to give her some more antibiotics and intravenous fluids, she did an amazing overnight recovery.”
The ordeal left Emilie confined to a wheelchair and she has resided in Shorncliffe since April 2012.
The secret of Emilie’s long life?
“There’s so much, and the nurses always want to know,” she replied. “Well, it’s no drinking, that being not popular with most people. No driving. I’ve never driven a car. It doesn’t even bother me. And the third one – I never smoked.”
Keeping busy is also important, Emilie added.
Emilie has received seven congratulatory cards from the Queen, one for each year since she turned 100.
Born Emilie Bohm, she was raised in an orphanage in England, along with six brothers and stepbrothers, as her mother was a wardrobe mistress and travelled a lot, Fran said. “She is half Hungarian circus gypsy, and we come from a family of circus performers and musicians.”
Emilie was a synchronized swimmer at Blackpool and loved to cycle. As a young woman, she worked as a cook and nanny to Canadian millionaires living in England and got to travel the continent extensively.
She was married during the Second World War at age 32 to a soldier, Francisco Claude Shaw, who was 12 years younger.
“My dad was in the Warrickshire Unit as a Red Beret,” Fran said. “He was in the first parachute drop during the war, as he got paid an extra five cents a week to jump out of planes.”
Together the couple had four children and immigrated to Australia in 1956, moving frequently for health and financial reasons. Emilie’s husband passed away in 1979 at age 58.
Emilie immigrated to Canada at the tender age of 78, joining Fran who had relocated to the Lower Mainland in 1981.
Though most of Emilie’s 24 great-grandchildren live in Australia, family and friends threw a small party in her honour at Shorncliffe on July 5.
