Donna and Vincent's wedding day had dawned, but they could not have imagined the caterers would fail to turn up to feed their 70 guests. GEMMA SIMMS reports...

Donna Gardner looked lovely in her white wedding dress. It was her big day and she had just one hour to go until she tied the knot.

Everything was going fairly smoothly so far, but Donna couldn't work out why the caterer was late collecting the key for the hall to lay out the food for the reception.

The only real problem up till then had been the upset with her mum refusing to go to the wedding after a series of fall-outs.

"I sat here and cried for three hours because I wanted my mum to be there, just as any bride would. She had made our wedding cake but wouldn't answer the door when I went to collect it," explained Donna, who lives in Wood Farm, Oxford, with husband Vincent, 32, and four children.

The wedding had already had a few hitches but Donna thought everything was finally sorted.

"We booked a disco but a month before the wedding the DJ said he'd had a better offer. This was before our summer wedding, and you try getting another DJ a month before.

"Luckily we got a friend of a friend to do it," said Donna, now 32. But her mother's absence and the disco cancellation paled into insignificance next to the catering problem. The caterer had promised to get the food to the hall in Horspath. But it didn't arrive.

"The caterer should have come to pick the keys up at 2.30pm and by 3pm I was getting worried as we hadn't seen him," said Donna, who was getting married at Horspath church at 4pm.

Her family called the pub where he was supposed to be preparing the food and he said he was on his way so Donna relaxed a little, thinking he would take everything straight to the hall.

But he still didn't show up.

"I finished getting dressed but forgot my garter because I had been panicking so much and also forgot to put my tooth plate in, so I had a missing front tooth all day.

"I even forgot my bouquet of flowers. At the church I said to my dad, 'We have 70 guests and no food'."

Her father told her not to worry and everything would get sorted. "It was not until we were signing the register that I told my husband there was no food. We hung around after the church trying to waste more time before going to the hall.

"My sister's husband missed the whole service trying to find the caterer. Eventually we got to the hall and all the tables were bare.

"I went to the kitchen to make my nan a cup of tea as that's all I could do," said Donna.

When everyone should have been tucking into a buffet, children were buying chocolate bars from the vending machine.

In the end Donna gave her stepfather the cash they had ready for the caterer and he went to his daughter's house where she was having a barbecue.

"She cancelled the barbecue and they both went to Sainsbury's and bought food."

"Within two hours we finally had a spread. To me, that was the worst part of the wedding but also the upset of my mum not coming - there was a lot of panicking," said Donna.

To this day, the couple still don't know why the caterer didn't turn up. According to Donna, he made excuses that his friend was supposed to be in charge of the spread.

"It really was a disaster, but at least we were able to get married," she added.

Previous news story

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.