It was love at first sight for Mavis and Tony Taylor one night at Pooley Bridge youth club – and the start of a lifelong partnership which is still going strong more than 60 years later.
This week the couple, from Penrith, are celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary in style, surrounded by family and friends over a slap-up Sunday lunch.
But Mavis, now 79, was still a pupil at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Penrith when she first clapped eyes on Tony, who was a year younger and
studying at Tynefield School, later to become Ullswater Community College.
“I’d gone to the youth club with my sister, and I saw him on the other side of the room,” she recalled.
“He was a regular there, unlike myself, and I really was taken with him straight away. There was a real electricity between us.”
The couple married just a few miles away at St Michael’s Church in Barton, on March 10, 1962. By then Mavis was training to be a nurse at the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle while Tony had begun as an apprentice with a welding firm in Penrith.
The couple have two children, Louise, 58, and 57-year-old Dean, and six grandchildren. The eldest, Jaimi Wilson, is a top endurance cyclist who last year came third in the gruelling GBDURO event staged between Lands End and John O’ Groats.
This week, Mavis managed to take time out of the busy preparations for the celebration to pass on her top tips for a long and happy marriage.
“You’ve got to be tough sometimes!” she said. “And as long as I know where he is, I know everything’s all right.”
