With her floral bomber-style blouson, dusky pink lipstick and mid-heeled black patent shoes, Connie Galilee could give Britain’s most stylish baker – Mary Berry – a run for her money.

Cooking was Connie’s forte throughout her career, and still is in retirement. Similarly, Mary Berry is seeing a resurgence in her success in older age, becoming a household name as a judge on BBC2’s popular The Great British Bake Off.

Sporting a trendy colourful jacket not dissimilar to one Mary sported on the show, which famously sold out at high street store Zara, Connie says she used to regularly make her own clothes but now settles for re-styling and customising garments she buys.

It may not sound such a mean feat, nor does baking batches of scones, sumptuous cakes and making jars of marmalade, but Connie recently celebrated her 100th birthday.

Her culinary expertise has played a part in maintaining her health and longevity, as she always eats a balanced meal.

“I have been a domestic science teacher and I never eat meals without balancing the ingredients. I don’t over eat and I think that is the secret to it. I think we are what we eat,” says Connie adamantly.

“I think the biggest problem is that people prefer quantity to quality. They expect their plates to be filled from border to border – and no matter what it is, they will eat it.

“You have to have protein, fat, carbohydrates and minerals and salts and you should have a bit of everything at every meal. If you have a boiled egg and bread and butter, you have three things you want. It’s easy enough,” Connie explains.

Connie’s ‘meat and tatie’ pies are renowned with family and friends, and her marmalade is popular, too. She often bakes for friends at her Heaton home, where they regularly gather for University of the Third Age (U3A) meetings.

Connie’s longevity could also be in the genes. Her mum, Ethel, lived until she was 99.

Moving across the room at Bradford People’s Centre’s weekly Wednesday drop-in, Connie demonstrates the agility of someone 20 years younger. She’s almost deaf and walks with a stick, but other than that, Connie is fit and well and can recall past events as though they happened yesterday.

The centenary of the First World War this year has a particular significance for Connie as she was born the year before it started.

“King George V had been on the throne for three years when I was born. I saw King George and Queen Mary in Lister Park. I was lifted up to see them, I was only a child,” Connie recalls.

She remembers Edward VIII’s ascension to the throne and, following his abdication, the arrival of the Queen’s father, King George VI.

Although just an infant when the First World War ended, Connie remembers harrowing newspaper headlines reporting the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme. “The local paper had page after page on the Bradford Pals being wiped out. There were only eight or nine of them left,” says Connie.

She talks of the city’s convalescent home for wounded soldiers on the site where the Bradford Royal Infirmary later opened.

“We used to see them in hospital blue wandering around Duckworth Lane with arms and legs missing, the wounded soldiers were sent there to recuperate,” explains Connie.

Rationing was another recollection, particularly during the Second World War when Connie was struggling to find ingredients as a cookery teacher in the Staffordshire mining village where her career took her.

“Everything was rationed and I was teaching cookery! All the children were looking for food to stock the school pantry. If anybody kept a shop and got a large amount of something they couldn’t ration like tins of treacle or jam, they saw to it that I got it!” she recalls. “If anybody had hens, I got the odd egg and if anybody kept pigs I got the odd bit of lard.”

Connie recalls young boys taking it in turns to stand on the school roof and bang a frying pan if they saw the planes coming over during the war.

“They would beat the frying pan and we had to get out of the school and into the shelters – in five minutes we were out,” she recalls. “Life was very spectacular.”

Life was also tough, particularly witnessing hardship in Bradford. “I had the flu that wiped everybody out. In 1917, after the First World War, flu killed more people than had been killed in the war,” says Connie, referring to the deadly influenza epidemic which swept through Europe.

“Bradford was awful in those days. There were horrible slums, dysentery and typhoid fever. If you had no money, you couldn’t have a doctor. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat and if you didn’t eat, you died,” she says.

Teaching wasn’t Connie’s vocation, but work was scarce. “When they asked me what I wanted to do, I said ‘anything but a teacher’. But there were teachers required and people were walking the streets without jobs so I took the only job that was going and that was teaching.”

Connie spent seven years teaching in Staffordshire before returning to Bradford where she taught at Bolling and Drummond Park Schools until retirement.

Now, like Mary Berry, she’s passing on the enjoyment of cooking and baking to another generation.

“Teaching was a means to an end, but I got job satisfaction out of it and I meet the children now and they are great-grandmothers! They are still baking and they still remember what I taught them. You feel you’ve done a bit of good,” smiles Connie.