SEVEN TIMES A WIFE

Evening Star, Issue 20193, 5 June 1929, Page 9

SEVEN TIMES A WIFE

WOMAN'S REMARKABLE LIFE There was recently buried at Kings-tuii-on-'i liaiiiei one ol’ the must remarkable ami most-married women in Kurland, Mrs Sarah Goodwin, of Park road, Kingston. During her ninetyone years she had no lower than seven husbands.

The old woman first mairied well over seventy years ago. Her husbands, in order of marriage, wore; William William Woslon, Robert Peed, William Wallace, Hubert Filo, John Collett, and Louis Goodwin. 'Clio first husband died utter only a few years of married life, leaving two daughters. The second, Weston, a confectioner at .Hampton Wick, was killed by falling beneath a train when alighting at a station. After a few years the widow, who had been left with seven children, married Reed, a sailor, who during an adventurous life, was thrice shipwrecked. He also met a tragic fate. Leaving the sea ho became river-keeper in the Kingston district. While working on a punt lie met with an accident, which brought about paralysis, and bo died about nine years after the marriage. Then, after an interval, Wallace came along and again tragedy stepped in to dissolve the union. Wallace was engaged at Normansfiekl, Hampton Wick, and ho died, two years after the marriage, from the result of an accidental fall from a ladder. The fifth union, with Kilo, a caretaker at Surbiton. proved unhappy, and the couple separated.

After Kilo's death I.ljc woman look her sixth husband in the person of Collett, who started in business at Kingston as an oil and colourman. lie passed away, and there was an interval of ninny years before Goodwin, the present widower, became the seventh spouse.

Now aged seventy-five, Goodwin bemoans the loss of ‘‘a grand old woman.” “ Now she has gone I feel I have lost my right band,” he told an interviewer. 11 She was as active as ever up to early this year, when she became ill and bad to. go to hospital,” Goodwin first met her forty-one years ago, and then lost sight of her for thirty years. “In 1921,” added the old man, “I happened to go to Kingston, where I saw her in the street. I asked her if she was Mrs Reed, and she said she had been, although she did not recognise me- We renewed onr friendship,and in 1922 wo were married. Neither of ns regretted it, and for the next six years we lived very happily.” In his little sitting room Mr Goodwin gazed 'affectionately at his wife’s photograph, which is surrounded by portraits of some of .her six other husbands.