A RESPECTED former schoolteacher has died at the age of 102.

Annie Chadwick, whose late husband Robert was once the headteacher at Durham's long-established Blue Coat School, passed away peacefully in hospital last Saturday.

Mrs Chadwick, who was born on August 18, 1903, in Hetton-le-Hole, Wearside, had six brothers and six sisters.

She began her training as a teacher in 1923 at Langham Towers College in Sunderland, now part of the city's university.

It was while teaching at Wheatley Hill and Eppleton that she met fellow teacher Robert Chadwick, who she married.

Later, when he was head at Blue Coat, he wrote a definitive history of the school on its 250th anniversary in 1958.

The mother of two sons, David and Arthur, Mrs Chadwick also had seven grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild and spent many hours telling her family of her times as a young woman in the North-East.

Her son Arthur recounted some of her early experiences, including how as a young girl she would travel to London - but in those days it was cheaper to get the overnight boat from Sunderland to the capital.

He said she had remembered vividly standing among a hushed crowd in Hetton as a man was literally drummed out of the community by a resident beating a drum.

Her family had listened in fascination as she told them of the night she drew back her bedroom curtains to see a Zeppelin aircraft hovering in the sky.

The German craft had mistaken a burning Eppleton pit heap for an industrial complex and dropped its payload of bombs on it.

After her husband's retirement, the Chadwick's moved to Pittington, County Durham, where they became active members of St Laurence's Church at Hallgarth.

Over the past six years, she had been a resident at Ashwood Park Residential Home in Easington Colliery, County Durham.

Her funeral service will be held at St Laurence's Church tomorrow at 12.30pm.