A National Treasure

100 year-old Joan Capel demonstrates that age is no barrier to voluntary work!

This is a busy year for special centenaries – and one greatly admired volunteer at National Trust property Erddig in Wales has marked her own 100 years by sharing her recipe for keeping youthful.

“I volunteered at Erddig to keep me active in retirement and have been repaid a hundredfold,” says Joan. “My philosophy for life is that the woman who works and is not bored, is never old and I intend to repay Erddig by spending my centenary in 2018 still serving it.”

Joan has been a volunteer at the 17th century mansion for more than 26 years, firstly as a house steward and then becoming involved in setting up and running the bookshop which opened around 15 years ago.

“I am not a native of this area and when I saw in the paper about the Prince of Wales opening this National Trust property I said, “I’ve never heard of it, let’s have a go.” So I visited and liked it and then came fairly regularly.

“I spread my favours a little bit with other properties nearby but at Erddig they served proper, real, honest-to-goodness, eatable food. When you’d had a meal here you felt you’d been fed and so this was the one that I came to most often.