Ada Daniel was born in 1915 in Ambergate, Derbyshire. She married Percy, a war veteran, in 1944, and together they never had children. What she did have, one after another over the decades, were greyhounds. They all had the same name: Street Lane, after the street where she lived in Ripley.
She walked to the village every day, even after turning 97. She did not regularly visit a doctor’s office until she was 103. That year, she moved to Codnor Park Care Home, where Kelly Goucher, the activities coordinator, once asked her what her secret was. The answer was simple: having dogs, not children.
In June 2023, when she turned 108, more than 300 cards arrived addressed to her, including one signed by King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Ada chose her own path more than seventy years ago, and that path, against all odds, turned out to be one of the longest and happiest ever remembered in Derbyshire.
