DEFYING MRS GRUNDY.

Evening Star, Issue 7473, 17 March 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

DEFYING MRS GRUNDY.

AN ABDUCTION AND ITS SEQUEL. EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF AN UNHAPPY MARRIAGE. [From Our Special Correspondent.] London, January 25. The story of Mr George S. Brockington, whose marriage festivities at Haselor last week led to a public riot, reads moro like a novel by Ouida or Rhoda Broughton than a romance of real life. Mr Brockington is a schoolmaster by profession, and, according to report, if not exactly young, very handsome. He was united on Thursday last to Miss Helena Bryan, a charming girl of about eighteen, her own brother giving her away. Numerous friends of bride and bridegroom attended the ceremony, and everything was done strictly en rigle. Why, then, should an angry crowd have assembled outside the church doors and greeted the wedding party with groans, cat-calls, and hisses? The persons chieQy concerned appeared to know, for they took no notice of the demonstration. Mr Brockington, indeed, looked savage, and his wife was very pale ; but neither the bridegroom nor any of his friends inquired the meaning of the loud cries of " Shame," or of the abusive epithets hurled at the festal cortege. After the scene of the morning, it may perhaps be thought, Mr and Mrs Brockington started quietly off on their honeymoon without exasperating public opinion by further rejoicings. Not at all. The day's programme included a dance at the village inn that evening, and it was strictly adhered to. Moreover, whatever may have been the feelings at the bottom of the public demonstration against the bridal couple, it was quite evident they had plenty of friends who failed to share them, for the company at the dance was numerous and socially dinting\t£. Popular indignation seems, however, to have been roused to white heat by this festivity. Hundreds of irate and hooting men and women assembled outside the inn doors, and, failing to drown the music by discordant braying, made a violent rush with stoneß and Btaves. Windows were broken and the furniture damaged. At the doors the mob were met by THE BRIDEGROOM, PISTOL IN HAND, who warned the "cowardly dogs " to stand back or take the consequences. Disbelief in the pistols being loaded shortly becoming evident, Brockington tired it once or twiceover the crowd's head. A scene of great disorder followed. The police were summoned, and ultimately about thirty arrests were made. The explanation of this extraordinary riot at what should have been a purely private festal party lies in Mr George Brockington'B past. The bridegroom I of Thursday last has been twice before the courts—once on a criminal charge, and secondly in a civil suit. About fifteen months ago he (then a married man and the father of several children) was charged with abducting a young girl under eighteen. But the girl (Miss Helen Bryan, now Mrs Brockington) swore that she went to his house of her own free will and passed the night there, and that she voluntarily accompanied him to Wolverhampton for three nights. It was also obvious that, though Miss Bryan was really under eighteen, she might well have been considered by the accused as above that age. Brockington's wife appeared in court on that occasion, and spoke bitterly of the treatment she had received, having been, she said, DESERTED AFTER TWENTY YEAR 9* MAHRIAOE, and left with seven children to support. Of course, the magistrates couldn't help her. The Divorce Court, however, did. A decree nisi was granted laßt May, and made absolute in November. Mrs Brockington obtained custody of the children, and left almost at once for Canada. These antecedents explain why the people of Henley resented the extensively-advertised wedding and wedding festivities of Mr Brockington and Miss Bryan. So far all is clear, save the inconceivable lenity of the numerous respectable people who gave their countenance to this extraordinary match. On Saturday morniDg last, however, there appeared in the Birmingham papers a highly original letter I signed by Mr Brockington himself, and putting an ENTIRELY NEW COLOR ON TIIE CASE, He calls it an "Apologia," mindful, perhaps, of the "Apologia pro Vita Sua, issued more than twenty years ago by a very distinguished resident in Birmingham—Cardinal Newman. In this he describes his wedded life: "By the headlong folly of early youth I found myself married to a woman of habits and temper totally incompatible with my own. All efforts to bring about a happier state of things were unavailing, but year after year I steadily resisted the advice of my friends to quit England and leave her to her fate. At fast I put the children—for whose sake I had borne with her so loDg—to one of the best schools in France. She accompanied them to that country, and there I spent my holidays. She now exercised herself in writing slanderous letters to the authorities of the Grammar School and the Midland Institute. These were easily refuted, and consequently disregarded. After her final return to England a deed of separation was drawn up, each clause being mutually agreed upon. Being advised that this would ' enable me to curb her slanderous tongue and clip the wings of her powers of mischief, she refused to sign. Nevertheless, that deed has been Btrictly adhered to on my part, and wo have lived wholly apart for six years." Here is a story miserable enough, and it is impossible to say how far it may be true, for the late Mrs Brockington is in Canada, and cannot contradict these accusations made behind her back. Mr Brockington, however, goes on to explain how he came to be guilty of the abduotion of Miss Bryan. After alluding to his marriage as an " intolerable bondage," he says: "The desire for freedom rapidly ripened into resolution with the appearance on the scene of Miss Bryan. To her I narrated the whole of the circumstances." " Picture to yourself," he continues; " I was bound to a

woman who broke up home after home, ruined my children, and tried to drive me from my profession—in fact, made life a burden grievous to be borne. After six years of total separation—in reality a mutually-agreed-upon divorce—l found a noble and devoted girl who was willing to face what was worse than death to a sensitive nature—public shame —for my sake. I freed myself by the only means which the law left open to me from the soulstifling bondage in whicii I was held. ' Desperate diseases require desperate remedies.' If my reader be a lady I say: Examine well your own heart and see if no I chord throbs responsive to the rare devotion of that noble girl whose renunciation of home 1 and friends for the sake of the man whom she loved—though as sacred an act of marriage as ever woman performed—was only to lead, as she well-knew beforehand, to Buffering and disgrace till the solemnisation of the ceremony of to-day." This, then, is Mr Brockington's explanation of his silence before the Divorce Court when his wife made a damaging statement against him. " Was I," he asks, " going to shut the gates of my own deliverance by denying it then?" Surely, never in the history of extraordinary marriages was such a proclamation issued on a wedding day. Nor is it less curious to see that THIS VERY SINOTjLAR BRIDEGROOM^ Who went through so much to get rid of one wife and to secure another, has still friends and champions. Ho found plenty of guests of both sexes to conic and dance at his wedding. The young lady who defied the ordinary laws of morality, the conventions of the world, and the ordinances of religion for his sake has, it is said, always enjoyed and deserved the esteem of her neighbors, and is described as of "remarkable personal attractions, and of an exceedingly amiable disposition." Rumor adds—to complete the story of woman's sacrifice—that she was engaged to be married to a young Guardsman, whom she deserted in order to help Mr Brockington to a divorce, losing her own character to secure his freedom. It is also a remarkable fact that she was " given away " at the marriage ceremony—a rite coming fifteen months late—by her brother, the very gentleman who prosecuted Mr Brockington for abduction. COMMENTS ON THE CASE. " It is hardly necessary," says the ' Daily Telegraph,' "to pronounce any public verdict on this exceptional narrative. The readiness of Mr Brockington to do anything or allow anything so that his first wife might be provoked into applying for a divorce testifies, no doubt, to his intense hatred of an uncongenial companion and to liia violent love for Miss Bryan. He reminds one of the country actor, who, playing Othello, ' blacked himself all over for the part.' Then, one can hardly admire the love of bombast—almost elation —with which Mr Brockington recites his deeds. There are men and women who, goaded by intolerable suffering at home, have broken the law of God and man, unable otherwise to obtain respite from a cruel situation ; but they have not been proud of their offence. Tennyson describes the noble Launcelot's visage when he fell under temptation: 'The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, in battle with the love he bare his lord, had marred his face and marked it ere his time. Another sinning on such heights, with one the flower of all the West and all the world, had been the sleeker for it.' Mr Brockington represents that alternative; he glories in the condemnation of the Divorce Court, and chuckles over the success of his silence. When under the Bourbon Restoration a Liberal Deputy paraded too often the fact that he had been fined for free speech, a colleague said to him : ' It is not enough to bo convicted ; one ought to be modest.' This we recommend to Mr Brockington. Let him bear what he thinks his honors more meekly. He considers himself a hero ; the people of Henley-in-Arden evidently i regard him as one who took passion for his guide. Nor does he explain some important points. His wife may have provoked his wrath ; but WHAT ABOUT HIS SEVEN CHILDREN. They, at least, we presume, were innocent of offence; yet the lover and husband of Miss Bryan leaves them to the care and support of his divorced wife. But, above all, why should this belated marriage be so triumphantly proclaimed? There are men among us who have erjed in wedlock, and who make the best of it—endeavoring by superb kindness and sublime patience to extract happiness from a foolish choice, and, even if they fail, enduring all things for the sake of their vow, their children, and the woman they once loved. These men are the true heroes—not the blatant Brockingtons of the world, who break old and form new bonds in tempests of wrath and passion, and then advertise themselves as champions of license and violators of law."