Platinum rule of our 70-year marriage... don’t go to bed angry
IT was a love forged between two teenagers during the darkest days of the Second World War.
Now, almost 80 years after first meeting at night school, Barbara and Jimmy Hamilton have celebrated their platinum anniversary.
They say the secret to the longevity of their marriage is ‘tolerance’ and never going to sleep on an argument.
The couple still tell each other ‘night night, love’, and make it a rule to patch things up before bedtime if they have had a disagreement.
They first met in 1940, but did not properly get together until six years later, when Mr Hamilton, now 96, returned from military service in India.
Although they have spent most of their lives in Scotland, the pair had a number of years in the Middle East during a turbulent era.
The couple, who have three great granddaughters, celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary with a party at the retirement home where they live in Hamilton, Lanarkshire – and invited around 70 guests. Mr Hamilton said: ‘It was a really happy day.’
Having met shorthand student Barbara at night school in 1940, Jimmy, who was training to be a plumber, invited her to a dance hosted by the Scouts. However, when he arrived at her house during a wartime blackout, Barbara had no idea who he was.
She agreed to go to the party, but received news that her aunt had died and was told to go home rather than stay out with her new beau. Luckily, they later bumped into one another at a different dance and hit it off once again.
Mr Hamilton said: ‘I fell in love with Barbara from the minute I met her, and I never stopped. I found her speech was to my liking – it wasn’t coarse or sloppy. I asked her home and we’ve been together ever since.’
His 95-year-old wife added: ‘We have really had a very happy life, and an interesting life too, in as much as we’ve done things that an awful lot of people would never imagine would happen in their life.’
The couple wed in 1948 and honeymooned in Inverness before moving to London, where Mr Hamilton had found work at Islington Council. However, they returned to Scotland soon afterwards and in 1949 celebrated the birth of their only child, Ken.
Mrs Hamilton had been fascinated by the blockbuster film Lawrence of Arabia and encouraged her husband to apply for a civil service placement in the Colony of Aden. That led to the couple spending 14 years in the Middle East, from 1953.
During that time, the country became increasingly unstable. Mrs Hamilton said: ‘We knew quite a few people who were killed. It was a war zone, more or less.’
The Colony of Aden became the Federation of South Arabia in 1963, and eventually became a part of unified Yemen in 1990.
Both husband and wife learned to speak some Arabic, which they can recall to this day.
They continue to tune in to news bulletins to follow the present troubles in Yemen.
‘We’ve had a very happy life’