A devoted husband who was married to his childhood sweetheart for almost 60 years is compiling an album of photos as a tribute to her, following her death.
Keith Duckworth, whose beloved wife Dilys died last month, is gathering together all the pictures he can to produce a ‘dossier’ documenting the seven decades they spent together, beginning at an Accrington school and stretching to the other side of the world in Australia.
Keith first met Dilys, whose surname was then Butterworth, at St James School on Cannon Street. They soon became friends and began courting at the age of 14 or 15.
The grandfather-of-three said he came up with the idea of the album as a form of therapy and “exorcising” the demons following the shock and trauma of losing Dilys.
Keith, 78, said: “We started going out to the cinema. It was a turbulent courtship, we’d have a row and pack it in, then we’d get back together - like all normal romances.”
The couple married in February 1956, when Dilys was 19 and Keith 18, at St Peter’s Church, Accrington, and Keith described his new wife as ‘the most beautiful creature on earth’.
Keith worked in the cotton factories, and he and Dilys lived in a mill house in Mill Street until they were flooded out.
He remembers ‘swimming across the living room’ to rescue vouchers they had collected for a Butlins holiday and telling Dilys ‘we’re not going to lose them vouchers!’
After the flood, the couple, who had two children - a daughter Elsie, who died in 2009, and a son Keith, moved to Hudson Street.
However, Dilys was eager for change and persuaded Keith to emigrate to Australia in 1966.
He found a job in an oil refinery, but Dilys struggled to settle and became intensely homesick.
“She used to go to the edge of the beach and just stand there looking out,” Keith explained.
“She said to me, ‘I want to go home’.”
They returned to England after six years, and set up home in Southampton, where they lived for 42 years.
In the last 10 years of her life, Dilys became very ill with kidney failure and was then also diagnosed with a respiratory condition - COPD.
Keith remembers when, 10 days before she died on December 5, she told him she’d had enough.
He said: “It was the worst day of my life. She was so brave. What she had to tolerate, most would have given up long before.”
Now he thinks of Dilys as the beautiful, smiling woman with whom he spent nearly all his life.
Keith added: “Even at the end, she was still beautiful to me and I’ll love her till my last breath.”
