Catherine Masters

Catherine Murray Millar Masters (née Cromb; 23 November 1899 – 14 February 2011) was a British supercentenarian.

Life
Masters was born in Dundee, Scotland, the daughter of David Lyall Cromb (1875–1961), an editor of the local Courier newspaper. The family moved to London in 1908 (or 1909) where her father eventually changed his career path to literary agent. Masters married twice, had a son, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 1921, she married John McInnes, who worked for a tea importing company, but McInnes died in 1962, and their son died of cancer in 1968. Her marriage to her second husband, Albert Masters, lasted from 1972 to his death in 1993. Following this she lived with one of her grandsons before he emigrated to South Africa in 2006.

In 2009, she wrote to Buckingham Palace to complain that she had received a birthday card with the same design for five consecutive years. This led to a 40 minute visit and an apology from Prince William at the Grange Care Centre in Stanford-in-the-Vale, Oxfordshire, where she lived from around 2006.

At the end of her life, Masters was the oldest living person born in Scotland and the third oldest person in the United Kingdom. She died from complications following an operation to insert a heart pacemaker, but was able to live with no nursing at all up to 10 days before her death. She was survived by a 48-year-old grandson and two great grand-daughters.