Her grandson said nobody would watch his grandmother play Fortnite. She has 24,000 followers and a world record
Cath Bowie was 69 when her grandson showed her Fortnite. He said nobody would join her or watch her. She bought a console, started streaming as grumpygran1948, and now plays every day to an audience of 24,000. Guinness World Records has named her the oldest female Fortnite streamer in the world.
27 September 2026
Photo: Guinness World Records, via BBC
A 78-year-old grandmother from the north-east of Scotland has been named the world’s oldest female Fortnite streamer by Guinness World Records, nine years after her teenage grandson introduced her to the game and told her that nobody would bother watching.
Cath Bowie, who grew up in Moray and now lives in Inverurie, broadcasts her games most days to an audience of more than 24,000 followers under the name grumpygran1948, the BBC reported on Thursday. Her certificate reads: “The oldest Fortnite streamer (female) is Cath Bowie (UK; aka grumpygran1948), who was 78 years old as of 1 September 2026.”
The red rag
She had tried video games before and none of them had held her. Fortnite did. “I was immediately hooked,” she said. She bought her own console, and it was then that her grandson, 17 at the time, told her what he thought of her chances as a streamer.
“As a young guy, he just couldn’t believe that his grandma would do such a thing and suggested that nobody would join me or watch me,” she told BBC Radio Scotland’s Breakfast programme.
Saying that was like a red rag to a bull to me. I would show him that I could do it. Twenty four thousand followers later and he doesn’t mention it. I wonder why?Cath Bowie
Photo: Cath Bowie, via BBC
What she plays
Fortnite is one of the most played games in the world, and the version she streams is the one that drops up to a hundred people onto an island to fight until a single player is left. She goes in alone, in pairs or in a squad of four.
“It’s a lovely, lovely game,” she said. “You’re trying to get the better of your opponents and eliminate them. But there’s no blood on the scene. You just shoot somebody and they either crawl about until they die or they’re just obliterated with the one shot. So there isn’t any mess, nothing like that.”
The folk in the headset
She said the people matter more to her than the game does. “I play with some wonderful folk, from the UK, quite a few from the USA, from Canada, New Zealand and Australia,” she said. “It’s super meeting all these folk. The chat we have, it’s lovely. I’ve had folk with me for quite a few years now.”
Photo: Guinness World Records, via BBC
Alice Bell, who edits the Gamer’s Edition, said the book sets out to show gamers of different generations and cultures, and that at Guinness World Records they believe gaming is for everyone.
Bowie’s own version of that is shorter. Nobody, she says, is ever too old to start.
Carry a story in five words
We run a game called Long Story Short: one real news sentence a day, and you keep the five words that carry it. Today’s is below. Do play.
How to play
One real news sentence. The job is to keep the five words that carry the story and let the rest go, then guess. Blue means the right word in the right place, orange means it is one of the five but sitting somewhere else, and grey means it is not one of them. Five tries. The result beats the process, the name or the job beats the place, and little words like a, the and of never count.
Yesterday: Printed on Christine Todd’s T-shirt and worn at White Sox games for two years, a plea for a kidney found her donor: Chris Beck, a Virginia biology teacher. The five: T-shirt plea found kidney donor.