Valentine's Day: Yorkshire cycling champion Peter Procter and wife Shirley celebrate 70 years of marriage

Yorkshire, though, is home. Peter was born in Bradford, where he returned after spending his childhood in Harrogate and Alne, but was stationed in Chester for his National Service with the Army – which had promised him plenty of training and cycling as part of the forces team – in the early 1950s.

The team was racing in the Coventry area one day when Peter’s captain suggested they stay afterwards for a social event. “During the racing season, I lived like a monk a little bit,” says Peter, 93. “I wasn't really keen on staying for this event and we had a long drive back up to Chester. Anyway, we did stay and then I met this girl.”

Despite training for the British championships, he delayed his departure to stay with Shirley, and invited her to watch him take part in a road race near Nottingham.

“I heard this voice shout ‘Come on, Pete!’ And I looked round, and there was Shirley, so that’s how it started. It’s been a long romance, hasn’t it?”

Shirley, 90, says: “He’s what I call a persistent Yorkshireman.”

That was in 1951 when Peter was 21 and Shirley 18. “Shirley was accused of being a champ chaser,” jokes Peter, adding: “We just gelled, like people do. I was in the Great Britain team as well as riding for the Army, so there's a certain amount of glamour there and Shirley was a keen cyclist, of course, and so that was the catalyst really.”

The couple married at St Nicholas Church, in Shirley’s home town of Kenilworth in Warwickshire, on February 14, 1953.

“A lot of cyclists turned up and when we came out of the church we had a guard of honour, holding the cycle wheels up like an arch,” adds Peter.

“I’ve always joked since, mind you, that next time I get married it'll never be on Valentine's Day. I mean, the price of roses is ridiculous.”

They had five boys, the first within a year of marrying: Derek, Paul, twins Gary and Andrew, and Stuart.

Peter had won the British National Road Race Championship in 1951 and had hoped to compete in the 1952 Olympics but he and others were not picked – unfairly, he still feels – and he joined the BSA professional team.

He concluded that the money he received in cycling wouldn’t support his new family and after coming out the Army in 1953 founded his building firm, PR Procter, settling back in Bradford, although they moved to Appletreewick in the early 1970s.

As his business grew, Peter bought an Aston Martin and was invited to join the owners’ club. The invitation, subsequently, was extended to racing and things got serious when he got a Cooper 500 and, later, a Lotus 18 among others.

He started to compete in Formula Two races, finishing second in the Berlin Grand Prix and Vienna Grand Prix during his time. He was also part of a team, with Andrew Cowan, which won the Tour de France Automobile in a Ford Mustang in 1964. When Formula One wasn’t happening, its drivers could take part in Formula Two, so Peter became friends with the likes of Sir Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark.

During Peter’s time racing for Alan Mann, who ran the Mustang and the Lotus Cortina teams, Shirley was able to call on him for quick international transport.

“Alan has had his own plane and so he used to fly Shirley up and down. She could just pick the phone up and say, ‘Any chance of the plane?’ and he’d lay it on for her, flying down and flying back home when she needed to. We were very lucky, really, with plenty of support.”

However, a crash in a Ford Anglia at Goodwood in 1966 ended Peter’s professional racing career at the age of 36. On the first lap of the race, another driver ran into the back of his car and ruptured the fuel tank. The car turned over several times, spilling fuel which caught fire.

“I was lucky to get out of it,” says Peter. “I got myself out of it and was on fire, of course. They put me out eventually.”

He spent almost a year recovering in hospital, returning afterwards for plastic surgery, having suffered severe burns on 65 per cent of his body.

But he remains a member of British Racing Drivers’ Club at Silverstone, which he regularly attends, and Shirley is president of the Women’s Motor Racing Associates Club – known as the Doghouse Owners’ Club – a charity formed by wives in the 1960s primarily to take care of families stricken by accidents.

Peter was diagnosed with a stage four melanoma in his left lung seven years ago and given, at best, nine months to live. But he says he was lucky to receive the drug pembrolizumab on an experimental basis, feels healthy and stopped treatment last year. “It's a bit of a miracle,” he adds.

Road trips continue, too, in the form of drives through Europe to see friends in Portugal.

For their anniversary, the couple will enjoy a meal at the nearby Craven Arms in Appletreewick with family – they have eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren – and on Valentine’s Day are going out to dinner in Grassington as they celebrate, in Shirley’s words, “a pretty varied life”.