Sheffield couple celebrate 75th wedding anniversary on husband's 99th birthday

Roy and Trudi Ashton, from Waterthorpe, celebrated their diamond wedding on April 5, which was also Mr Ashton’s 99th birthday.

Mr Ashton served in Italy and the Middle East during the war and met his future wife when he came home on leave after seven years.

He was out celebrating his 21st birthday when he met his love.

He said: “My parents’ friends were very appreciative of what we’d been through in Italy and in the Middle East and that night all my old friends came in. I had pints coming from one side and pints coming in from the other.”

Recalling the night he first met Trudi, he said: “It was beautiful evening, beautiful moonlight. It was warm.”

“Now I’d never met her before. She came in with one young chap and for some reason he went home. We bought some drinks and went up to Hanover Square to the dance.. I had to go back to Italy of course, and then I also wrote to her,” he recalled.

The couple got married in St Silas Church in Sheffield.

Mr Ashton said the couple had to save war time rations so they could buy things for the occasion.

“We had a little wedding do in a pub and what we managed to buy on rations we put out for people to eat,” he said.

When asked about the secret to a long and happy marriage, Mr Ashton said: “All I can say is just help each other as much as you can and be honest with each other. Just go out with your wife, and that’s it, always go out together. Stay together all your life and go out together.”

The couple had two children and now have several grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Mr Ashton has written a letter to one of his granddaughters every Thursday since she turned 18, and she is now 40.

“When she was 18, she said to me ‘I’m going to university grandad, will you write to me?’ I said, ‘yeah, of course I’m writing. And I started writing her since the first week she was there. She’s now the headmistress at a school in Durham’.”