A WEDDING reception nearly didn’t go ahead after one of the marquees put up in the Brecon garden where it was going to be held was blown over by a freak gust of wind.
Freddie Price and his fiancee Amanda Archer tied the knot at St Michael’s RC Church in Brecon on Saturday.
The beautiful and moving white wedding was followed by a lavish reception at Theatr Brycheiniog.
And Pippa Price, the bridegroom’s mother, said it was one of the best wedding receptions she has ever been to.
But for a few terrifying moments the day before she feared all her planning had been for nothing when the marquee in her garden, in Priory Hill, was blown over.
The loss of the marquee meant that the wedding reception for nearly 100 guests no longer had a viable venue.
Pippa had been planning the reception in her garden for months and at one stage she was worried that a problem with telephone wires being draped across her garden by a leaning telephone post could be a danger to her wedding guests.
After contacting the Brecon & Radnor Express to highlight the problem, Pippa was delighted when a team of engineers from Openreach went to the Postern behind her home in the week before the wedding and replaced both the pole and the telephone wires.
Once this work had been done and the two marquees had been put up, Pippa was confident nothing would stop the wedding reception in her garden going ahead.
That was until a freak gust of wind on Friday afternoon brought the main marquee crashing to the ground.
“I couldn’t believe it when the marquee came down,” Mrs Price said. “It was all just a mangled mass of canvas and steel. The freak gust of wind must have lifted the marquee up and rotated it in the garden.
“It was all pegged out and tied up with ropes but one of the groom’s men was left hanging on to one of the poles and two of my sons were caught in the middle of wreckage. I dread to think what the outcome would have been if it had happened on the Saturday and the marquee had been filled with guests.”
Pippa and her son’s bride, Amanda, immediately feared the repercussions if the wedding reception had to be cancelled at such a late stage.
Pippa contacted the nearby Castle Hotel, hoping they had a spare room where the wedding reception could be staged the following day. They did not and the Wellington Hotel in the centre of Brecon said the same thing. However, the hotel suggested Pippa try Theatr Brycheiniog and, fortunately, the staff there said they would be able to accommodate it even at such short notice.
Pippa said: “My immediate thought when the marquee came down was ‘do not panic!’.
“I told Amanda that whatever happened we would find a way for the reception to go ahead. When I heard the Theatr might be available I pegged over there in my slippers and collapsed over the reception desk and shouted ‘help!’.
“The Theatr staff were fantastic. For functions like wedding receptions they have to put all the seating down. In the end we had about four hours to move everything from my garden like the bunting and what remained of the lighting to the Theatr.
“I can honestly say, the way it turned out, it’s the best wedding reception I’ve ever been to.”
One of the ironies of the marquee being blown down, Pippa said, was that two of the new telegraph wires put up by the Openreach engineers also came down.
Pippa, who runs her Hatbatty hat hire business from home, said: “I’d been planning the wedding reception for months.
“When the wires were fixed I thought all my worries were over. Little did I know what would happen. In the end it doesn’t matter, the bride and groom had a fabulous day and the guests all went away happy.
“I’m so proud of how everyone – the bride, bridesmaids and the groom and his groom’s men and our friends and guests – pulled together.”
Pippa, who has seven sons, is hoping her home insurance will cover the cost of the damage to the marquees and her garden.
Freddie, who works as a computer science teacher at a school in Oxford, and Amanda, a speech and language therapist in High Wycombe, are now spending a romantic few days together in Devon.
Soon the Price family will have another big wedding day on their hands as another of Pippa and her husband Jonathan’s sons is getting married in the Gold Coast where the Commonwealth Games are being held.
As Pippa said: ‘It’s like the plot from the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Eventually I’d like all my sons to find nice girls to settle down with. Now we’ve got two – which is a great start!”