Today, devoted couple Len and Hilda Dixon should have been celebrating 70 years of happy marriage. Instead, the pair, both aged 91, were being laid to rest together after dying within days of each other.

Len died of a chest infection earlier this month. Just eight days later, cancer claimed Hilda, who passed away with her beloved husband’s name still on her lips. The family said Len had been “her rock.” Heartbroken relatives said today the timing of their deaths was “what they would have wanted.”

Their son Colin, 61, a site manager at St Joseph’s RC Primary School, Dudley, who lives in Hope Street with wife Chris, said: “They were a really loving and devoted couple.

“They always wanted to be together. It has been comforting to know that they are still together.

“We had been looking forward to celebrating their 70th anniversary but it wasn’t to be. But they had a very happy and long life together.”

Colin added: “It is extremely poignant we should be burying them together on what should have been a landmark anniversary for them. However it also seems appropriate somehow. ”

Colin’s wife Chris added: “I have never known a love like it. They were an extemely devoted couple.”

The couple’s family said Len had been a tower of strength to Hilda since she was diagnosed with cancer.

And they said she had still been talking to him as though he was in the room with her in the minutes leading up to her death.

Len and Hilda, of Hope Street, Wordsley, would have celebrated their marriage milestone surrounded by family and friends at the nursing home where they lived.

Instead a joint funeral for the couple, who leave three children, seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, was being held at Stourbridge Crematorium.

Retired engineer Len died on October 15. His wife died on October 23.

Len, who went to Spon Lane School in Smethwick, started his engineering career as an apprentice at the Tangyes works and moved up the ladder to foreman.

Before retiring he also worked at West Bromwich Steel Fabrications, and was a keen collector of rare breed chickens.

Hilda worked as an assembler in factories across the Black Country including BSR in Stourbridge.

The couple, who married just after the outbreak of the Second World War and lived in West Bromwich before moving to Kingswinford in 1970 and later Wordsley in 1982.