John Alfred Tinniswood
26th August, 1912.
Big bastards, small bastards, cool bastards, magnificent bastards and absolute bastards. We’ve done them all. And finally, we come to, perhaps, the best of them all. The ordinary bastard. The everyman. The quiet sort, who ploughs the fields and mills the grain and adds up numbers in columns in checkbooks for reasons. I grew up among these stoical, jovial, peaceful and kind people and they’re my favourite kind. Undemanding yet demonstrative, quiet yet melodic, slow but wise. They are old like the land and bright like the sky. Regular as rivers and tides and murmuring on a breeze in the corner of a memory somewhere. They are the shadows of clouds across landscapes.
John Tinniswood’s life is what anyone would call ordinary, but that doesn’t make him ordinary in the least. Born in Liverpool in the year the Titanic sank, 1912, he went to school… somewhere…. lived a life… somewhere… tried to enlist in 1939, but they wouldn’t have him because he was blind as a mole. So, he got a desk job during World War II, in an administrative role within the Royal Army Pay Corps. As an accountant.
He met a girl called Blodwen at a dance and they married in 1942. They had a daughter, Susan, in 1944. After the war, John worked for the Royal Mail. As an accountant.
He retired in 1972 so he could watch his beloved Liverpool Football Club.
Blodwen died of lung cancer in 1986. They had been married for 44 years. John and Blodwen had four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
An unremarkable life, full of peace and gentility. A loving man in a loving family. In many ways, the perfect life.
And that’s it. That’s his story. I know you were expecting something else, but there’s nothing much else to tell you.
Apart from that today is John’s birthday. I mean, obviously today is John’s birthday because he’s in this daily article about people who celebrate a birthday on this very day. But no. I mean today is John’s birthday.
John Tinniswood became the oldest living British man on 25 September 2020, with the death of 108-year-old Harry Fransman. On the 2nd April 2024, with the death of 114-year-old Venezuelan Juan Vicente Pérez, Joh was declared the oldest living man in the world by Guinness World Records. However, two other men were then confirmed as older - Shi Ping of China and Frenchman Georges Thomas, both born in November 1911.
When Thomas died on 1st June, 2024, John became the oldest European man and, on 29th June, 2024, with the sad death of Shi Ping, John Alfred Tinniswood became the world’s oldest living man once again.
He is also, due to his official duties during World War II, the world’s oldest living World War II Veteran.
John doesn’t have a secret to long life.
"I eat what they give me and so does everybody else," he said. "I don’t have a special diet. Why I’ve lived that long, I have no idea at all. I can’t think of any special secrets I have.”
The glue that binds human communities together. The world can’t do without people like John and it never could. John Tinniswoods are woven into the weft of society and without them, the threads unravel.
Happy birthday, John.
See you again next year.