Resident at a veterans’ care home in High Wycombe celebrates their 104th birthday

Home Manager Reggie Ballos watches as Ena blows out the candles on her birthday cake. (Image supplied by Royal Star & Garter)

A resident at a veterans’ care home in High Wycombe has celebrated her 104th birthday.

Ena Mitchell enjoyed a party with fellow residents from her floor at the Royal Start & Garter Home in Hughenden Avenue, High Wycombe on Friday 30th September 2022.

Ena was born in 1918, in Kingsley, Hampshire. Royal Star & Garter had been established just two years earlier to care for the severely injured young men returning from the battlegrounds of the First World War.

Ena’s husband Bill, who she married in 1938, was a soldier in the East Yorkshire Regiment. He was one of the 330,000 troops successfully evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940 and four years later took part in the D-Day landings on Tuesday 6th June 1944. Bill survived the offensive, but later that year, on Wednesday 13th September 1944, the 33 year old was killed in Belgium by enemy fire. Their daughter was just two at the time.

Later, Ena started fighting for the rights of the women who had lost husbands during the war and joined the War Widows’ Association (WWA).

She has lived at Royal Star & Garter since 2019.

Royal Star & Garter is a charity which provides loving, compassionate care to veterans and their partners living with disability or dementia and also has Homes in Solihull and Surbiton.

The High Wycombe Home is welcoming new residents. Further information can be found on the Royal Start & Garter website at www.starandgarter.org/hw.

*Source of information : Press release from Royal Star & Garter.