A happily married couple in St Albans are celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary with their six children.

To mark their blue sapphire anniversary, Ryland and Susan Clendon have booked a meal with their six children and respective partners at St Michael’s Manor Hotel on Fishpool Street.

The couple met at Euston’s University College Hospital in the early 1950s, while Ryland was training to be a doctor and Susan was a nurse.

Hitting it off, they were married just one year later in Susan’s hometown, at Bath Abbey on January 9 in 1954.

They moved to St Albans in the 1950s and in the decades that followed Ryland worked at Marconi Instruments while Susan taught child and family care at the former St Albans College of Further Education, now at Oaklands College.

Having six children, the couple can now boast 19 grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

Tom, the fifth child who is now 55, said: “They love each other, they put each other first, they look after each other and they always have done.

“They are very good people, they did volunteer work, fundraising and school governing just to help people out. We are very proud of them and their message and the example they have set.”

Ryland did not formally propose to Susan, he said, they just met each other’s respective parents and agreed to get married.

He said: “I think one of the secrets of happy marriage is although we are completely different in many ways - my wife is a very enthusiastic and dynamic person and I am rather quiet, I decide things slowly and carefully - but we both respect each other’s differences and we always reach compromises.

“We are still very much in love with each other and that has not changed after all this time.”

Ryland is now 88 and Susan is 87.

In a Herts Ad report on the couple’s 60th diamond wedding anniversary party, Ryland said he “never thought we would make it” that far because they “both had serious heart troubles”.

On that occasion the couple hosted a large family party at St Saviour’s Church on Sandpit Lane.