HER family has bought the Daily Echo every day for more than 100 years - and Daphne Harris has no intention of breaking the habit.

The 95-year-old, who maintains she would be "completely lost" without a copy of her local paper, believes she could be the Echo's most loyal reader.

Her father, Arthur Lodder, started buying the paper when he opened his chemist shop on the corner of Seabourne Road and Woodside Road in either 1903 or 1904 - just three or four years after the Echo first started publishing.

"I don't know which year he opened the shop but I know he took the Echo from the start," she said.

"Then, when I got married in 1932, I started taking it and I don't think I've missed a day since.

"If I don't have it every day, I just miss the bits of local news.

"It's part of my life, I guess, and I just feel lost without it."

Her father's shop even featured in the Echo in September 1940, when it was bombed during the Second World War.

Daphne, of St Catherine's Road in Southbourne, still has a copy of the Echo picture showing the devastation that occurred.

After she married, she and her husband William Harris ran a motorcycle shop on the corner of Salisbury Road, Boscombe and advertised in the Echo.

"When you look at old papers, you realise how cheap everything was in those days," she said.

"Things have changed a lot, but I don't think Bournemouth has changed for the better."

Daphne has four children, 10 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, but still finds time to buy the Echo every day.

Her daughter, Lola Barker, who lives in Poole, said: "If any of us wants to know anything, we always ask her because she seems to know everything that's going on."

One hundred years of news...

When Daphne's father started buying the Echo in either 1903 or 1904, the world had just seen the first Tour de France cycle race and scientist Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel prize.

The Suffragette movement was in its infancy and details of the atrocities in the Balkans were beginning to emerge.

Britain and France put their differences behind them to sign the Entente Cordiale in 1904, but war was declared between Russia and Japan.

In 1932, when Daphne got married and started buying her own Echo, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, the Nazi party won 230 seats in Germany's Reichstag elections and Sydney Harbour Bridge opened.

Franklin D Roosevelt became the 32nd President of the USA and King George V made the first royal Christmas Day broadcast to the empire.