A COUPLE who once owned the Lord Haldon Hotel celebrated their 60th anniversary there at the weekend.

Ron and Pam Martin partied with 140 friends and family at the Dunchideock venue on Haldon Hill.

Ron said: ‘It was great to see everyone together to celebrate 60 years. And we had The Liberty Sisters for some 1940s entertainment.

‘We had a letter from the Queen on our anniversary.

‘Like everyone else we’ve had our ups and downs but, on the whole, it’s been a great 60 years, it’s been really lovely.’

Ron said they owned the Lord Haldon for 10 years from 1963, when it was named Haldon House Guest House.

He said: ‘Pam’s family paid for us to have a holiday there. We loved it so much I made an arrangement with the owner and we sold up our modest house in Essex, moved down and lived on site.

‘It was quite an experience, we hadn’t done anything like that before. It was a challenge. We did the place up and helped renovate the old chapel in the grounds, which is a stunning building now.

‘We had our three daughters while we were there, then moved to Teignmouth for them to grow up.’

Pam added: ‘During our 10 years at Haldon we went through many trials and tribulations, but made a success of the business. We ran it as a summer guesthouse with 22 bedrooms.

‘It’s a huge three-storey building with a great history.

‘When we started we invested in 12 giant tins of white masonry paint and began the daunting task of tackling the job of renovating the shabby exterior with our four-inch brushes.

‘Three months later the lovely old building with its Adams archway stood gleaming in the sun ready to open for the summer season – our brushes by this time were just bristles!

‘That week a man came from the council.

‘He was extremely rude and officious and told us a pair of kids like us (we were 25) had no right to have a house like this and put a line through the rates figure and doubled it.

‘Not satisfied with that, he informed us it was three weeks before the end of the year and we would have to pay last year’s rates also, which had now doubled. Life became difficult but we soldiered on.

‘Then two years later the Torrey Canyon oil spill left a four-mile oil slick, which ended up on Teignmouth beach, along with hundreds of casualties of birds and fish and every one of our bookings cancelled. We almost went under.

‘Living on fish my husband caught earlier that year we survived. From then on it was a success and we flourished.

‘The Lord Haldon is now a beautiful Best Western Hotel with 25 en-suite bedrooms and we’re proud to say we were once associated with it.

‘Of course it’s still haunted, just like it was in our days!’