Ruby Druce survived two world wars and two global pandemics
When Ruby Druce celebrated her birthday last New Year’s Eve, she recalled her long life and said she only drank once – some poitín to beat Spanish flu in 1918. She was the last person in Ireland who had survived two world wars and two global pandemics - Spanish flu of 1918-20 and Covid-19 of 2019-23.
Apart from that drop of poitín when she caught Spanish flu 107 years ago, Ruby never smoked or drank. She was only a toddler when her life was threatened by Spanish flu, the global pandemic that infected a fifth of the world's population and killed 50 million people over a century ago Ruby and her husband Jim Druce, a musician from Scotland, were childhood sweethearts when they met, aged just 14, in 1929. They married in 1956 and would go to the seaside together in Donegal town Bundoran on Jim’s Honda 50 motorbike. Ruby left school at 14, around the same time as she met Jim, to work in a local shirt factory for more than four decades until she quit to care for her ageing shoemaker father George.
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