BIRTHDAY girl Jean Audas is celebrated her 100th year with a family party and a card from the Queen.
Mrs Audas turned 100 on July 5. Born and bred in Staindrop, she carried out important work during the war and enjoyed extensive travel to exotic places with her late husband, Myles, a photographic enthusiast who recorded their adventures together on camera.
She went to the village school and left to go into service, before becoming an Aycliffe Angel during the Second World War at a munitions factory in Newton Aycliffe.
“I used to take my bike up to Cockfield to get the bus to Aycliffe,” she recalls. It meant cycling up Keveston Bank. “It was quicker coming down. I was back in no time,” she laughed. When Glaxo opened its factory in 1945 to make penicillin for the troops, she was the first woman to be taken on. She started work as forewoman of sterile process on New Year’s Eve 1945 – a job she held for 31 years.
“I had a very good job. I was part of inspection at Aycliffe and I carried that on into Glaxo,” she said.
She retired at 60 and still lives in the Staindrop home her husband built in Moor Road. Mr Audas, who was a director for Shepherd Construction, died in 2008.
“He was a very good photographer,” said Mrs Audas. The many awards he won at Darlington Camera Club for his National Geographic-style photographs are still on show in the house.
As well as travelling across the world, the couple enjoyed the occasional snowball at the Milbank Arms, in Barningham. Mrs Audas now has 24-hours care at home, provided by Middleton Care. In a quirk of fate, Mrs Audas gave the company’s managing director, Yvonne Metcalfe, her first job at Glaxo.
