Sisters with a combined age of 213 crowned world’s oldest siblings

With a combined age of 213, two sisters from Lincolnshire have just been crowned the oldest siblings in the world.

Dorothy ‘Dorrie’ Richards is 108 and her younger sister Marjorie Ruddle recently celebrated her 105th birthday – giving them the incredible combined age total.

A spokesman from Guinness World Records has confirmed the sisters officially have the ‘highest combined age of two living siblings’ – 213 years, three months and 27 days.

The proud pair marked their achievement on Thursday with a tea party at Marjorie’s nursing home in Peterborough not far from Dorrie’s care home in Stamford, Lincolnshire.

Marjorie’s daughter Pat Comber said, “We’ve always wondered whether Dorrie and Marjorie were the oldest sisters around and last year decided to find out. We contacted the Guinness World Records and it took them several weeks to do their research and confirm it.”

“To be honest I would have been surprised to find any siblings older than them and I think it may be a long time before their record is broken” she added.

Dorrie was born on December 15, 1903 – two days before the Wright Brothers made the world’s first successful flight.

Marjorie was born on April 21, 1907 two months after the Old Bailey Court opened in London.

Mrs Comber added “It is a remarkable achievement and my family and I are very proud of them. Both Marjorie and Dorothy are very active and on the ball for their ages. They certainly know what’s going on.”

“I’m not sure if they have secrets for living for so long but just that they’ve tried to stay fit and active. “

“Really, all we wanted was to get the two of them together. ‘They haven’t seen each other for three years because my mother has a slight disability and my aunt is quite frail.”

The sisters grew up in Northampton where their father ran a men’s shoe factory, GT Hawkins.

After school the sisters went to London with Dorrie studying at a physical education college in London and Marjorie going to the Buckingham Palace College of Domestic Science.

Mrs Comber added that “their mother sadly died and their father wanted them home to look after the household, so neither of them actually worked at what they had trained for.”

Marjorie married her first husband, Dr James Robertson Wills, in Northampton in 1932. The couple later moved to Peterborough and had three children – a girl and two boys.

Five years after her husband died, Marjorie remarried. Allan Ruddle was an architect with a practice in Peterborough.

Her sister also married and had a family. She and her husband, an optician, brought up their three sons near Stamford, where Mrs Richards had a small gift shop.

The Guinness World Records have only recently started to monitor the ‘combined age’ category and confirmed the record was the first entry on its files.