On this day in 1927, The Canberra Times featured a story written in such a way that it could have been fiction. A bride was travelling from Sydney on a later train but her groom waiting for her in Canberra missed the telegram and so began a story set amongst a young Canberra city.
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A bride lost in Canberra - a groom frantically combing the city on his wedding night - around these two were woven the tangled web of circumstances which caused the postponement of a wedding from Saturday night to the Sunday.
The story goes that the prospective groom awoke on Saturday morning keen to pick up his bride from the Canberra train station. What he had missed though was a telegram that had been sent to his place of work that sat unopened. As he arrived at the train station, the passengers disembarked but his bride was nowhere to be seen. He then thought that she had missed him and had made her way to the house. But alas, she was not there either. So began a one-man search of the city.
While this was happening, the bride and her bridesmaid were sitting on the slower mixed train departing from Sydney after the Canberra Express had already gone. The two weary travellers arrived at Queanbeyan station and were waiting, the only ones on the platform, for the groom to arrive.
When he did not show, they began a search themselves. The problem was complicated by the fact that Canberra was wide with few streetlights, unnamed streets and unnumbered houses which made it difficult for the ladies to direct the taxi driver.
The story has a happy end where the prospective to be wedded couple found each other and so their wedding happened on the Sunday at St John's Baptist Church with much celebration.
