DIVORCES IN BRITAIN

Evening Star, Issue 20029, 21 November 1928, Page 3

DIVORCES IN BRITAIN

P ALARNIIKG INCREASE TOLL OF BROKEN HOMES Secret divorce in the two years of Us existence has almost doubled tho toll of broken homes in Britain, says the ‘Sunday Express.’ In 1926, before the new Act, which censors the details of divorce proceedings, cases numbered 2,973. Tho list of petitions for this year’s Michaelmas sittings showed that tho total number of cases in 192 S may exceed 5,400. giicli a figure is unparalleled in the history of tho Divorce Court. Women petitioners outnumber tho men by approximately two to one, and most of the eases, which are undefended, occupy only ton minutes of the judge’s time. A prominent Divorce Court solicitor gives vivid and poignant stories of shattered romances which have passed through his hands, “The chief reason for this alarming increase in matrimonial troubles is the difference the Act has made to tho consequences of divorce,” he says. “ Before December. 1926, many thousands of unhappily married women shrank from tho publicity that the hearing' of their cases would inevitably be given. They snlfered almost any form of torture before that of revealing the sordid story of their married life. “i. have been told stories in Ibis room which have made mo wonder that nnv human creature could ciuluro such hardships and remain sane. And yet the victims of those cruelties would rather have them twenty times doubled than face a column of print. “ A great reason for those increased numbers is. however, something quite different. There are many young married women who make no attempt to make tho best of their married life. They quarrel with their husbands over some trivial matters, and. having nothing to fear, suggest a divorce. The husband may agree. They arrange it between them, and once more they are free again. It is easy as that. “ There was a time when the wife made every effort in unhappy circumstances to divorce her husband rather than he divorced herself. Now she does not care. Shc_ is quite ready to be, legally, the guilty party herself, content in the knowledge that her friends need never know the facts of the case at all.

“Tnko a case in point. A young married' woman onmo to mo the other day and asked mo to obtain a divorce tor her.

“ ‘ What evidence have you against vour husband?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, 1 haven’t any yet,’ she answered, ‘but I want to marry someone else. I haven’t told’ my husband. Would you write to him for me and tell him what I want, and then perhaps you and ho could fix the evidence up between you?’ “Mv reply sent the young lady off in a temper, doubtless to another lawyer! But I have had many others, not ouite so blatant perhaps, but with the same idea in their minds. I am convinced that many divorces are avoidable. People do not try to understand each other or to make allowances. _ Over every divorce court should be written: ‘This is iho inevitable meeting place of those who cannot give and take.’ BOY AND GIRL MATCHES.

“ Many of my cases are those of the boy and girl who married after, say, a seaside meeting and a few glamorous holiday weeks. They have discovered that married life is not all fox-trots and moonlight. In the crowded courts women’s tears are commonplace. It is the tearless face of the woman who will never be ablo to cry again that excites pity—the woman from whom every illusion has been stripped. The girls cry, and you know that in a year or two years the wound, if it has not gone, will at least be only a scar. But the laces that haunt one are the faces of middle-aged women who seo for the first time the girl who irretrievably led away their husbands from them and their children.

“ The greatest sufferers never appear, or at least rarely. They are the children of couples broken ruthlessly apart, sometimes to be left without even a name; after their mother has been through the legal machine. “It is Robot legislation, leaving behind a trail of broken hearts and distorted lives, but in the present state of things it is tlio best we can do.”-