THE MAN SOMETIMES PAYS

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 72, 26 March 1932, Page 15

THE MAN SOMETIMES PAYS

Ex-wives of men in Britain get £6,000,000 a year of the money earned by their ex-husbands! Arid year by year the allowance is increasing.

The humble shillings paid by workerhusbands who are separated in the police courts and the third of their total income which divorced husbands have to pay combine to make the colossal' total, says the "Sunday Express." Forty-five thousand'men are to-day paying either alimony or maintenance. Twenty thousand of the women receiving it are childless..

There are women travelling from hotel to hotel all over the world on the alimony paid by their husbands. Now they are in Cannes, then on to Venice, and later they turn up in Cairo. ...... ... ■ .; "One of my clients," said a famous divorce court lawyer to an interviewer, "is in a desperate position. His first wife keeps a servant and runs a small car. They were married for only two years, and during this time he was making £1500 a year. For the past eight years he has been paying £39 a month alimony. *. "To-day this man's business is on

the. point of bankruptcy. He is not making £36 a month. If that man applied for a reduction of his alimony the news of his failure would reach his creditors and complete the wreckage. His second. wife is finding the money for the first wife.

"In another case—it was a war marriage—the first wife has been, .receiving £5 a week maintenance for eleven years. Eor nine of those years the man has been married to another woman, and the two are devoted to each other. But he lost all his savings in a; Stock Exchange. crash, and on top of that he lost his job.

"This man wrote to his former wife, and for a month or two managed to send her enough to live on. His present wife, who had never worked; previously, got a job as a housekeeper. "The man got another job, but after three weeks the firm heard that his former wife was suing him for arrears of maintenance and dismissed him.

"The former wife has saved nothing, and although she earned her living before she was married, she has not attempted to1 earn a penny since."