Encounters with a young Princess Elizabeth and Winston Churchill, along with cameo appearances in classic war films, do not feature in most pensioners’ life stories.
But as Quarry Bank great-grandfather John Hill celebrates his diamond wedding anniversary with wife Vera today – just nine days after the Queen – he reveals a catalogue of brushes with celebrity that few could match.
The 84-year-old enjoyed most of his extraordinary meetings while fulfilling his wartime service as a sergeant with the Scots Guards, whose duties included guarding the royal palaces.
And it was while patrolling the garden of Buckingham Palace in 1943 that Mr Hill – who now lives with 79-year-old Vera in, coincidentally, Queen Street – had perhaps his most memorable experience.
“I was just doing the garden patrol when who should come running down the steps but a 16-year-old Princess Elizabeth followed by Princess Margaret,” he said.
“Margaret was holding a ball so they were obviously coming out to play.
“The thing was, that every time a member of the royal family walked past, we had to stand at attention,” he explained.
“As you can imagine, with them running around the garden, this kept on happening,” he went on to say.
“The next thing I knew some windows on the balcony opened and King George came out on to the steps and called ‘Lisabeth, Lisabeth’, which is how he pronounced her name with his speech impediment.
“He could obviously see we couldn’t really do our job properly with them there,” the pensioner continued.
“The royal family had not spent much time at Buckingham Palace earlier in the war, but were starting to be there more regularly by that stage, as the air raids had calmed down a bit,” he added.
It was around the same time that, while manning a pill box outside Westminster, that he watched in awe as Winston Churchill popped out for breath of fresh air with the then foreign secretary Antony Eden and legendary British Field Marshal, General Jan Smuts.
Mr Hill said: “They must have come out for a walk and a chat. I was rather taken aback to see such great men.”
And as well as military stints abroad in locations including Algeria, Italy and Yugoslavia, Mr Hill also has two minor film credits to tell his four children, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren about. He appeared briefly as a marching soldier during a film to accompany Dame Vera Lynn’s iconic White Cliffs of Dover and also featured as an extra in the 1944 war film, The Way Ahead, starring David Niven.
Mr and Mrs Hill met while he was on leave in 1945 and had their first date at the Majestic cinema in Cradley Heath, before marrying two years later.
After being demobilised in 1948, he went on to work at pits including Beech Street in Colley Gate and Jubilee in Wet Bromwich, before becoming a fitter at Standard Motor Company in Coseley, Brierley Hill’s Roundoaks steelworks and then William Hacketts Chains, in Cradley, where he spent 23 years. Mrs Hill worked as a housewife, raising the couple’s four daughters, and said the secret to a long-lasting marriage, even with such a loquacious husband, was quite simple.
“It’s just trial and error,” she said, before adding “…and a big stick!”.
The pair will celebrate their anniversary with family and friends this weekend.
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