Oldest Birthday Honours recipient is 'delighted'

The oldest recipient on this year's Birthday Honours List has said she is "delighted and very grateful" to be recognised.

Pat Knifton Hough, who is 101, has dedicated 57 years to amateur dramatics in Nantwich, Cheshire.

She has been awarded a BEM for services to theatre and to the community for her work, which helped bring about the continued growth and the future of Nantwich Players Theatre.

"I've enjoyed every minute of my work with the theatre. I just feel thrilled to bits really," Knifton Hough said.

She was one of the original members of a group that created the venue within a former Quaker meeting house, after taking it over in 1980 from Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council, which had been using it as a records office.

The 300-year-old building was converted into an 82-seat theatre, with surrounding corridors used to create a foyer and backstage area.

"Effectively, that is the building that we still operate," said the Nantwich Players chairman Jeremy Acklam, although they had since extended into the former funeral parlour next door.

"We're immensely grateful, as is Nantwich, for the work that Pat and her colleagues did," he said.

The theatre has about 160 members and puts on 10 productions per year, which Akclam estimated was about twice the size of the organisation Knifton Hough helped create.

"We're really strongly building on her legacy and so grateful that she still attends almost every production at the age of 101," he said.

He described her as "incredibly generous" and said she was "always looking at positives" and focusing on what could be achieved for the local community.

"I'm very, very pleased that Pat has been recognised in this way," he said.

"It's something that we think is very fitting and she is such a lovely person that it really couldn't have happened for a better person."

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