Thirty years ago newlyweds Michael and Lyn Fleetwood made the front page of the Examiner after their surprise wedding in Barbados.

But the couple weren’t the only lovebirds to make the news with an elopement to the Caribbean ... Rolling Stone vocalist Mick Jagger was also getting spliced to Jerry Hall on the same island at the same time.

“We never saw them,” quips Michael, as he looks back on three decades of married life with Lyn.

“We were aware of it because it was in the Barbados newspapers but we were more concerned with our own wedding.”

Michael met Lyn when she came to England from Majorca where she had met Michael’s sister, Julia. She came to a party, met Michael and sparks flew.

“I thought ‘This is the one’. We had only known each other a few weeks when we got married. Originally we were going to get married on the Isle of Man but it got messy so we just ran off to Barbados.”

How the Examiner reported Michael and Lyn Fleetwood's Barbados wedding in 1987
How the Examiner reported Michael and Lyn Fleetwood's Barbados wedding in 1987

Michael, now 57, had seen a travel agent’s advertisement for Weddings in Paradise and decided to do his own thing. Suddenly he and Lyn, 56, were in Barbados where they surprised the receptionist in their hotel by asking if they could married.

“She said, ‘You want to get married? Whoa! When do you want to do it?’ You had to be in Barbados for three or four days to qualify and she just did it all.

“Everything cost 100 Barbados dollars, which was £30 at the time, including flowers and a photographer. Everybody at the hotel attended for us - about 40 people. We didn’t know any of them. And it turned out that we were the only couple that were married. Everyone else seemed to be with their secretaries!”

Hairdressers Michael and Lyn, who run Hair Design 9 in Scholes, Holmfirth, have never regretted their non-traditional wedding, even if it meant relatives weren’t around. And as for Mick Jagger: “We went to see him play with the Rolling Stones in Roundhay Park in Leeds, but that’s as close as we got!”