Our wedding, 6 June 1960

The day of the wedding was fast approaching. The days leading up to Monday 6th June 1960 were warm and sunny. Last-minute arrangements went smoothly. Eileen had her wedding dress made for her, together with the dresses for her bridesmaids - her sisters Anne, Pat and a friend of Pat, Ann Weatherstone. 

We arranged for my family to stay the night before the wedding in the house we had just begun to rent in Spital Tongues. They decided to travel up by car from Peterborough. To give you some idea of the enormity of a journey up the A1 in those days, before the dual carriageway was constructed, my parents and sister plus her boyfriend, John, decided it would take two days to travel the 200 miles to reach Newcastle. They stopped the night in Northallerton in North Yorkshire to break the journey. My best man, old school friend John Walters, drove the same distance with his fiancee, Gillian, in one day, although he had a little white sports car to do the trip. 

No other relatives on my side of the family felt they could attempt such a long journey. I was, however, delighted that my Uncle Wilf and his partner, Flo, took the train over from Manchester: he was such a favourite uncle of mine.  

Rather than have an all-male stag party the night before the wedding, it was decided to book a room at the Rising Sun pub for guests who wanted to meet up. Eileen had too much to do, including looking after her future in-laws requirements, so she didn't attend. I looked after my best man and his fiancee so put in an appearance for a while without getting drunk. 

I had one important task in the morning which was to pick up the wedding cake and take it to the Bath Hotel, Tynemouth, where the reception was being held. John picked me up in his sports car, we collected the cake, then drove down the coast road at great speed on that fine Bank Holiday morning, with no traffic to worry us. Mission accomplished!

St Columba's Catholic Church was just around the corner from James Terrace in Wallsend so the bridal car didn't have very far to go. When John and I arrived at the church we could see the street outside was already lined with local people ready to greet the bride who, of course, was well-known in the area as a singer. The guests inside the church were already seated, having been caught on cine-camera as they entered, filmed by one of Eileen's cousins, Jimmy Flannery. 

The wedding ceremony itself was short and without trimmings. As it was a 'mixed marriage' (Catholic and Protestant) the priest would not allow music for Eileen to walk down the aisle with her father and wouldn't even arrange the time for her to walk to the sound of the church bells at 11 o'clock, by switching the time to 11.15. We were also denied a nuptial mass associated with Catholic weddings. It was usual for the officiating priest to stand at the altar to welcome the bride but this old priest insisted that the bride and groom stand together and wait for him. He sent his altar boy, Eileen's young brother, John, to the back of the church to inform Eileen of this as she had been standing waiting for him. The marriage ceremony was therefore a short and rather sober affair.

Once outside of the church the whole atmosphere changed and celebrations began in earnest. As we appeared on the steps, Eileen's little nephew, Mark, presented her with a special posy of flowers. Half of Wallsend seemed to have turned up to give us a send-off as we stepped into the official car. It was the tradition for the bride and groom to throw coins from the car for local children to collect. Known as a 'hoy-oot', we duly obliged and the kids scrabbled for pennies as the car headed to Tynemouth. We savoured these special moments as we looked forward to our future together. 

The weather held out for the reception which began with us receiving guests on the lawn overlooking the harbour. No-one could deny this was the perfect setting, sipping sherry and mingling with our family and friends.

 

The reception itself was a sit-down meal in the hotel ballroom. Speeches went well as far as I can remember. I was able to make reference to a number of people there of special significance including Eileen's granny who was in her eighties and her Aunt Mary who was visiting from Ireland. I also mentioned the amazing coincidence that our wedding day, Whit Monday 6th June was the same day as my own mother and father's wedding in 1927. The father of the bride, Jimmy Brennan, almost made the mistake of addressing the guests as 'Mr Chairman and Gentlemen' as he was so used to public speaking at the Co-operative Directors meetings.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly Eileen singing 'This is My Lovely Day' from the musical, Bless The Bride with her usual accompanist, Joe Bennett, on the piano. She had often sung this for other people's weddings but this was her day so it was a very fitting end to our 'lovely day'.

While we changed our togs for our going away outfits, the younger guests decorated our hired Ford Escort with Just Married slogans and white ribbons. The final send-off, before our honeymoon travelling around the UK, was colourful and noisy. We drove off and headed to our house in Spital Tongues to tidy the car up and collect our luggage. As we approached the house we realised my family were still there, packing up their things ready to drive south. There was no way we were going to arrive in the middle of all this so we turned around and parked the car at the top of Claremont Road, overlooking the Town Moor. The coast was then clear for us enter our new home together. We cleaned up the car, packed our bags and began the first stage of our honeymoon journey to the Lake District. 

A new job, finding accommodation and a wedding date set

Back in Newcastle I began my career in architecture. Ken Appleby and I continued to share the house in Bowsden Terrace and we both started work with Edward & Partners on the same day. As a junior architect in a well-established practice, I was given some of the more mundane jobs to do such as building surveys and assisting senior staff in producing detailed working drawings. 

The first job, with Ken, was a full survey of the old Rutherford College in Bath Lane. Some of it was dirty work, scrabbling about in cellars and attics. We would come back to the office in the afternoons to draw up the survey from site dimensions. 

I gradually progressed to bank premises for Midland Bank Ltd (now HSBC) and domestic work seeing small alteration jobs through to completion. 

At the end of my first full year, I had completed my first design project, a student residential block, Ethel Williams Hall, for Newcastle University. The original building had been opened for female students in 1950. This new extension I designed was actually built after I left the company but it stood the test of time for nearly 40 years before being sold off and demolished to make way for a private housing development in 2000. At the time of writing, we live only a few hundred yards from the site in Benton, Newcastle. 

Ethel Williams Hall of Residence (Newcastle University Archives)

My time with Eileen was now an integral part of my life. I no longer had studying to do so my evenings and weekends were free. I accompanied her on singing engagements which brought me into contact with a whole new world of formal dinners, conferences and local concerts. I like to think I gave her some moral support. In the process I began to appreciate what it was like for her to perform in front of different audiences. 

In November 1959 we set the date for our wedding: 6 June 1960. I decided to formally ask Eileen's father, Jimmy Brennan, for his daughter's hand in marriage (much to the amusement of the rest of the family) but I think he appreciated the chance to talk man to man with a squad of women in the house. 

In the run up to the wedding we made a couple of attempts to find alternative accommodation for me, but to no avail. Ken had taken a flat in Jesmond to live with Valerie. No other students were able to take on Bowsden Terrace at that point in the academic year. I was therefore left to deal with the final handover to a landlord who had not visited his property during several years of student occupation. When I showed him round I thought he was going to have a heart attack on the spot as the old chap was not in the best of health in the first place. He was so shocked by the years of student 'wear and tear' that he made no attempt to ask for damage payments. He just wanted to go home and forget about it. Having said that, he hadn't spent a penny on the place in all those years. 

I almost rented a ground floor flat in Gosforth. I had actually moved in on the Saturday morning. Eileen and I went out to lunch to celebrate however, when we returned, the landlady was immediately on her high horse, laying down the law about female company with severe restrictions imposed on visiting hours. It was clear we would have no peace so tempers flared. The result was we called a taxi and I was out of there within the hour. 

We also tried to rent a flat above a shop in Walkergate but because we were not yet married the agent would not allow me to rent it. Can you imagine that happening in today's housing market? We were resigned to having to wait until we were actually married before we could find a place to live together, even though our plan was always to wait until the wedding before Eileen moved in. In the few weeks before the ceremony I moved in with Wynne and John Hipkin, Eileen's sister and brother-in-law. 

Eventually we struck lucky and were able to rent a fully furnished end-terrace house in an area of Newcastle with the delightful name of Spital Tongues. (The name is thought to be derived from spital, a corruption of the word 'hospital', and tongues meaning an outlying pieces of land.) No.1 Burnside belonged to a retired couple who were planning to visit their family in Canada for nine months so it was clean and comfortably furnished. The main living room was on the first floor with wonderful views overlooking Leazes Moor. 

All these years later, Eileen and I still have very fond memories of those early months of married life in our first home together.