60 up for Huddersfield triplets

Jun 1 2009 by Roy Wright, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

60 up for town triplets

HUDDERSFIELD'S second set of triplets are today celebrating 60 years of triple trouble.

Peter, Susan and Miriam Wrigley were born at 26 weeks at St Luke’s hospital on June 1, 1949, weighing a tiny 1Ib to 1.5lb each.

Doctors didn’t expect the trio to survive and their parents Arthur and Hannah were told to name and baptise them quickly.

But against the odds and to the astonishment of medics, they pulled through and were allowed to leave hospital after six months.

And yesterday they celebrated their 60th birthday with 38 members of their family, including their mum, now 89, at the Golcar Lily pub.

The triplets recalled how they became local celebrities after their miraculous survival, their story featured in newspapers including the Examiner as they grew up.

Miriam, a mum of two, said: “While mum and dad had been told by doctors that they might be expecting twins they had no idea it would be triplets. When the doctors kept coming out and telling dad he’d had another one, he thought they were pulling his leg!

“But with us being so tiny and them not having the having the modern technology we have today it was touch and go whether we would survive.

"There was quite a bit of fuss made of us when we were growing up, we were only the second set of triplets to be born in Huddersfield. Our pictures were in the Examiner and other local papers also followed us for the first few years and came to take pictures of us on our birthdays.

“When dignitaries came to our school, we always had to be the ones on the photos with them!”

The trio lived in Netherton when they were growing up and their already large family was expanded even further when their siblings David, 58, Joan, 57, and Maxine, 52, arrived.