Great-grandmother donates 90th birthday to charity

A generous great-grandmother donated her 90^th birthday to charity, asking friends and family to give money to Cornwall Air Ambulance rather than receiving presents.

When Eileen Roseveare was born in 1927, the first commercial transatlantic telephone call from New York City to London had only just been made and an experiment to try out Britain’s first automatic traffic lights was still some months away.

Ninety-years later and Eileen, from St Columb Major, near Newquay in Cornwall, celebrated her birthday at a local community centre with around 60 friends and family, including her six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, raising £307.

Reaching such a milestone is quite rightly an opportunity to be showered with gifts from loved ones, but Eileen instead decided to donate to Cornwall Air Ambulance and help save lives.

Eileen said: “The air ambulance does so much good helping people and getting them to hospital. I wanted to help and I thought this would be nice way to do that.”

Sharon Stevenson, Fundraising Officer at Cornwall Air Ambulance, said: “It was incredibly generous of Eileen to ask her friends and family to donate to Cornwall Air Ambulance instead of buying her presents. She is a wonderful lady and we’re very grateful to her. It is only through the generosity and support of people like Eileen that Cornwall Air Ambulance and its crew is able to fly more 700 lifesaving missions each year.”

You can find out more about the work of Cornwall Air Ambulance and how to support the charity here.