A pioneering former journalist who was the first-ever female reporter on her paper has celebrated her 100th birthday.

Barbara Buchanan, pictured left, who began her career at the now defunct daily Bristol Evening World in 1933, reached the milestone age on New Year’s Day.

She rose to the role of woman’s page editor of the Evening World before its closure in 1962, and then joined the city’s remaining daily, the Evening Post, as a feature writer.

Barbara, who was widely known in the West Country for her campaigning journalism and her Saturday Chatterday column in the Post, received the accolade of Britain’s Woman Journalist of the Year in 1967.

Her award citation said: “Miss Buchanan’s range of writing covered many of the major social problems of the day. The panel were particularly impressed by her series on cervical cancer in women and the campaign she mounted for improved facilities for tests in the South West.”

Barbara spent her 100th birthday being visited at the nursing home near Bristol where she lives by her two sons and other members of the family – including three grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

She once wrote a column on the trials of trying to interview the very elderly, in which she mused what she would do if she reached the age of 118.

In it she said: “If I do reach 118 years of age and some fathead of a reporter comes to ask me how I did it I shall be able to say; ‘Never took a rest, my dear. Went to bed late and got up early. Ate and drank all the wrong things. Don’t deserve to be alive at all.'”