Platinum celebration for Newmarket couple
NEWMARKET JOURNAL FEB 2012. SID AND IRIS NARDY PLATINUM WEDDING COUPLE FROM NEWMARKET.
NEWMARKET couple Sid and Iris Hardy celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary on Saturday.
The couple met in 1941 when Iris, now 90, was staying with her aunt in Northumbria and Sid, 92, was serving with the Royal Corps of Signals attached to the 43rd Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment.
“The Women’s Institute used to organise a weekly dance and I used to help make the tea,” said Iris. “Sid was there and asked me if I would be at the next one.”
She wasn’t, but the very next week, as she was walking down the street, that same young soldier caught her eye and,with the words “I think I know you” triggered a romance that would endure for seven decades.
Iris took Sid home to meet her father, who declared he thought he was a “canny lad” and the following year they were married at the parish church in Ponteland, Northumberland.
Sid was a Norfolk boy. He went to Bungay Grammar School, where he excelled at football. The Colts’ team, of which he was captain, was regularly coached by players from Norwich City and was so good they often played again senior teams and their skilful centre forward did not go unnoticed.
When he left school in 1935, Tom Parker – who had captained Arsenal to their 1930-31 Championship triumph before moving into management with Norwich – wanted Sid to sign schoolboy forms at 12/6d a week. But that’s where the dream of playing professionally ended.
“My dad wasn’t having any of it. He told me to get a proper job,” said Sid.
At 17 he joined the Post Office, and in 1937 transferred to Newmarket. He was still a keen footballer and played for Newmarket, regularly scoring 35 goals a season, until he was called up in 1939 and left to go north, where Iris was working for the RAF at the fighter station at Woolsington, where she was in charge of the post.
After being demobbed in 1945, Sid returned to his job in Newmarket but the post office building he had left six years earlier had been destroyed by German bombs in 1941. Among the fatalities were three of his former work colleagues.
“We were based in temporary premises in the Memorial Hall until they built the post office that is there today,” said Sid.
Iris had to wait until the couple got one of the pre-fab homes the Government provided in Exning Road before she could join him. Sid’s career with the Post Office blossomed – he eventually became postmaster at Newmarket, retiring in 1979, while, as the couple’s two sons, John and Ken, grew up, Iris worked at Newmarket library, which was then in Fitzroy Street.
The couple also have three grandsons and three great-grandchildren.
Home is in Heathbell Road, in the house they have lived in since 1968 when it was first built.
And the secret of 70 years of marriage? They both agree: “If you have a row, it has got to end that day.”
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Friday 25 May 2012
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