TWO former Barry yacht club members have celebrated 70 years of married life.

Derek and Sheila Hart now live in Chatsworth Road, Lytham St Annes, but spent 56 years living in Barry at Borough Avenue, Lidmore Rd and, latterly, Trem-y-don.

The couple celebrated with a party on October 25.

Derek, 89, said he’d met Sheila, now 92, when he was 17 years old and got a job in the laboratory at a small factory making bakelite2 moulding powders in 1942.

He said: “It was part of what today would be called a business park, five small enterprises owned and run by a local entrepreneur; a soap works, a signwriters/joinery, a scrap yard and a sheet metal works, where Sheila had her office. Joan ran the joinery office and the gaffers place was on the first floor of what had been a substantial Victorian house where his fertile mind invented all sorts of things from a device for picking up incendiary bombs to suggesting that lighthouse keepers could be exchanged by autogiro. Sheila did his correspondence and regularly wrote to Winston Churchill with, I think, advice on running the war. I can’t remember why I visited Sheila’s office but the first time I saw her, a beautiful blonde with a happy, smiling face, I took a shine to her.”

The couple enjoyed dinner hour sandwich dates, Saturday night dances and cycling trips which stopped when Derek was conscripted in November 1943.

Romance continued and a lucky posting to Huddersfield allowed them to meet and eventually get engaged and marry in 1944.

Derek said: “Sheila’s mother altered her sister, Joyce’s, dress and I borrowed her brother-in-law, Bert’s, morning suit, I didn’t want to marry in khaki uniform. After the ceremony at St John’s Church, Radcliffe we had a reception at the Co-op and the next day I had to leave, on a troopship, for Burma and I didn’t see Sheila for three long years until August 1947.

“Churchill wanted to keep us out there for another year but a parade of mainly Lancashire ladies, my mother and Sheila included, petitioned 10 Downing St with banners flying, may have changed his mind. A homecoming party was arranged at St John’s school and we celebrated together with family and friends, dancing to a small band. A two week honeymoon trip to Bournemouth completed the return and life started to return to normal.

“I returned to my previous post of control chemistat at the Radcliffe (Manchester) factory of British Resin Products to learn that a new plant was to be based in Barry and we would have to close. This plant became part of the BP empire in 1967. I am the surviving member of the four man team of key workers who chose to move to Barry, Alfred Withington, Technical Manager and 2 foremen Bob Mather and George McFarland in 1949. Sheila and our daughter Kathryn soon joined me.

“We lived in Barry for 56 years where our second daughter, Gillian, was born.”

The couple returned to Lancashire in 2006 to be near her and the family.