Vintage Wedding

A lifetime of love: Charles & Lina Thake

“Charlie and I met on the stage,” says Lina Thake, 84, as she affectionately recalls the moment she met husband and veteran actor Charles Thake, 88, around 65 years ago. “We both had a part in the same play, but he was more of a star than I was. We met every day for as long as the play ran, and when it ended, he asked me out on a date. I was 19 and not interested in getting serious, but he was insistent.”

With April fool approaching, Lina told Charles she will go out with him on 1st April, but there was a catch – “I told him that if we hit it off, we’ll continue and consider ourselves lucky, if not it would have been an April fool’s joke. The date went well in the end, we talked a lot about Shakespeare and the stage, and I considered him to be a very interesting person. When he asked me out on a second date, I said yes.”

It wasn’t long until the couple decided to tie the knot, just over two years after they’d met. “We decided to get married when his brother, George, was back from the UK where he was studying, otherwise it would take us another year until we could get married!”

The couple exchanged ‘I dos’ on 2nd August, 1953 at St Ignatius Church in St Julian’s, followed by a reception at the Regina Hotel in Sliema, which is Lina’s hometown. It turns out, however, that the Regina Hotel was not their first choice. “My father and father-in-law joined forces to plan our wedding, and made a big affair of it,” says Lina. “But only ten days before the wedding, he found out (through my mother – who happened to be told by a family member that she received two wedding invitations for the same day, time and venue) that they had double-booked the venue. The other couple refused to give up the slot, so we had to look for an alternative.”

As fate would have it, Lina’s father bumped into a friend after church one morning who happened to own a hotel. “He was offered the Regina Hotel to host the wedding, but it needed some doing up, so my father employed a bunch of workers and cleaners to bring it up to scratch with very little time to spare. Only four days before the wedding, we had to resend invitations to let everyone know that the venue had changed.”

Lina describes the entire day as beautiful – a society wedding including the whole cabinet of ministers of the time and the cream of Maltese society, including Dr George Borg Olivier as her witness and Dr Paul Boffa as Charles’. “We were young and couldn’t stop smiling, and it was a very jovial affair,” recalls Lina. “We got everyone dancing thanks to Jimmy Dowling and his band, and that was probably my favourite part of the whole day – almost everyone joined in to dance.”

Lina donned a made-to-measure gown for the occasion, with a full skirt and train, v-shaped bodice – “to accentuate my flat stomach,” she quips – and a high collar, complete with buttons down the front. Her ‘something borrowed’ was a pair of shoes from her sister, while a ribbon around her thigh served as ‘something blue’.

63 years, six children and 12 grandchildren later, Lina reveals that the secret to a good marriage comes down to a few things. “You have to work hard to make a success of your marriage, but the one thing that sustains it is making your partner feel loved,” says Lina. “Charlie was and still is very complementing and has always been a loving husband, so there was no reason to grumble.”

Image Credits

Lionel Galea