Love for Eternity

Theirs is truly a story of a lifetime of love.

Ron and Eileen Everest were born in the same maternity unit, posed as “bride and groom” at a town carnival aged four, married for real at 21 and now, 70 years later, are celebrating their platinum wedding anniversary.

The couple, both 91, said yesterday that they had spent their entire lives loving each other after being born seven months apart at the Royal Navy maternity hospital in Gillingham, Kent.

Their sailor fathers were good friends, having fought together in the First World War, and the families remained close as the children grew up, dressing them as a married couple for the Gillingham Carnival in 1926.

There then followed 14 years of separation as Mr Everest’s parents began a new life in Scotland and his future bride moved to south London.

However, the two families stayed in touch and when Eileen (then Campbell) started work in a wool factory at 18 — and had the rare opportunity to use its telephone — she chose to call her childhood sweetheart’s mother, Getrude.

This led to a meeting with Mr Everest and a blossoming romance. Mrs Everest still treasures the letter he sent proposing marriage in 1940, shortly before he went off to fight in the Second World War, serving, like his father, in the Royal Navy and seeing action in the Far East and in the Arctic Convoys.

The couple eventually married on June 7, 1943 and, other than for Mr Everest’s naval service — he was involved in the D-Day landings of June 1944 — have been inseparable since.

“We have been in love from the age of zero,” said Mr Everest.

“We didn’t meet at a factory dance or anything like that. We were born in the same maternity hospital – we might have even been born in the same bed.”

Mrs Everest added: “Ours is quite an unusual story, especially these days, but we have got on well together most of the time. I can still remember the day we first dressed as a bride and groom, even though we were only four.
“Our parents decided to dress us up for the Gillingham Carnival. Our mothers were both good with a needle so they made the costumes and we walked all round Gillingham in them.

“That was the last time I saw Ron for 14 years, until I was 18 when I’d started work. Nobody had telephones in their homes in those days and there was one in the factory and I really wanted to ring someone but didn’t know anyone else to call. I asked my mother and she suggested her friend, Gertrude, who ran a shop and post office. I rang her up and, of course, it was Ron’s mother. She came over to visit me, without Ron at first, and then he came later.”

The couple married in Welling, Kent, and a report in the local newspaper at the time described her “blue dress and bolero jacket with a spray of orchids”.

It added that the wedding “ties together two families who have been friends for 25 years and forges a stronger bond between two fathers”.

In 1986, the couple moved to Dereham in Norfolk to be near their daughter Carol, 68, and grandson Maxwell, 38.