This is the story of how a blind date in 1937 led to sixty happy years of marriage ...

the diamond wedding

Two people who met as youngsters in a Chew Valley pub have just celebrated their diamond wedding - after 60 years of married life.

It was more or less a blind date: Charles's friends said 'why don't you join us at the Mendip Hunt Ball', but he said that as a newcomer to the area he didn't have a partner. Someone suggested young Edith might be like to join them, and Edith duly got permission from her parents (who figured it would be ok for her to go out with the stranger as they would be in a foursome).

On the evening of the ball Charles and his friends' car duly picked up Edith from her home in Barrow Gurney in the pitch black of a winter's night, in the days when cars had no interior lights to give a clue as to what each had let themselves in for. For that they had to wait for a stop at the Blue Bowl, then just a tiny country pub lit by oil lights. The couple evidently liked what they saw, and while discovering a variety of shared interests (including dancing) they progressed to the ball at a packed Chewton Mendip Hall, and within a few months they had got engaged.

The sharing has carried on ever since, and now with two sons and two grandchildren both fairly close to their current Compton Martin home, Charles and Edith can look back on sixty very full years. The first 35 years of their married life were spent at Barrow Gurney, latterly at the Listed Steps Farm (the building with all the stops at the front), and the last 25 years in Compton Martin. Both of them have had key involvements in all sorts of community activities, and more often than not ending up as Chair or President of the respective organisations.

One interest which took up a large amount of their time was work for the North Somerset constituency's Conservative organisation, from the days when Sir Edwin Leather was the MP through to the more recent times of Paul Dean. Other groups Charles chaired included Compton Martin Parish Council (on which he still has a place as a councillor), Barrow Gurney Cricket Club an Barrow Gurney Flower Show.

Edith's. interests have included drama (as shown by the picture of her in a play at the age of 14), Womens Institutes, flower shows, and civil nursing at the Homeopathic Hospital in Bristol during the war, before her children were born. She was also Chairman of the European Union of Women's Somerset branch at one time. The EUW has been a particular interest of Edith's, as she was a founder member, some 35 years ago. (it provides a network of politically aware women in 21 European countries). She was also a founder member of the League of Friends of Barrow Hospital.

So, although Charles was the traditional breadwinner and Edith did not do paid work, her answer to the question ' do you work?' was always an emphatic 'yes'. Charles graduated as an engineer at Loughborough College and opted to work in the aviation field, coming to Bristol in 1936 to work for the Bristol Aeroplane Company, after a short spell with Napier in London. He stayed with BAC, which was taken over by RolIs Royce in 1966, until his retirement in 1976. His work had included contributions to the procurement of pioneering computer pilot systems for Concorde and work on the production side of Harrier Jump Jets and the Tornado.

The couple have just received a congratulatory card from the Queen. The photographs show 1) The wartime wedding at Barrow Gurney Church, 18.11.39: white dresses were not an option in the austerity of the first months of the war. 2) Edith (left) playing Robin at the age of 14 in a Barrow Gurney WI production of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor', which won an all-Somerset award.

[note, the surname has been removed from this web posting].

The politician
The promoter
The sculptress
The keeper
The poacher