The first year John King’s Christmas lights were put on the tree, Johnnie Ray was top of the pops and Stanley Matthews had just won the inaugural Ballon d’Or award for best football player in Europe.

And 69 years later, the Philips bulbs – thought to be Britain’s oldest Christmas lights – still work just as they did when John King’s mother, Elsie, purchased them back in 1956.

Mr King, 79, said he had never had to replace any part of the set, bought from Halfords for 18 shillings – equivalent to almost £20 today – when he was just ten years old.

‘I’ve always cherished and looked after them. It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it myself.’

The pensioner said he remembered how he was ‘delighted’ when his mother returned home from shopping on Scunthorpe’s High Street with the lights.

He added: ‘I had been nagging her to buy them. So it was such a thrill to see them on the tree. I got a Hornby railway set for Christmas that year.

‘The price tag on them is 18 shillings.

‘I was really excited with them because not many people could afford a set of lights in those times.’

John King remembers ‘nagging’ his mother Elsie to buy the Christmas tree lights when he was a ten-year-old schoolboy 

Mr King, from Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, keeps the ‘precious’ lights in their original packaging

The set of 12 multi-coloured lights pre-date another set by the Dutch electronics company which had previously been thought to be the oldest in the UK. 

Those lights, owned by Ross Farr-Semmens, from Plymouth, Devon, had illuminated the family’s Christmas for 54 years until the bulbs finally blew last Christmas.

Mr Farr-Semmens, then 45, told last December how he had inherited the lights from his mother, Vina Shaddick, after she passed away in 2018.

Retired Mr King, who still lives in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, said that while his ‘precious’ lights still work, he stopped using them 20 years ago in order to protect them, even though they ‘look as if they’re going to last forever’.

But they have outlived his entire family, except his older brother. Alan, nine years his senior, who is still alive at 89.

His sister Joan, 12 years his senior, died in 2016. His mother died in 1977, a year after his father George.

Mr King, painter and decorator before becoming a school caretaker, has never married and has no children.  He still lives in the same end-of-terrace house that his family moved into in 1950 when he was seven.

He said: ‘I don’t use the lights because it is all LED now and they would use quite a bit of energy.

‘I was asked the other day will be the lights be good for another 70 years. Well, you never know.

‘I always put them up. I always put them back in the same order. I was very careful with them.’

But he added: ‘I have to say they’re now in retirement because, of course, they’re so precious to me.’

At Christmas 1956, Johnnie Ray was number one with Just Walkin’ in the Rain.

Matthews became Sir Stanley in 1965, while still playing in the top flight for Stoke City at the age of 50. He was the first active player to receive a knighthood.

The world’s first Christmas tree lights were assembled by Edward H Johnson at his home in Murray, Hill, New York City, in 1882.

Johnson was a friend and business partner of Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb, and hand-wired a string of red, white and blue bulbs to hang on his Christmas tree.