A BIG INDUSTRY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4809, 12 July 1939, Page 7

A BIG INDUSTRY

DIVORCE IN BRITAIN. 200,000 MARRIAGES FAIL. NEARLY £4,000,000 ALIMONY. There arc, says the "Sunday Express," two hundred thousand people in Britain who have been married and whose marriages have failed. And the numbers are increasing. The amount of divorce in Britain today would probably astonish most people.

Last year, with the new grounds for divorce, there were 24,000 people divorced. This meant that, as 400,000 people marry a year, marriages were failing last year at the rate of one in seventeen.

Last year, however, was the first year of the new grounds of divorce, with many long-standing cases. We can guess that the future rate of divorce will be 7000 to 8000 a year, and this will mean that the failure rate will be one in twenty-five to one in twenty-eight.

High figures, but they do not and probably never will approach the fantastic figures of America. There one married person in every five gets divorced.

When people divorce, is it because they arc simply unhappy, or is it a case of there being a third person involved? Divorce solicitors are unanimous in saying that people seldom divorce out of mere incompatability. It is almost always because of a third person; living alone is intolerable. The figures confirm it.

In 1935, of 90.00 people who were divorced, 6000 remarried. In other words, Britain's 200,000 divorced people were not "fed up" with marriage. They wanted more of it, in fact. They were only fed up with a particular marriage". A point of social significance.

So much for the number of people who get divorced. Here is the reason why thousands do not—the kind of ordeal, in other words, that divorce is,

First point— Divorce is expensive. The usual cost for an undefended divorce is £6O to £7O. And it is the man who pays all the time. Few people realise that if a wife is trying to get a divorce from her husband, he is obliged by law to finance her case for her. Divorce can be called quite a big industry. If 60 per cent, of last year's divorces were paid for at the rate of £7O, as is probably true, it meant an income to the legal profession from divorce of half a million pounds. In the future their annual income will probably be over £300,000.

Thousands of husbands toil all their lives to keep wives whom they married when young and foolish and lived with for only a few years. Total alimony paid by the 40,000 life-long alimony-payers of Britain, £3,600,000. Formidable, as the French would say.