By Michael Doran
As the guns on the Western Front fell silent, the noise coming from the maternity ward of the Vaucluse Private Hospital in Moreland was from a newborn girl.
Beryl Peace Todd was born on 12 November 1918, within hours of the end of the first world war.
“The owner of the hospital told my parents that if they didn’t call me Pax or Peace, he wouldn’t let me out of the place,” said Beryl. “So they made my middle name Peace.”
Looking back she said, “I remember my first day at Coburg state school and mum walking me to school,” she said. “We got to the school gate and I told her ‘you can go home now,’ and I think she was a bit put out by that.”
“I went to Brunswick Girls Domestic Arts School, where I learned to cook, clean, keep house and sew. My first job was as a dressmaker in Flinders Lane and I loved every day I worked there.”
After her early years in the northern suburbs of Melbourne she moved to the Yarra Valley in 1941.
“I’ve loved living in the Yarra Valley and being in the Country Womens Association was great fun. We did a lot of cooking and I remember making aprons and selling them for charity.”
“We went on CWA bus trips to Wandin and I used to parade the aprons up and down on the bus and sell them to raise money for Lilydale Hospital.”
Beryl’s links to Wandin have continued and she meets weekly with a group, loosely known as the ‘ripe cherries’ in the Wandin Senior Citizens Centre for lunch.
The day is put together by the Social Support Group of Yarra Ranges council and lunch is cooked by a group of young adult volunteers who are living with disabilities.
Asked about how she met her husband, Jack Taylor, she cheekily flashed back, “I didn’t meet him, he met me at a dance. I didn’t think much of him that night but he thought I was ok.”
“Jack worked at a timber mill in Preston and in 1941 we bought the McKillop Post Office and Store in Mount Evelyn. Then we bought a saw mill in Mount Evelyn but Jack couldn’t get the logs licence so we sold that and moved over to Marysville.”
In a cruel twist of fate Jack passed away in 1963. “I met him on a dance floor and he died on a dance floor,” she said.
She then moved back to Mount Evelyn with her children, Helen and John. “I got a job working for Harry Graham at his new store, which everyone in town said was too big and wouldn’t last, but now it’s the IGA. I stayed there until I retired in the mid-1980s.”
Beryl, who describes herself as a talking box, is off to government house on 15 November for morning tea to mark her 100th birthday.
Her secret to a healthy and happy life of 100 years? “I’ve never smoked, never drank alcohol and did ballroom dancing until a few years ago. Dancing is the best exercise anyone can get.”
With two children, 7 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, there are plenty of people around to help her blow out those 100 candles.
“I even invented my own name,” she said. “For the grandchildren I was nana but when the great grandchildren came I changed it to granna, because Helen is now nana.”
“Not bad for an old duck,” she quipped.
