AN Alcester couple have celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary in style with a surprise visit from the family.

Maurice and Margot Beddin met in 1947 at Honeybourne Station when Mrs Beddin was 16 years old.

She said: “I fancied what I saw and we married when I was 22 and he was 24. In those days you courted.”

The couple were married at St John’s Church in Bromsgrove in 1953, and honeymooned in Ireland, before noticing that new houses were being built in Alcester.

Mrs Beddin added: “We watched the house being built and fell in love with this beautiful town. We’ve been here ever since.”

“We’re very close. We do things very much together, Alcester in Bloom and the WI. We like classical music and ballet, we have interests that are very alike, we’re very compatible.”

The couple have a son, Simon, and a foster daughter, Tracey, as well as three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and as a special anniversary treat, they received a surprise visit from the Shropshire branch of the family whilst enjoying an anniversary.

Mrs Beddin said: “We were having a lovely lunch, and I saw these people in the distance and I thought ‘don’t come and sit near us’, and then I saw who it was. I was struck dumb. They came all the way from Shropshire, so there were four generations of us. It was lovely.”