WIVES PAY COSTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 34, 9 August 1943, Page 3

WIVES PAY COSTS

TWO DIVORCE CASES

WORK BEFORE HOME

O.C. SYDNEY, August 6. Two Sydney wives who left their husbands to earn their own living were ordered today to pay Divorce Court costs. "Wives, who without reasonable excuse treat marriage as a temporary convenience must not expect to go free of liability to pay costs," said Mr. Justice Bonney.

In the first case Mr. Justice Bonney, making a restitution order, said the wife must pay the costs if she refused to return to her husband. He directed Gladys Eileen Lawless, 29, to return to Leo Dudley Lawless, 32, locomotive

driver

"Here is a case of a perfectly good husband who treated his wife well and she goes off to get a job. I think this is a. case in which she should pay costs," said Mr. Justice Bonney. "She put her good husband to the expense of these proceedings. She deliberately chooses to make money for herself, and she should pay for her choice."' Lawless said he lived happily with his wife from the time of their marriage in 1935 until 1939, when his wife, against his wishes, took a job as a barmaid in Wollongong, on the south coast of New South Wales. At the time he was giving her the whole of his wages of £3 a week, and she returned him 25s a week. She gay* up her job in Wollongong. telling him she did not like the town, and that she was sick, of married life. On December 28 last she left him to take a job in Sydney. Later, Mr. Justice Bonney ordered Mrs. Hazel Mary Warburton, 36, to pay her husband's costs after he had granted the husband a decree nisi for divorce on the ground of desertion. The husband. Lieut. Carl William Warburton, A.1.F., formerly- of Kensington, said his wife had had her own millinery business and was now working for i\ big millinery firm.