Edgar makes it an extra special occasion by popping the question to Joy
It was double the joy for a lady named just that at Beverley Ladies’ Day. The biggest date on the Westwood racecourse calendar also happened to coincide with Joy Fenton’s 78th birthday.
Joy probably did not bet on it also being the day she got engaged, however. Her sweetheart Edgar Godden 68, got down on one knee and asked for her hand in marriage.
Now, Joy – who said yes – is wearing an engagement ring that brought another level of sparkle to Ladies’ Day in Beverley. Hull Live photographer Donna Clifford caught up with the happy couple not long after the surprise engagement got announced over the racecourse public address system.
Edgar said: “It’s Ladies’ Day, Joy’s 78th birthday and obviously I proposed and made it all in one go.” He said he had been secretly planning to pop the question with the racecourse and “got it all organised”.
It was coming up to the happy couple’s fifth year of being together. Two weeks ago they attended Market Rasen Ladies’ Day, before heading for Beverley. “We love ladies’ days,” said Edgar.
“It was a secret, Joy didn’t know,” said her new fiancé. He had taken her to one side of the racecourse where a member of staff was waiting to have a “little word”, on the pretext of it being her birthday.
“Beverley Ladies’ Day being on her birthday gave me the idea to propose. I think we were ready for that situation,” said Edgar, whose now fiancée could not understand why he had been handed a microphone.
“The beauty of it was, when I opened the box, and I said ‘would you marry me’, she said ‘let’s have a look at the ring first’.”
Joy said: “I didn’t know anything. I had no idea. He said to me this morning, ‘I’ve got you a present but you’ll have to wait until after the races because I want it to be special’.
“Whenever he sends me a card, Christmases, birthdays, the anniversary of when we met, anything, he always puts a letter in. About our journey, how much he loves me.
“What he wrote in the letter this morning was lovely, but I still had no idea. I thought, well we’re going to the races, we’ll have a lovely day, I’ll see what he’s bought me … then he goes down on one knee.”
Edgar said he was a lifelong racegoer but he introduced Joy to the joys of the sport. He had taken a fun photograph of her first contact with a racehorse in 2022 – a “galloper” on a child’s roundabout in the Frenchgate Shopping Centre in Doncaster – before they went off to Cheltenham three weeks later.
“The Gold Cup winner was called Galloper. That was fate,” he said.
The couple have not set a date for their wedding but Edgar said with Joy being 80 in two years, and himself being 70 next year, it could be another occasion when they made it a double celebration.