HAM RUBBED IN WIFE’S HAIR

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 May 1941, Page 8

HAM RUBBED IN WIFE’S HAIR

HUSBAND’S FURY AT SPILT SOUP

LONDON, January 31. A private secretary who married her employer, an American business man, was granted a judicial separation in the Divorce Court yesterday. She was Mrs Roseff Honor Carr, Queen’s-gate, S.W. She alleged cruelty against her husband, Mr Gilbert Harry Carr, managing director, Fitzjames-avenue, Croydon, whom she married in 1931. Giving judgment, the President, Sir Boyd Merriman, said the case against Mr Carr was one of a course of conduct calculated to break his wife’s spirit and that it had been continued until her health broke down under the strain, or was likely to do so. He was devoted to his wife, but she said that from about 1935 onwards his conduct was becoming progressively unbearable. His lordship spoke of an incident when the husband objected to the wife smoking while she was driving a car." He snatched a cigarette out of her mouth,, her glasses were knocked off. and the car mounted the pavement. His lordship thought that that incident was typical of the husband’s manner to his wife, and showed his arrogant attitude towards her. The President also referred to an incident at the dinner-table on December 27, 1937, when Mr Carr behaved in the most outrageous manner. He and his wife had sat down to dinner when the maid upset the soup all over the floor. The wife suggested that they might do without soup, but the husband said not a bit of it, and so more had to be made. Then he asked why the Worcester sauce was not on the table. The thing brewed up into a firstclass row, which ended by the husband picking up three pounds of ham and rubbing it into his wife’s hair and face, and on to her neck and dress.

The wife, his lordship continued, went out to a cinema, and, after she had returned, her husband asked her, in the gruffest possible way, how long she had been back. She did not answer, but eventually said it was her business what time she came in. The result was that he swung his arm round and smacked her face very hard several times. She smacked him back, and they had a real set-to. According to Mrs Carr, he twisted her arm behind her back and tried to get at her throat, saying: “I will kill you.” “I have not the slightest doubt,’* the President added, “that the wife’s evidence about this evening is substantially true.”