Two next door neighbours are both celebrating - their 101st birthdays.

Josie Church and Anne Wallace-Hadrill have lived side-by-side since the 1980s.

The great-grandmothers share something else in common - the same birthday after being born on the same day in 1924.

Anne, who grew up in Hampshire, first moved to her current house following the death of her husband, John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a historian.

Josie said: “I think life has gone quite quickly.

“Anne was very busy when she was younger, so was I, and was very productive and creative.

“She did a lot of painting and tapestry, and she was always busy, and I was always busy doing something else, somewhere else, because that's the sort of life we live.

“I don't think we've thought much about the time passing. It's just passed.”

Both women threw themselves into volunteering and creative activities after their husbands died.

Josie’s husband, Peter, passed away shortly in the 1990s and the women formed a friendship.

Anne read English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a radio mechanic during the Second World War.

St. Hilda’s was an all-female college at the time, but Anne says: “We weren’t forbidden from seeing men.

“We were expected to live decent lives.”

She says she enjoyed university, but it was both a lot of fun and a lot of work.

She met her husband at a family gathering.

After graduating, Anne worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary.

She said: “I was always interested in words. It was my trade.”

She was very proud to receive a medal for her service from the Royal Navy last year, described as “long overdue" by the representative who gave it to her.

Originally from Manchester, Josie did her training at Preston Royal Infirmary and remembers the introduction of the NHS.

She said training was “three years of hard work”.

“In those days,” Josie said, “You had to live in and you couldn't get married, and it was very strict. People wouldn't put up with that sort of life now.”

Her time nursing during the Second World War included a “chilling” experience of caring for SS German soldiers.

Josie said: “They weren’t very nice. They didn’t wish to be taken care of by us. They were very difficult patients. "

She moved with her husband to her current house in Oxford so he could continue his degree at University College, interrupted by the war, and they “lived the life of an undergraduate”.

Half of the undergraduates had been to war while the other half were young students just matriculating.

Josie said: “Oxford was very strange because each college had a large intake of older people who’d gone through the war and were taking up their university places.

“So you’d get the old men and then the young 18-year-olds coming in from school.

“Oxford wasn’t like it is now. There were quite a lot of married undergraduates, which you don’t get, I don’t think, now.”

After marrying, she worked for a while and looked after her family.

Her husband was a housemaster at a boys’ boarding school, and she was the house nurse, meaning she had an “interesting” few years looking after 120 boys.

She has three "wonderful" children - Chris, Pamela and Andrew.

Anne’s son James lives in Poole and Andrew in Cambridge.

They don’t remember the moment they discovered they had the same birthday but enjoyed the celebrations arranged for them last year.

“We live in the most amazing road. It’s like one big, extended family,” Josie said.

“Everybody knows everybody else. If you have a problem, you just give a shout and somebody will come.

“It was wonderful, we had a lovely day last year. It was quite unexpected because I didn’t know anything about it.

“It's just an amazing street. I think we are lucky.”

As for tips to lead a long life, Josie says: “Just live.

“There's not much you can do. You just go on from one thing to the next.

“You do what seems to be needing doing, and then you do that, and then something else takes its place. You just go on from one thing to another.

“We don't engineer our lives. I think they've just engineered us.”

They were both born on April 1, 1924.