A Raynes Park couple have celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.

Vera and Frank Burgess, both aged 92, met at their local dance hall where they enjoyed regular Saturday night dances and married aged twenty-three in 1949.

Over the years they enjoyed many happy family holidays and although they never had a lot of money, having a trip away was always important to them.

With two happy children and several grandchildren between them they put their long marriage down to the moto of ‘family comes first’.

“We always like the same things,” said Fred.

"When we saw our first house, we both knew ‘that’s the one’.

"When we started out, I had a motorbike with a side car for Vera and she’d put the baby on her lap.

"We then moved on to a car later and that’s how we were in life, we’ve had a good steady life together."

Now living at Link House Nursing Home, the couple received an anniversary telegram from Her Majesty the Queen congratulating them on reaching their milestone and celebrated with a special dinner for two.

Home manager, Evelyn Repkovas added: “We are delighted to share this milestone with Frank and Vera."

“We’ve discovered that reaching your 70th Wedding Anniversary is actually very rare, with only around 30 couples per year or 60 people achieving this, making Vera and Frank one in a million.”