Alice Millington has died at the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, aged 92. The youngest and last surviving of seven children of the late Charles Pierce, a builder from an Enniskillen family going back at least eight generations and his wife Catherine, née Frazer, a farmer’s daughter from Drumclounish, Florencecourt, Alice was born in Ben View, the family home on Windmill Hill, Enniskillen.

She attended the Model School, Enniskillen and then the Collegiate School. At the outbreak of the Second World War, at the age of 18, she began training as a nurse, at the Royal Sick Children’s Hospital in Belfast, but was traumatised by bombs which fell very close in the Blitz of April 1941 so she joined the Land Army and spent five much happier years producing cereals and vegetables near Magilligan. Recently she spoke at length, in her own gently humorous but articulate way, about her experiences, on a television programme celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Land Army.

After the war she was surprised to find herself the successful applicant for a job running the dairy on the Dunleath Estate at Ballywalter. Years later she reminisced that she had bluffed her way through the interview! It was during her years there that she met Sam White, secretary of the Ulster Farmers’ Union. They married in 1955 and set up home near Dundonald, where Alice ran their poultry farm. Later they bought a larger farm in the countryside, about three miles away. Their happy life together was tragically brought to a close when the tractor which Sam was driving on a steep field overturned, killing him instantly.

She continued to live on the farm and remarried in middle age. Alice’s father had served in the Inniskillings in India, at Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, in the 1890s. There he had befriended an Anglo-Indian military family, the Millingtons, and when they all had come to England after the Boer War, he arranged for three of them to marry three of his sisters. Alice’s second husband, George, a retired university lecturer from Birmingham, was her first cousin from one of these marriages. He enjoyed life in Co. Down but unfortunately developed alzheimer’s disease, which Alice tended with gentle care. He died in 1997.

For her last 12 years Alice lived in sheltered accommodation in Dundonald, leading a full life, remaining sharp and clear in her mind, creating original needlepoint, corresponding in her firm, round hand with relatives round the world and keeping up with friends, including regular meetings with contemporaries from Enniskillen Collegiate School who lived in the Belfast area. She drove her own car until three months before her death, though in recent years only to the supermarket and to church. She had an unshakable faith.

Until her last Christmas she played the piano for hymn singing in the community where she lived. She had no children from either marriage but loved her six brothers’ and sisters’ children dearly. She is survived by 20 of her nieces and nephews, Mary Scandrett, Ruth Colvin, Henry Colvin, Leslie Jackson, Richard Pierce, Robert Pierce, John Chestnutt, Charles Chestnutt, Rosemary Butler, Harriet Johnston, Charles Pierce, David Pierce, Oliver Pierce, Vivien Pierce, Henry Pierce, Bill Pierce, another Robert Pierce, Hilary Crawfoot, Miriam Dunn and another Henry Pierce. Her nephew Arthur Jackson and niece Catherine Shaw predeceased her. Her nephew James Pierce also died recently.