A grand old lady once voted Hackney’s ‘personality of the year’ when she passed her driving test at 77 has died at the age of 105.

Mavis Jackson arrived in east London from Burma in 1957 with eight children to join her husband Horace and set up home in Clapton, where she gave birth to another three.

Her funeral was held at St Jude’s Church in Clapton on February 19.

Mavis was an Anglo-Burmese British subject invited to the UK in 1957 with her children when Burma became independent.

“Mum came for better education for us,” her 68-year-old son Paul said. “I was just two at the time.

“We didn’t speak Burmese and didn’t fit in when the country became independent. So Mum accepted the invitation from the British ambassador to come here. She was exactly where she wanted to be.”

The family have lived in Milden Hall Road in Lower Clacton since 1973, where Mavis lived out her days, still active to the end.

She went to evening classes when she was 75 and passed her GCSE German so she could write to three of her 42 grandchildren who live in Germany.

Then she took driving lessons at 77 and passed her test.

“It was my fourth attempt — I wasn’t going to give up,” a determined Mavis told the Hackney Gazette on her 100th birthday in 2018. “It was like a new life for me, driving all over in my little car.”

She was voted the Gazette’s ‘Personality of the Year’ by readers in 1997.

Mavis was a trained nurse and teacher but couldn’t do a full-time job while bringing up her large family. It didn’t stop her voluntary work as a parent-governor at Homerton's Cardinal Pole School for 33 years.

She was born in Rangoon in 1918 to a Scottish father and Burmese mother, nine days after the Great War ended.

But it was unsafe to remain when the Second World War broke out and the Japanese invaded. Her first husband was killed in a Japanese air raid and she was evacuated to India.

Mavis returned to Burma after the war — but even then it wasn’t safe to stay when the country became independent in 1957 because she wasn’t ethnically Burmese and didn’t even speak the native language.

Her second husband Horace, a fireman in Rangoon, came on ahead to the UK and got a job at Manor House Hospital as a boilerman. He found a place in Lower Clapton for Mavis and the children.

Mavis had 11 children of her own, or 14 if you count her second husband Horace’s first family, 42 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren.

Horace died in 2001 at 94. Mavis said she only really felt old herself when she reached 100 and got a card from the late Queen — then a card from the King when she reached 105 last November.