Compromise and tolerance have been key to 70 years of happy marriage for a couple who celebrated their platinum wedding anniversary.

Arthur and Margaret Buck marked the occasion with cake, lunch and Bucks Fizz at Wyndham Manor residential home after receiving a card congratulating them on the milestone from the Queen. They also had a separate party with four generations of their family.

“The secret is compromise and tolerance,” Arthur said.

Arthur, 95, and Margaret, 94, have three children, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The couple moved to Cumbria in 1974 to take over a village shop and cafe in Holmrook.

They ran the shop for 10 years before retiring to Irton, then lived in Seascale for three years before moving into the Cleator Moor residential home in January last year.

Arthur was born in Aberdeen but his family moved to Stockport when he was six and it was there – at the Congregational Church where the couple would later marry – that he first met Margaret.

After their wedding in 1949, the Bucks enjoyed their honeymoon at the Pennington Arms in Ravenglass but, although Arthur had family links to the county as his great-grandfather ran the RR Buck and Sons factory in Carlisle, they did not move to the area until he was forced to leave his job with the family firm in Cheshire and the couple decided to make a fresh start.

“We were looking for a campsite to run and we hadn’t really thought of Cumbria,” Arthur added.

“But on the way back from Scotland on one of our searches we saw a cafe and shop advertised in Holmrook.

“We had a look at it and decided to buy it and after we’d been here 26 years we didn’t feel we could move back.”