Dancing couple mark 70 years of marriage

Peter and Norma Charlton, of Louth, headed to their weekly ballroom and sequence dancing session in Mablethorpe community centre on Tuesday (June 16) where they were congratulated by fellow dancers plus family members who travelled to join them.

Family included daughter Michele who travelled with her husband from Canada and their son Paul, along with wife Fiona who laid on a feast for nearly 40 guests.

The couple also received a card with well wishes from the King and Queen on their Platinum wedding anniversary.

Peter, 91, explained they have been attending the group every week since 1997, but they have always been dancers, he said.

The couple remember that they had a nice, quiet wedding on June 16, 1956, at the parish church in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, followed by a small reception at a nearby country club and then a honeymoon in the Isle of Wight.

They recall first meeting in the NAAFI canteen at RAF Hawkinge, near Folkestone, where Norma, now aged 90, was serving in the WRAF as a telephonist, while Peter was working in the technical stores doing his two years National Service.

"We were only 18 and 19 at the time and it went from there,” Peter said. “She was extremely good looking and I wasn’t too bad then – I still had hair!”

They would go out for meals and to the cinema. “You could get to hold hands there,” he joked.

As it was an Air Cadets glider training station, Norma learned to fly a glider during the weekly sports afternoons while Peter tended to play cricket and football.

Completing his National Service Peter went to work in a bank, living in London, but they kept in touch and he eventually proposed and Norma was then allowed to leave the RAF.

The pair went on to run an accountancy business in Nottingham until retirement, moving to Sandilands and then Louth.

Looking back at their many happy years, Peter said: “Well, you have to be in love with each other for a start! We just live a normal life and are very happy after all these years – considering my mother said it wouldn’t last as we were so young!

"We have always been best friends.”