An inspirational woman who is writing her third book has celebrated a milestone birthday.

Freda Gregory celebrated her 100th birthday at the Jubilee Centre in Bury on Thursday.

Joined by many friends and family including her daughter Sally Mason, Freda celebrated her landmark birthday and spoke about her love of dancing as well as writing her third book.

Freda was born in Blackpool on September 20, 1924, to Elsie and Harry Riley. Her mother Elsie was a spiritualist and attended many seances that were very popular in the 1930s.

This in turn made Freda very spiritual and she always believed that she would live to 97 as a clairvoyant had once told her and therefore she never thought she would live to 100.

Freda wrote her first book "Sigh with the Tide" aged 80 and self-published aged 82. The book is a family saga set in Blackpool between the wars.

A sequel followed three years later, "Tides of Destiny", which followed the next generation of the Blackpool family through the highs and lows of life during the Second World War.

Freda had lived through and drew on these often thrilling years in Blackpool for her second novel. Blackpool was host to the army and air force and American air bases.

Read more: Theatre Royal Ramsbottom reopening after £20k investment

The glamorous American visitors thronged the Tower Ballroom and Winter Gardens and taught the jive to the local girls to the accompaniment of the British air force’s own dance band, the famous Squadron Aires.

Freda was a regular during the war at both these venues and continued her passion for ballroom dancing all her life until Covid led to the closure of her local club and she was forced to stop at the age of 96.

Freda always had dreams of becoming a writer however on the first day at a job at the Blackpool Gazette, she was mistaken for another girl so never continued at the job.

The head teacher at her school had recommended her to the Gazette as she consistently topped the class in English and was passionate about writing as a career.

On the declaration of War in 1939, Freda was immediately seconded by the Department of Works and Pensions, which had evacuated from London to Blackpool’s grandest hotel, The Metropole, where she worked in a tiny cubicle, as a typist for the duration of the war, all hopes of a writing career put to one side again.

In 1946, Freda married her first husband Jim who was a teacher at St Paul's Primary School in Radcliffe, and she was working at a fabric shop in Bury.

In 1954, she had her daughter Sally and, undeterred by motherhood, was voted in as town councillor in 1959 in Radcliffe until 1962. She was one of the first working-class women to become a councillor in the area.

After 16 years of marriage, Freda and Jim’s marriage broke down and Freda started a new life just in the next street, to be near to her eight-year-old daughter, who stayed in the family home with Jim, attending St Paul's School, where he was teaching. Freda retrained as a hairdresser and set up her own business at home.

She met her second husband Ronnie and married him in the late 1970s.

Read more: Restart the Heart reaches runners-up in Make a Difference Awards 2024

As Ronnie’s health deteriorated in the early 1980s, Freda gave up her business and applied for a ground floor council flat in Radcliffe, which they finally moved into only a month or so before he passed away.

Devastated by the loss, after a year alone, Freda joined various adult education classes in Bury, including creative writing and painting classes, as well as continuing her ballroom dancing exams and social dancing evenings.

She also joined her local tenants association after noticing the less than perfect condition of her small block of flats and the area she had moved to.

She became the secretary of the Customer Review Group committee meetings.

She eventually gave up the secretary’s job when she was 96, after being awarded Inspirational Individual of the Year award in 2017 by Six Town Housing at the age of 93.

In 1990, she met her third partner, Bill, at an art class in Bury, who was a retired Marine bandsman and a keen ballroom dancer.

They spent a very happy 15 years together until his death in 2005.

Again, Freda set about rebuilding her life and started to write her first novel, after delving into her family history, as a catharsis from grief and a distraction from her life alone once more.

Read more: Radcliffe: Asda asks customers to donate children's books

She continues to live independently with some help with shopping from her neighbour, very content to live alone in the flat she has made her home for the past 40 years.

Freda has now written her autobiography, which is being reviewed for the final tweaks.

Her daughter Sally is in constant contact via visits and video calls from her home in Bristol and Freda still enjoys visits to the hairdresser and the occasional shopping trip.

Speaking about the secret to living to 100, Freda said that it is ballroom dancing.

She said: “Especially ballroom dancing as it’s great exercise. You can see if on Strictly Come Dancing, it’s quite athletic.

“I was very familiar with the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, it was one of the big dancing venues during the war, it was never shut down.

“A regiment of Yanks came over when I was about 17, and they introduced the jive, and everyone started doing it. we used to jive the night away with them.

“I was a dancer ever since.”