From the Papers- Your mission: Getting to the church on time!

Featured in the Bristol Observer, Friday 6th September 2002

Anna Ward and her Dad were happy and smiling in their wedding car as they drove slowly to the church, acknowledging the admiring glances from well-wishers. That was until they passed her mum with all the bridesmaids in the other wedding car, which had just broken down on the way.

The chauffeur said that he had called the RAC so Anna and her father went ahead to the church and filled in time by getting photographs taken until and Mum and the girls arrived – in an RAC emergency vehicle!

“The RAC driver was determined to get them to the church on time so he drove them himself before going back to repair the car” said Anna of Downend. “He even held the flowers and helped the girls out of the van, so he really did save the day”, she added.

It was a different story for Nina Brown of St George, who was waved goodbye by a crowd of well-wishers outside her home as she and her family settled into the wedding car to go to church.

“Then disaster,” she said. “We had driven less than half a mile when the car broke down. Then the police arrived because the car was blocking the traffic. “They gave my mum a lift back home to get her car and our neighbours offered to take the rest of us to church. Another wedding car was waiting at the church, but when I went to get in it started off without me. We shouted and the driver reversed to pick me up, and then drove on and stopped some way past the red carpet. It was an extremely stressful start to the ceremony!”