But despite the fairytale wedding the couple now face an anxious wait to see if the groom has cancer.

The couple told how as smitten teenagers they dared not develop their young relationship back in the 1960s for fears it would be frowned upon and went their separate ways.

Both married other partners and lived wonderful family lives and hardly saw each other for almost half a century.

But in January the paths of Rex Harding-Smith and Iris Dickson crossed in Hartlepool and that was to lead to wedding bells as all of their old feelings returned.

But the couple's big day was marred amid fears that Rex could have cancer and the couple now face an anxious wait for test results later this week.

After Rex lost his wife and Iris lost her first husband and divorced a second, the pair found comfort in each others arms before confessing their love and pledging to live the rest of their lives together.

But as they planned their wedding, Rex was given the devastating news by doctors that a lump on his leg was likely to be cancer.

Iris, 60, said: "I am absolutely devastated, it's really bad, it's like a cloud hanging over us. The doctors have said there's a strong possibility it's cancer but they can't say for sure.

"We can't believe it. It felt like finally we got together and then this terrible thing happened."

Both Rex and Iris grew up in Hartlepool and Iris said: "Back then it would have been badly frowned upon.

"It was just something telepathic between me and him. We knew it but never spoke about it."

Iris, who has a daughter called Leanne Richardson, 34, and two sons, Stephen Richardson, 40, and Glen Richardson, 30, and who worked for many years on a market stall in the Middleton Grange Shopping Centre, said: "We saw each other only a couple of times a year by chance."

Rex, of Corporation Road on Hartlepool's Headland, said: "When we were kids I used to run past her house twice a day to see if she was in."

In January this year they met for a drink and Rex plucked up the courage to tell Iris about his feelings.

Four months on the couple were planning their wedding when Rex, 59, developed a pain in his leg and went to get a biopsy taken.

They moved their wedding forward from June to last Friday and were touched when the Cosmopolitan pub in the town's Durham Street paid for the couple's reception meal after hearing of their plight.

The HGV driver will discover the results of the tests this Friday and says that he will "freak out" if he has cancer.

Rex, who has a daughter called Natalie Harding-Smith, 28, and two stepchildren called Kay Alan, 40, and Keith Alan, 36 is on morphine to dull the pain.

Iris said: "It's fingers crossed for Friday."