A local MBE and retired residential carer that are celebrating their diamond anniversary this week, said that “we feel we are very lucky”.

Owen and Carole Masters will be celebrating 60 years of marriage on Thursday.

When asked what their ‘key to success’ was, they said: “Well, there has been a lot of give and take! And being open and honest with each other.

“We think it’s those sorts of things that make it successful and the reason we’ve been married for 60 years. Many people don’t get that privilege, so we feel we are very lucky.”

Born in South Milton, Owen went to school in Salcombe during the war where he lived with his gran while his dad was away in the army.

He went to Kingsbridge Secondary, and in 1955 joined the RAF and was based at Wroughton, near Swindon.

Carole was born in Swindon into a ‘hardworking’ family with her mum, dad, three sisters and two brothers. Carole left school at 15 to work as a sewing machinist at Nicholson’s in Swindon, which made men’s raincoats for exclusive stores in London.

On Sundays she regularly attended church where she was also a Sunday school teacher at age 16 - here she discovered her passion for caring for others.

While Owen was serving in the RAF near Swindon at age 18, his friend brought him along to church, which is where he met Carole.

He said: “She was absolutely gorgeous - still is, of course - and she had the most beautiful auburn hair. She really, truly struck me.”

Owen had previously volunteered to serve overseas, and a few months after they met, Owen received notice that he was to be posted to Malaya for two years.

He said: “We decided to get engaged, which we did on September 23, 1956 - not long after we met, but we planned to marry soon after my return.”

Owen was posted to Malaya for two years, and said they wrote each other every day.

He said: “Sometimes the letters came altogether, sometimes you went days without them.”

The couple got married on August 16, 1958 and now have a son, Adrian, and a daughter, Avalon, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

The Masters’ lived a few short spells in Swindon, Camborne and then onto Bristol, where Owen worked for Prudential Assurance Company and Carole as a care-worker at Hortham mental health hospital where she had a few ‘life-long’ patients, “but she absolutely loved the work - she’s aways been a very caring person.”

But Owen had always wanted return to his home in the South Hams, so the two bought Hope Cove Post Office, and moved to the seaside village in 1982.

Owen was elected into the South Hams District Council in 1987, and became leader of the council in 1994, and again in 1999. In 1997 he became a councillor at Devon County Council where he served the county until 2005.

While council work took up more and more of Owen’s time, Carole was taking care of operating the shop at Hope Cove.

Adrian Masters said that among many other things, his dad was “instrumental” in negotiating in the combining of Kingsbridge Community College onto one site.

During that time, he also began working for the Council of Europe in the Balkans, beginning with Albania, and then was in Kosovo a few weeks after NATO entered the country in 1999. Because of his commitments in the Balkans, he stood down as leader of SHDC.

He was appointed as Deputy Head of the International Election Observation Mission in Kosovo in 2000, and was involved in establishing the first local councils overseen by the United Nations.

In 2001, an election was held for a central Government in Kosovo, and Owen was appointed Head of the International Observation Mission, which included observers from all over the world.

It was for this work and the efforts of his team under difficult circumstances that Owen was made a Member of the most Excellent British Order (MBE) from the Queen.

In order to focus entirely on his work overseas, Owen and Carole sold the post office to their son, Adrian and his wife, Alison in 1998. Carole then took up care work again and started working at Thurlestone Residential Home.

Owen and Carole moved to Kingsbridge in 2013, and are celebrating their diamond anniversary Saturday evening at the Cottage Hotel in Hope Cove with their close family.