Keeping Up With Times

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31207, 3 November 1966, Page 2

Keeping Up With Times

Mr Sidney Wallis and his wife Beatrice, who celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary today, have a very optimistic philosophy of life—“today is the best day there ever was and tomorrow is a better day.”

Both Mr and Mrs Wallis, who look amazingly young for their 80 years plus, agreed yesterday that “things were getting better all the time.” Bikinis were part of a better life, much preferable to the “neck-to-knee bathing suits” once compulsory on New Brighton beach, they said. “If you moved from the beach without wearing an overcoat over your neck to knee you would be arrested,” said Mrs Wallis.

“Nowadays you cannot tell a person’s income by his appearance, and I think that is a good thing. All the snob-

bery and class barriers are disappearing,” said Mr Wallis. Although both are very tolerant of the young, they are occasionally made to feel their age. “My granddaughter told me she was going to make herself a dress from a yard and a half of material, and I could hardly believe it. In my day we had to buy at least eight and a half yards,” said Mrs Wallis.

Both are from families which have been settled in Canterbury for more than 100 years. Mr Wallis’s grandparents arrived at Lyttelton in 1849 and he was born in the hotel at Little River where his father was the licensee. Mrs Wallis’s mother was carried over the Bridle path from Lyttelton when she was 10 months old. Her father, who used to work in the coal mines in North Canterbury, was born during the Industrial Revolution in England.

“Father used to work in the mines when he was eight years old,” she said. In his younger days, Mr Wallis played an active role

in the trade union movement. Both Mr and Mrs Wallis keep good health and are very modest about their youthful appearance. "Don’t judge a chicken by the parsley sauce,” they said, with a laugh. “They were not quite respectable in those days, but they have led to better times,” he said. Always a keen reader, Mr Wallis is particularly interested in the works of Charles Dickens, whom he considers the finest writer in English.