Supercentenarian Profile

Margaret Lambourn

Born:

1915-07-03

Leeds, England

United Kingdom

Current Residence:

Tauranga, Bay of Plenty Region

New Zealand

✔ Age Certified by LongeviQuest

Winifred Margaret Lambourn (née Heseltine) is a British-born New Zealander supercentenarian whose age has been validated by LongeviQuest.

BIOGRAPHY

Margaret Lambourn was born in Leeds, England, UK, on 3 July 1915. Her parents were Florence Elizabeth, an organist, and John Edward Heseltine, a masonry worker on the Duke of Devonshire’s estate in England. She had hoped to study drama, but her father would not allow it. Instead, she trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, where she met her future husband, Alan.

They married in 1938 and moved to Egypt, where Alan was posted as a Second Lieutenant with the Garrison Engineers in Ismailia. After two years she was forced to evacuate. At the time she was pregnant with her first child, Suzie, and left on a midnight train bound for South Africa via Jerusalem.

In Durban, South Africa, she worked as a waitress at the Victoria League before applying for repatriation to England. She returned during the second phase of the rocket attacks, where she and Alan had two more children, Michael and Andrew.

After the Second World War, the family moved to Kuwait, where Alan, a qualified architect, spent 14 years working as Chief Architect for Kuwait Oil Company Ltd. During this time she led a busy life and bought a nursery school, which she loved running. In 1972, the couple moved to New Zealand.

Her sister, Dorothy Emily Taylor (29 July 1917 – 16 April 2017), died at 99, and another sister, Audrey Staniland, died on 15 February 2020, aged 95.