A COUPLE who met in Glasgow and retired to South Milton are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary with an anniversary tour.

Brian and Joyce Nice met while Joyce was working as a secretary for British European Airways and Brian was apprenticing with GPO telephones with Joyce’s brother and later met Joyce at a party.

Joyce realised he was interested in her when they both went on a coach trip to go monroing, or hill walking, at Ben Cruachan in the Southern Highlands.

Brian was wearing a waterproof cape, and having walked to the top of one of the peaks, he had Joyce sit on the cape in front of him, hold tight, and he lifted the cape, which acted as a toboggan, and they whizzed down the hill, ready for the next peak. By the end of the day, the whole group had followed suit.

When Brian was drafted for National Service with the Royal Signals attached to the Royal Horse Guards at Windsor, he asked her to wait for him.

While Brian was in the army, Joyce was still working for BEA, meaning she could get 10 per cent tickets for flights. She and a friend both had boyfriends in the services, so they decided to take a trip to visit them, staying with respective aunts who lived close by.

‘With those tickets, you could be bumped if the flight was overbooked’, said Joyce, ‘so you were supposed to get to the airport for the earliest available flight, but we were having so much fun, I decided to wait for the last possible flight back to Glasgow.

‘Unfortunately I missed it, so I had to get the overnight train all the way back to Scotland!’

Joyce did wait, and after his 18 months of National Service, they were engaged in December 1954. They were planning to wait until Christmas, but once they had the ring, they were too excited to wait and were officially engaged on December 16.

The couple bought their first house in Hayes, before moving to Hampton, where they lived with Joyce’s parents, before her father was advised to move to somewhere with sea air, leading them to move to South Milton in 1969.

By this time, the couple had three children, Stephen, Deborah and Caryn, who were 11, 9 and 7-years-old respectively.

Steven went on to be a geologist who now lives in Frome, Somerset, Deborah trained as a children’s nurse at Great Ormond Street before returning to work in the NICU at Derriford Hospital, she is Deborah Eadie. Caryn married Alec Moore and now runs Mill Valley Bakery in South Milton.

The couple now has seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Brian sings with the Stanborough Chorus and the Tamar Valley Male Voice Choir, while Joyce put a period of illness to good use and completed two honours degrees with the Open University in English Literature and Classics with Humanities.

She also studies Greek Mythology with the local U3A group and is a member of book clubs. Joyce’s love of books and ancient history has been passed on to her granddaughter Cathryn who has a degree in Egyptology and devours books at a rate of knots.

The couple nearly didn’t get together at all, as Joyce recalled a near miss in a bombing during the Second World War.

Her father was working in the Wirral area, with Frank Whittle on the new jet engine technology. The Nazis knew they were looking at jet engines somewhere in Merseyside, but didn’t know where, so the area became a target for heavy bombing.

There were two bomb shelters on her parent’s road, one to the left and one to the right. When the air raid sirens sounded on that particular night, the family ran right in what transpired to be a lucky decision, as the other shelter took a direct hit.

This was not the only lucky break in the couple’s history, as Brian’s parents met while his father was working on the plumbing system at Burgh Island. He was offered a job on an island, originally meant to be Bermuda, but when that fell through, it was Burgh Island.

Brian’s mother was working as a milliner at Adam’s, where Kings Market now stands on Fore Street in Kingsbridge, and his father was lodging in Church Street, while his mother lived in Western Backway, meaning their paths crossed.

Brian was evacuated to his grandparent’s at Lipton Farm in East Allington during the war, before they were evacuated when the Americans used the area for D-Day practices in 1943, and they moved to Ringmore.

Brian and Joyce’s grandson Graeme Moore, Cathryn’s brother, linked the whole thing back together when he was doing contract work cutting silage at Lipton farm, once owned by his great, great grandparents, a few months ago.

Brian and Joyce will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on Thursday, December 3 and with family and friends spread all over the country, the couple have decided to go on a ‘anniversary tour’ to celebrate, rather than have a party.

They did a similar thing with their golden anniversary, so this year their Diamond Tour will see them visiting everyone they can early next year.