I was a Wren in World War Two – now, at 101, I teach yoga in the village hall

Dorothea Barron maintains a fitness regime many half her age would struggle with – and says she feels as sprightly as she did at 16

Nov 1, 2025 - 17:48

Nov 1, 2025 - 18:02

I was a Wren in World War Two – now, at 101, I teach yoga in the village hall

‘It gives me a feeling of control, I suppose,’ says Dorothea of yoga Credit: Clara Molden

The sun is shining brightly in the Hertfordshire village of Allen’s Green. Yesterday, Dorothea Barron had her annual flu jab – but at 101-years-old, the word “frail” falls a long way short of the woman I meet today; neat and smart in a little mini dress and fitted white bolero jacket.

Dorothea’s jewel-encrusted black suede espadrilles are kicked to the side and she is flat on her back on the drawing room floor, a position of strength not weakness. Her toned legs are taut and straight, pointing up to the ceiling like an arrow. Slowly, she rolls them right over her head as if she’s folded herself up like a neat little sandwich, toes reaching way over her head and landing back on the floor.

“Keep those legs very straight,” she tells me as I struggle to follow on. I am, give or take a year or three, half her age. “Bend from here,” she says, pinching her hip bone. Dorothea, nicknamed Wink, has been teaching yoga for 40 years. Why stop at 80, 90 or even 100? She was still doing the splits at 80, even though the hip replacement came at 85. And in her sixties, she was doing headstands and handstands, a perfect 5ft 2in dart reaching up to the sky.

Yesterday, despite the visit to the GP, like every other Monday for the last 40 years, she made her way down the road to the village hall to teach the yoga class that has been the staple in her adult life. She is led there by habit and geographic instinct rather than good eyesight – she is registered blind due to macular degeneration and can no longer drive. There’s no fuss, no prep and no overthinking – “oh no no!” she says to any suggestion of “targets” or competitiveness.

Getting every muscle where it should be

“Oh I haven’t got a favourite position – you are trying to analyse what I just do for pleasure! It gives me a feeling of control, I suppose. You don’t just take a position. You work at it and you get every muscle where it should be.”

Her six friends, including Susie (“not 100 yet”), Fiona (“also in her nineties”) and Jean (“must be about 85”) meet there at 10.30am every Monday for company and for stretching, an improvised form of yoga, keeping stiffness, injury and loneliness at bay in one enjoyable 90-minute session. Before Covid, Dorothea ran two more classes on a Wednesday. Now, she no longer practises at home but uses Mondays to move, stretch and work the octogenarian/nonagenarian/centenarian muscles.

When she was younger (although not that much younger), she practised full Iyengar yoga – headstands, handstands and all manner of moves devised by the guru BKS Iyengar, who visited nearby Harlow in the 1970s and got Dorothea hooked, building on her existing love of keep-fit. She shows me a dog-eared and disintegrating book, cello taped at the spine from overuse, called Light on Yoga: over 200 postures and 14 breathing exercises described in detail, by BKS Iyengar, foreword by Yehudi Menuhin.

Dorothea practised these more advanced moves with her late husband, Andrew, a former RAF navigator who flew more than 40 missions with the 223 Squadron. They had been married 72 years by the time of his death (he died in hospital in 2021). “He did the perfect handstand,” Dorothea says. There are two busts of him in the house – both sculpted by her – “and as I go to bed at night, I say to him ‘oh darling, have I had a day!’”

Yoga wear for this grandmother (of four) and great-grandmother (of four) is her grandson’s cricket whites and a tee. Her stomach is flat as pancake – “I’ve always been trim. I carried my two babies out here”, she says gesturing frontwards (Kati is 62, Fiona, 74, hardly babies anymore). She eats porridge and fruit or fruit and yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a simple supper – “maybe a chop or a quiche with one glass of wine and I like a tipple of whisky.” The odd snack might be a ginger or shortbread biscuit. It’s a no-fuss approach to food, simple yet disciplined.

As sprightly as the sporty 16-year-old Wren she once was

Dorothea was a Wren in World War Two, helping to train the D-Day troops in Scotland to learn semaphore before they were sent to Normandy. She is now among the last still alive. Falling short of the 5ft 3in height requirement by an inch, she padded out her shoes with cardboard and backcombed her hair. She became a visual signaller at the allied combined operations training centre HMS Hopetoun in Port Edgar, Scotland.

Dorothea as a WWII Wren — Dorothea is among the last World War Two Wrens still alive

Today, she maintains she feels exactly the same as that sporty 16-year-old Wren of 1940:

“Oh I don’t think about my actual age,” she says from a yoga position on the floor. Her body has kept up. “I never have to bend my knees when I pick up anything from the floor. I’m supple enough not to have to! Anybody coming to this as a beginner wouldn’t be able to do what I do unless they are a gymnast.”

Falls and trips which often plague people of her age, and lead to bigger problems, are not an issue for her. One yoga exercise concentrates on placing the feet and ankles flat against a wall, turning them first one way with ankles together, feet at first forming a v – but hers are so nimble they eventually form a flat straight line. Dorothea says, “You have to stretch and exercise your ankles even more as you get older because strong ankles prevent a fall. If I trip on a pavement, my ankles hold me.”

“I love life,” she says as she twists and turns on the carpet, “I get so excited when I have something to do.” On her 100th birthday, she celebrated by riding in a Spitfire.

An authoritative teacher who loves a dance

I can see why Dorothea is an excellent and long lasting yoga teacher. Her voice is authoritative and slow and, in the way of the best yoga/Pilates instructors, she keeps a running commentary: “Soles flat! Knees straight!... That is very good…Now creep down a bit at a time…You are managing that…with straight knees please…Don’t drop your head. Push your bottom! Forget everything else! Push that bottom up! Now tuck your head in. Yes, that’s better. Just concentrate on that bottom. Legs straight!”

“I don’t go in for targets at my age!” she cries mid pose, “I’m too grown up for that. You have to be inspired by yourself. You are just loosening up. Take your time. Let your body gradually bend.”

Dorothea has lived in this house where we are practising yoga since 1957. “I would never want mum to leave here,” says her daughter, Kati (who practised yoga with her parents while she was growing up), “because it’s like braille to her.” “Oh yes,” says Dorothea, “I know my way instinctively.”

In the last year or so, Dorothea Barron has achieved something of a celebrity status after her story was discovered by one of this year’s Telegraph Christmas Appeal charities, The Not Forgotten, which has been supporting veterans and service personnel suffering from injury, illness and isolation for over 105 years.

There has been two Buckingham Palace garden parties, meeting both Princess Anne and the Duchess of Gloucester, racing at Ascot, and in May, the national service of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey for the 80^thanniversary of VE Day. She has made friends with the pop star Matt Goss (who composed and recorded a 2024 single for The Not Forgotten) – and danced at his own concert at the London Palladium. “Oh he’s an absolute daaarling,” she says.

“I don’t care what people think,” she says. “And I don’t think about ageing. If you don’t think about ageing, you won’t age. Life is a continual battle. You just have to fight it. You won’t get anywhere if you succumb. You’ve got to have the fighting spirit your whole life.”