CONJUROR'S 'MAGIC'

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 267, 10 November 1937, Page 13

CONJUROR'S 'MAGIC'

WON WOMAN'S HEART.

PRETENDED TO LOVE BABY.

STORY TOLD IN COTJRT. Florence Blanche Rose Asbridge was a liappy woman thirty-two years ago. She lived at Bombay with her husband, a Government official. Then she fell in love with a young stage artist. She ran away with him. Her husband resigned because of the scandal and disappeared. A changed Florence Asbridge, elderly, bespectacled, walked from a Cardiff workhouse to the police court recently to claim arrears and maintenance from the stage artist. He is Frederick William Asbridge, illusionist, conjurer, trick cyclist. His stage name is Nixon. His real name, he told the Court at a previous hearing, is Perrett. "Enticed Me Away." Asbridge asked the Court for the maintenance order to be set aside, as there was no proof that when he married Mrs. Asbridge her first husband was dead. Mrs. Asbridge said she married Ernest Charles Pritchard, Government superintendent of bubonic plagues, in 1902, lived with him for three yea is. In 1905 she met Asbridge at an hotel. "He enticed me away from my husband." she said. "He pretended to love my baby girl, ten months old, and he won my heart by this means. We ran away together." She heard of her first husband's death in 1910, she said, and she married Asbridge in England in 1912. A maintenance order was made against him at Cardiff in 1913, but she had received nothing since War Office payments —made to her during the war when Asbridge enlisted—ceased in 1919. In 1923, Mrs. Asbridge told the Court, she heard that her husband "had married again." The hearing vas adjourned.