Top flight for 60 years

WHEN Leeta Hoblyn first met her husband to be Frank during the war, she was in the operations room at an RAF base in Norfolk and he was a wireless operator/gunner. I used to go in and scrounge cups of tea, he said. It was not love at first sight. Leeta

WHEN Leeta Hoblyn first met her husband to be Frank during the war, she was in the operations room at an RAF base in Norfolk and he was a wireless operator/gunner.

"I used to go in and scrounge cups of tea," he said.

It was not love at first sight. Leeta remembered: "I used to say to my colleague why do you always bring in the tea when that signals type arrives?"

Now the couple are celebrating 60 years of marriage. They married after the war on April 30 1947.

Squadron Leader Hoblyn, now aged 90, started his RAF service at Up-wood.During the war he flew in the famous 1,000-bomber raid carried out in May 1942. He was decorated four times with campaign medals and mentioned in dispatches.

His bombing missions, included those where the Royal Air Force would bomb German runways so that when the enemy planes returned to base they had nowhere to land.

After the war, Squadron Leader Hoblyn served in Germany and Bahrain as a navigations specialist. Retiring in 1973, he was then a consultant on communications for Cambridgeshire Constabulary working at Brampton and later the new headquarters in Hinchingbrooke.

Asked for the secret of a long and happy life and marriage, Squadron Leader Hoblyn joked: "A glass of beer every day."

Mrs Hoblyn, 84, said: "It's luck really. It's meeting the right person at the right time. We had a lot of separations through being in the forces and it makes you appreciate being together more."

Her husband said: "We have never had what you might call a fierce argument. We are both service people and once they meet they have got something in common.