A FORMER butcher and postman who has served either meat or mail to thousands of people has celebrated his 105th birthday.

George Mabbs marked the occasion on Friday, May 4 with a family meal and cake at his sheltered home in John Lamb Court, in The Bye Way, Harrow Weald.

Daughter Val Hurwood, 62, said: “He had a really good time and he had a lot of visits from friends in the block and he was really very touched by that. They brought him a food hamper they had put together and other gifts they had bought individually and he stayed up to about 9.30pm talking and reminiscing, which was pretty good going.”

The great-grandfather and his late wife Lilian met in North Kensington where they both grew up and later married, celebrating 71 years before she died in 2003. They moved to Greenford, then to a house in Carmelite Road, Harrow Weald, in 1948, where their youngest child, Val, was born.

His other children are Frederick Mabbs, now 77, David Mabbs, 71, and Pamela Pink, 66, and he has nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Mrs Hurwood said: “For most of his life he worked as a manager in various butcher shops, in Epsom and central London, and he worked in Matthews, in Long Elmes, when I was in primary school in the 1950s and 60s.

“When he got older he gave up butchery and went to work at Harrow Post Office, in College Road, in the 1970s and he was a postman in the Harrow Weald area.

“He retired when he was about 68.”

In 1953, the father-of-four was featured in the local press for catching a burglar who had been stealing coins from numerous domestic electricity meters in the family’s street.

Mrs Hurwood said her father’s great love all his life has been horse racing and added: “I consider myself very lucky to have my father for so long. He’s a very strong man and always supported his family.

“Ironically for a butcher, his favourite food is a cheese sandwich or roll and he has one every day and it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm.”