By Victoria Stone-Meadows
A COUPLE from Narre Warren have achieved a diamond milestone in their marriage that started out with a glimpse across a lawn.
Bert Battin was working on a temporary basis at a factory in Clayton in the mid-1950s when he first caught sight of his future wife.
“I was on holidays for a fortnight and I wanted some money to buy a car so my sister got me a temporary job at the Repco Forge in Clayton for two weeks,” Mr Battin said.
“I was having my lunch one day when a saw a red-head beauty running across the lawn and I thought ‘Wow, look at that, who is that?’”
Mr Battin first saw a young flame-headed Isobel on a Monday but didn’t cross paths with her again until the following pay day.
Mr Battin again saw Isobel running across the lawn while he was lining up to receive his pay and learned her name in an unusual way.
“We were lined up to get paid and I saw her again running across but this time I could hear the migrants yelling out to ‘Isabella’,” Mr Battin said.
“I turned to the young bloke next to me and asked him ‘Who’s that girl? And he told me she had just come out to Australia from Scotland.”
Mr Battin was so taken with the young Scottish lass he hadn’t even met that he knew from the exact moment he wanted to be with her.
“I told the young bloke in line ‘I’m going to marry her’ and he turned and said ‘get out of here you little turd, you don’t even work here.’”
This exchange took place in October and the two didn’t meet face to face until December the same year when Isobel popped over to visit Bert’s sister.
“I opened door and saw the red hair,” Mr Battin said.
“About a month later I ran into her again and we went out and that was it since then.”
A year later, on 29 September 1956, the two love-birds were married at the Presbyterian Church in Springvale.
Since then the couple have shared a full life together including raising three kids in Shane, Christine, and Stuart, seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
The couple have said they had led a wonderful life together and wouldn’t change any of it.
