NATALIE SALEH AND Eoin Gillen were married on August 21st in St Edmund’s College Chapel in Hertfordshire, where the bride had gone to school, by Fr Alexander Master of Westminster Cathedral in London. The chapel was designed in 1846 by Augustus Pugin, who also designed the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. It houses a number of relics, including one of St Edmund and one of St Oliver Plunkett.
Natalie’s mother is from Greece and her father, a doctor in the British army, is from Lebanon, and they travelled a great deal as a family. She was born in the UK, but because of her father’s career they lived in both Saudi Arabia and Germany for a number of years. Thus Natalie and her brother, George, were sent to boarding school at St Edmund’s, the oldest Catholic college in England. She chose its chapel for their wedding as it is full of memories for her: she was confirmed there by the late Cardinal Basil Hume and was the first girl allowed to serve at the chapel’s altar.
Natalie graduated from both the University of Leicester and the University of Paris, having read law and French law. She is fluent in English, Greek and French, and also speaks German, Spanish and some Arabic. She trained and qualified with several law firms in the City of London and is now a lawyer for a private equity firm there.
Eoin grew up in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and attended Blackrock College along with his two brothers, Fergus and Maurice. His father is Prof Gerard Gillen, emeritus professor of music at NUI Maynooth and titular organist of the Pro-Cathedral, so the house was always full of music. This rubbed off on Eoin, who took up the French horn, studying at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and playing in the National Youth Orchestra. After a year studying law and German at Trinity College, he decided to study music at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After completing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in music at Cambridge, as well as teaching music there, Eoin’s career came full circle and he returned to law, qualifying as a solicitor at a law firm in the City of London. He has worked as a lawyer in London and Bangkok, and now works as legal counsel at French bank BNP Paribas in London.
The couple met through Natalie’s brother, who shared a flat with Eoin. As befits a couple of lawyers, they still have the lease of the flat, dated on the day they first met 10 years ago.
Friends travelled from as far away as Japan for the wedding. Eoin assembled a choir of friends, who sang a Haydn Mass, and his father played the organ during the ceremony. Guests were later served a Middle Eastern mezze during their reception in Longstowe Hall, an Elizabethan manor house in Cambridgeshire.
Eoin planned the honeymoon and kept it a complete surprise. They spent two weeks in Namibia – hiking up the world’s tallest sand dunes and trekking into open savannah, with plenty of game spotting and safaris – and one week in South Africa, travelling down the famous Garden Route, with some whale-spotting thrown in and a tour of the wineries in Franschoek and Stellenbosch.
They live in the same flat where they first met in Maida Vale.
