// BBC UK NEWS — CRONACA
World's oldest person celebrates turning 117
Ethel Caterham received a card from King Charles on her 115th birthday in 2024
The world's oldest living person celebrates turning 117 years old in Surrey on Friday with her family and friends.
Ethel Caterham, who lives at Hallmark Lakeview Care Home in Lightwater, took on the mantle in April 2025 after the death of Brazilian nun Sister Inah Canabarro Lucas at the age of 116.
Born three years before the Titanic disaster and eight years before the Russian Revolution, Caterham has also lived through two world wars.
In addition, she is one of the oldest people to survive Covid-19, after contracting it in 2020 at the age of 110, according to Guinness World Records.
Originally from Shipton Bellinger in Hampshire, the second youngest of eight children, Caterham was raised in Tidworth, Wiltshire.
The last surviving subject of King Edward VII, as a teenager she travelled to India in 1927 and began working as an au pair to a military family there.
Caterham being visited by King Charles shortly after her 116th birthday last year
Caterham met her husband Norman, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, at a dinner party in the UK in 1931 and the pair later lived in Hong Kong, where she set up a nursery school.
They then raised two daughters, both of whom died before her.