A CHANCE encounter on a dancefloor brought them together 62 years ago and today a loving Swindon couple will celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.

Derek Main, 82, and his wife Shirley, 80, met in their hometown of Weston-super-Mare in 1954 shortly after Derek had returned from national service in Singapore.

“He hadn’t been back in the country very long at all,” Shirley recalled.

“My friend had tickets for a dance at the Winter Gardens Pavillion so we went along.

“Derek was sat a few seats down from us and she dared me to ask him to dance, so I did.”

And the rest, as they say, is history – Derek and Shirley were married two years later at the Victoria Methodist Church in Weston.

They had two daughters, Carol and Janet, before moving to Swindon in 1960 where they set up home on the railway estate.

Derek, who had been working on the railway before leaving for national service, was working as a signalman.

He went on to work on the railway for almost 43 years, ending up in the Swindon panel signal box before taking early retirement at 59.

Shirley worked in the kitchen and behind the counter at schools in the town, preparing meals for generations of children as they passed through, mostly at Clarence Street.

But life was not all work, Shirley’s early passion for the dancefloor was reinvigorated and they started modern sequence dancing together, a hobby that took them to dance floors at home and overseas.

Another staple feature in their life was Gloucestershire County Cricket Club where Derek was made a Vice President of the club five years ago.

He said: “We used to watch Somerset Cricket Club, but they let Viv Richards and Joel Garner go and we didn’t agree with that so we joined Gloucestershire instead.

“That was almost thirty years ago - we’ve made so many fantastic friends in the cricket fraternity since then.”

Family life has been busy too, Shirley and Derek are grandparents to two boys and five girls and great-grandparents to 11 more.

Every grandparent has stories to tell but Derek has one that is more unique than most – in 2007 he appeared as a contestant on the TV quiz show Deal or No Deal.

“It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience,” he recalled. “One of the most memorable of my life.”

Derek went on to beat the banker and take home a modest but greatly-appreciated prize.

The winnings allowed him to treat Shirley to two cruises in the next year, one along the Danube and the other to the Caribbean.

Cruising became something they looked forward to, enjoying more in the years that followed.

Derek and Shirley have certainly packed a lot into their 65 years of marriage, but when Derek was asked if there was anything in particular he wanted to mention, he said: “Not really, I’m just very lucky to have such a wonderful wife.”