Joan Chester will see them for her party bash at the Cuffley Manor home in Potters Bar, where she has been living since turning 99.
Her actual birthday was on Thursday (Oct 23), when the town mayor of Elstree and Borehamwood, Cllr Alpha Collins, dropped in to meet her.
Joan had married Charlie Chester when she was already 74 and was thrown into the limelight with their picture splashed on the front of a glitzy showbiz mag.
The retired police secretary from Temple Fortune, who grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb, first married her next-door childhood sweetheart Albert Hardiman in 1946, a close friend of Charlie Chester and his family. But Albert died in 1966.
“My marital home in ‘The Suburb’ was opposite Charlie’s house in Urskine Hill — that’s how we met,” Joan recalled in her memoirs. “He lived there for 30 years before moving away. But he came back and stayed in our house whenever he had to work in London, which became his ‘second’ home.”
Widow Joan was working as a shorthand-typist at Golders Green police station in 1976 when she met and married her next husband, Superintendent Joe Jarvis. She was often called to Scotland Yard to take notes during police interviews because of her accuracy and high speed in shorthand. But she was widowed a second time.
Charlie had moved to Elstree by then, before finally moving to Whitstable in Kent. He was widowed himself in the 1990s but had kept in touch with Joan and her family — and eventually they hit it off.
Joan would travel with him to his Sunday night Radio 2 show, Charlie Chester’s Soapbox, broadcast from the BBC studios in Birmingham.
Her eldest of three daughters, Lisa Klein, recalls: “Mum’s friendship with Charlie caught fire and they married in 1994.
“They had known each other for years — the two families were close. Charlie even carried me as a baby to my christening in 1948.”
Joan and Charlie tied the knot in the Crypt at Canterbury Cathedral and were featured in Yours magazine in July 1994, with the headline ‘Cheerful Charlie celebrates by marrying’.
Daughter Lisa, a mum-of-three herself from Shenley, near Borehamwood, revealed: “She was always impressed with his showbiz life. My sister Marguerite and I worked in the theatre at one time and Mum always came to our opening nights.
“But she still had all her secretarial skills she learned at Pitman’s in the late 1930s. Even two years ago when Mum was 103 we asked her to write something in shorthand — she was able to do it and could read it back.”
Joan’s parents, Francis and Beatrice Puffett, had sent her to Pitman’s secretarial college in North Finchley in 1938-39. She went on to work in central London right through the war years.
Joan remembers Charlie as a talented artist, poet, songwriter and published children’s author as well as a top radio and TV presenter, who donated much of the proceeds to his beloved Water Rats showbiz charity.
‘Cheerful’ Charlie Chester, who broadcast almost continuously from the 1940s to the 90s, died aged 83 in June 1997 at the Brinsworth showbiz care home in Twickenham, following a stroke. Joan moved into Cuffley Manor care home two years later.
