In September 2017, we featured a pitiful pensioner exposed for bicycling to funerals and their subsequent wakes with Tupperware boxes to raid buffet tables. At the time, Theresa Doyle’s atrocious antics were quite rightly slammed as “shameless,” but today we can share the story of an all-together better granny on a bike.

Lauded as “Super Gran” in The Sun this morning, grandma of six Pauline Bridge gets up at 5am six days per week to deliver newspapers on her bicycle.

Pauline Bridge, 82, took over the round, which encompasses 32 houses in Southampton, Hampshire from her grandchildren ten years ago and reckons to have covered around 5,000 miles on her 40-year-old bicycle.

Continue the thread

Two stories to keep beside you

Hero of the Hour 2021 – 86-year-old steeplejack Peter Harknett – That 86-year-old steeplejack Peter Harknett has just completed his final job climbing St Giles Church in Horsted Keynes is remarkable.
The same people in the Steeple archive

Hero of the Hour 2021 – Peter Harknett

That 86-year-old steeplejack Peter Harknett has just completed his final job climbing St Giles Church in Horsted Keynes is remarkable.

Cheerfully, of why she does it, this spirited lady stated she aims to carry on until she turns 90 and remarked:

“I love it and I find it keeps me fit. I start at half six and it’s about a mile and a half. I deliver to 32 houses. I cycle every day, I always cycle.”

Of her, one of her granddaughters, Megan, 17, added:

Advertisement

“She gets up so early every day, Monday to Saturday without fail, in all weather conditions.”

“We can’t believe what she is still achieving and she puts us youngsters to shame. She is an amazing mum and grandma – and we are all very proud of her.”

Heroine of the Hour 2021 – Pauline Bridge: Granny papergirl on a bike – 82-year-old granny Pauline Bridge gets up at 5am daily to deliver newspapers on her bicycle; she’s quite the contrast to bicycling pensioner and funeral crasher Theresa Doyle.
In 2017, we featured the story of another bicycling pensioner, Theresa Doyle (AKA ‘The Grim Eater’ and ‘The Phantom Mourner’). Whilst 82-year-old pensioner Pauline Bridge cycles daily to deliver newspapers, Doyle, at the time 65, was exposed for bicycling to funerals of people she didn’t know to raid the buffets at the wakes that followed six-times-per week. Of her, Margaret Whitehead of Wargrave, Berkshire told ‘The Sun’: “She got my son Kevin to give her a lift from the church to the Irish Centre for the wake [for her deceased 42-year-old daughter, Catherine]. There were a lot of people at the funeral from Catherine’s work so I just assumed she was a colleague. When I spoke to her though she told me she used to work with Catherine as a waitress. My daughter never worked as a waitress. She was eating from the buffet like there was no tomorrow.”
Advertisement
Sadly, with the news moving online and print paper sales hugely down, the number of paperboys and papergirls in Britain is fast coming towards its end. Pauline Bridge claims she intends to carry on as a ‘papergran’ for at least another eight years, but will her services actually still be required?