Wilbur and Shirley Wright

Wilbur and Shirley Wright

They were married for 61 years and died within half an hour of each other - the wife first, then the husband, without knowing she had just died.

Shirley Lorraine Wright, 81, and Wilbur Orville Wright, 83, were farewelled in their hometown of Kawerau yesterday.

The eastern Bay of Plenty identities died at 12.35pm and 1.05pm on Saturday.

Mr Wright had been ill for several years and was in a resthome, but family members said Mrs Wright was in reasonably good health.

So it came as a shock when she took ill on Friday night after going to the local Cosmopolitan club with a friend, and by Saturday afternoon was gone.

The second-youngest of their five children, Peter, said the family was at the local hospital with Mrs Wright when she died.

"While we were there, we got a phone call from the resthome to say Dad had died," Peter, 49, said.

"It was a double whammy."

His mother had moved to a unit at the Mountain View resthome a couple of years ago to be closer to her husband, and Peter said his father was greatly comforted by her presence.

"She was the anchor in the boat," he said. "She held him together."

The Wrights were members of many clubs and volunteer organisations in the eastern Bay, and the size of their funeral showed the high regard in which they were held in the community.

It was standing-room only in the Kawerau town hall, as hundreds of mourners, including Mayor Malcolm Campbell, said their farewells.

Mrs Wright - known to many as "Ma" - was a Justice of the Peace and holder of the Queen's Service Medal, and Mr Campbell said the crowd's size was a "befitting gathering" for her and her husband.

He paid tribute to Mrs Wright's community work, which included helping Budget Services, Victim Support and Prisoners' Aid.

"There are a lot of people here that Shirl stood by thick and thin, especially in the dark days of Waikeria [Prison]," Mr Campbell said.

Lady Mary Delamere of the Maori Women's Welfare League praised Mrs Wright for always having "a good ear to listen to your problems", and a fellow Prisoners' Aid worker, Margaret MacDonald, said prison inmates and their families knew they could trust her.

"Shirl used her own car to take the wives, children and partners to the prison for visits," Mrs MacDonald said. "Whatever the situation, Shirl was not judgmental."