A WOMAN who was was awarded an MBE for her services to health in Manchester has died, aged 106.

Lily Nahum spent 52 years working as a medical secretary at the Royal Salford Hospital, and even after retiring, was missed so much that she agreed to continue working part time.

She was born in Tunis in 1903, the youngest of three sisters, but her father who worked in the textile trade, brought the family to Manchester, because of its importance in the cotton industry.

Lily was educated at Manchester High School for Girls, where she started in 1914. King George V was on the throne, Burnley won the FA Cup and the First World War had just started.

The school held a party in 2002 to mark her 100th birthday, and that of Isobel Hall, another old girl from the same class who had reached her centenary.

Lily, who would have been 107 on March 3, lived on her own in a flat at Platt Fields until six years ago, when she moved to the Morris Feinmann Home in Didsbury, where she died last Sunday.

Personality

 Her great niece Sonia Kliman said: "She had been in reasonably good health until not too long ago when she developed a chest infection. She was treated with antibiotics, but sadly though we thought she was getting over it, she didn't really respond."

Sonia, from Sale, added: "Lily was the kind of character that you don't see too many of these days. She had a tremendous personality, but she was also very strong-minded and determined. She enjoyed her life to the full, and she will be much missed.

"She was always very charismatic, and anyone who spoke with her would warm to her. She was forever happy, sociable and friendly.

"She came from the kind of background in which fathers frowned on their daughters going out to earn a living, but Lily wasn't having any of it.

"She took the view that she was certainly not going to sit at home sewing when she could be doing something useful. The only reason her father gave way was that she took a job working in a hospital.

"She became one of Europe's top medical secretaries, winning the MBE in the 1970s. She was so fast at typing, that when the-then new fangled electric typewriters were introduced, they were too slow for her.

Character

"Lily never married, but she always regarded her nephews and nieces as her children and treated them as such. She was a real character, and even towards the end when she had difficulties with her memory, she would chatter on about anything and everything.

"During her working days she would always take breakfast at the Midland Hotel, where she relished seeing the great and the good in what was undoubtedly the best hotel in the city - then walk the mile and a half to work.

"She always used to enjoy a good lunch in the hospital canteen too. She was a great believer in people having three square meals a day, and could never understand in later years how young women would eat only a sandwich at midday."

Lily Nahum was interred after a funeral service, at Urmston Jewish Cemetery, where her parents and her two sisters are buried.

Classmates celebrate memorable centuries

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