Great grandmother will retrace her parents' 60th anniversary footsteps as she and her husband mark the same milestone

Dancehall darlings Jo and Bill Bourton will celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary today with a family party – graced by some of their 10 grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.

The Kennington couple met at a dance in a Cowley Road in 1955, when Mr Bourton’s RAF get-up acted as the catalyst for their courtship.

Retired school cook Mrs Bourton, now 74, said: “It was the uniform that attracted me. We met through a mutual friend, arranged to see each other again and that was it.

“We still make each other laugh.”

The then-17-year-old lived in her family home in Cowley’s Boswell Road, just ten minutes away from her first love’s RAF station in Nuneham Courtenay.

Within a year the pair had married at St James’ Church in Cowley, after Mr Bourton was given permission from his commanding officer to begin life with a wife.

They returned to the same church in 1992 to give Mrs Bourton’s parents Lilian and Joseph Chamberlain the wedding they had always wanted, gifting them with a vow renewal ceremony six decades after they first said “I do”.

She added: “It was our parish church in Cowley. Mum always said she didn’t feel married because they did it at a registrar’s office. She died within that year – it was as if she had done all she wanted to do on that day.”

Tomorrow she and 80-year-old Mr Bourton will meet St James’ vicar to relive those memories, and see a church kneeler which was crafted especially for her parents by her late twin sister Maxine Hartwell.

Mr Bourton, who left the RAF to work in motor production, said they had passed “family values” onto their children Kevin, Steven and Tanya, who are all in their fifties.

He said: “It’s about working things out together. It’s so easy these days to walk away but you’ve got to work at it.”

Asked the secret behind a happy marriage, he joked: “Always let the wife think she’s right.”

He said when they were younger they loved to travel round Europe together, and spent weeks on caravan holidays in Somerset where they would fish on the beach and sip bottles of traditional cider.

Mrs Bourton, who prides herself on never forgetting a birthday, said: “We’ve had a good marriage and we’ve seen a lot of the world. I think the key is give and take.”

They hope to frame their diamond anniversary card from the Queen and hang it on the wall of their living room in Kenville Road, alongside Mrs Bourton’s parents’ telegram which recognised the same achievement.