Happy 110th

WORLD War I’s last surviving combatant Claude “Chuckles” Choules will celebrate his 110th birthday with a low-key party, his son said, describing his father as a “celebrity” who hates war.

British-born Choules, who lives in an Australian nursing home, will mark his birthday just days after the death of Frank Buckles made him the conflict’s last living male veteran.

“He’s blind and he’s deaf, but we get up close to him and we shout at him and he understands,” his son Adrian Choules, 76, told AFP from Perth in Western Australia.

Choules lied about his age to join the Royal Navy in World War I and was an officer in the Royal Australian Navy during the Second World War.