TELEVISION soap fan Ellen May Whittaker celebrated her 104th birthday yesterday with a family gathering and an episode of Coronation Street.

Thought to be Rossendale's oldest resident, great-great-grandmother Mrs Whittaker lives at Deansford home for the elderly in Haslingden where she still reads the papers each day and enjoys chatting and watching television.

Known to all as Nellie, she has lived at the home for the last five years and in Haslingden for most of her life.

She has two sons, Walter and Roland, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

Nellie is the eldest of three sisters. Her middle sister, Ethel, was 100 when she died two years ago and youngest sister, Alice, also died two years ago just before her 98th birthday. Nellie remembers how as a child she delivered breakfasts made by her mother to working weavers.

The family moved to New Brighton, near Liverpool, but the three sisters were sent back to Haslingden to live with an aunt and learn the weaving trade themselves.

It was in the weaving shed that she met her husband, Arnold, and they were together for more than sixty years.

From her retirement at the age of 60 until she was 96, Nellie walked once a week from Haslingden over Haslingden Old Road to Rawtenstall market.

Senior care assistant Margaret Goldsworthy said: "She is in a wheelchair now but still remains as bright as a button.

"She chats away all day and still enjoys watching the television and reading the papers out loud to us."

A special cake was made for the occasion and she was visited by her sons and other members of the family.

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