DAPHNE and Neville Harm believe the secret to their 70 years of wedded bliss is THAT simple – common sense.
The Booval couple – she just turned 93 and he is 94 – celebrated their wedding anniversary recently in the same house that they built, starting in 1952.
“We didn’t go to bed mad,” Daphne says, adding that any disputes had to be resolved before then. She also pointed out that they had never been together for more than 3-4 weeks at a time during their courtship, separated by distance.
The couple first met in 1946 through family which Daphne, born in Townsville, described as “complicated”.
“My grandmother met Neville on a visit to Ipswich. Then he came up in 1946 for cycling and she said we should meet.”
A visit in 1946 was followed by another in 1947, followed more than two years of writing letters before he came up in 1950 by rail and made a big impression by flying back home, a big deal back then.
The Lowood-born Neville said it was decided that she would come down to join him because of his job at the time as an apprentice electrician at the then railyards at North Ipswich. (He started his career in January 1943 and retired in 1988 as chief electrical engineer.)
“We lived with my aunt for six months until we built our garage,” Neville said.
“We started building in 1954 and (our first son) Kevin was born there. It was basically a granny flat,” he said.
Construction on a three-bedroom house proceeded despite his “not knowing a thing” about brick-laying. That house is now five bedrooms after they added two more rooms.
They have three children (Kevin, Mark and Wendy),five grandchildren and eight great-children.
