Last year Jake and Mary Jacobs celebrated 70 years of wedded bliss but this couple have overcome all the obstacles to reach such a marriage milestone.

When Mary, who is White, met Jake, who is Black, it was 1940s Britain and although they were living in a city, Jake was one of very few black men.

It would have been easy for Mary to walk away but she had fallen in love and would do anything she could to stay with her love, even after her father told her to leave.

“When I told my father I was going to marry Jake he said, ‘If you marry that man you will never set foot in this house again.’”

The couple had met when Jake came over from Trinidad during the war and they had attended the same technical college where Mary was having typing and shorthand lessons and he was training with the Air Force.

Mary, who lived in Lancashire at the time, and Jake got chatting and he impressed Mary with his knowledge of Shakespeare.

He and his friend invited Mary and her friend out for a picnic and they were spotted by a lady cycling past who was shocked to see two English girls chatting with black men so she reported Mary to her father. Her father was shocked and banned Mary from seeing him again.

When Jake returned to Trinidad they wrote to each other and a few years later he returned to the U.K. to get better paid work.

Jake surprised Mary by asking her to marry him; she was 19 years old and accepted but when she told her family they threw her out.

“I left with only one small suitcase to my name. No family came to our registry office wedding in 1948.”

Mary said while her father was ‘horrified’ that she could contemplate marrying a black man she didn’t realize that the rest of society felt the same way.

“The first years of our marriage living in Birmingham were hell — I cried every day, and barely ate. No one would speak to us, we couldn’t find anywhere to live because no one would rent to a black man, and we had no money.”

Even walking down the street together was difficult as people would point at them, Mary told the Daily Mail.

Mary fell pregnant and the couple enjoyed the excitement of knowing they would soon become parents but at 8 months she gave birth to a stillborn child.