MARRIED AT FIFTEN.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIV, Issue 124, 2 June 1910, Page 3

MARRIED AT FIFTEN.

A young woman, named Violet Mary Maitland, formerly Wormald, petitioned in the Divorce Court at Sydney for a dissolution of her marriage with John Maitland, on the grounds of desertion, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, and non-support. "I was married," she said, "on December 30, 1899. I had been courted hy my husband for some little time, hut matrimony had not crossed my mind. On the night of my marriage I was under 16 years of age. We were walking along Pitt Street about •7;30, when he suddenly said, 'I have made arrangements for us to get married this evening.' I thought he was Joking, but He pulled me inside a house, and then we were married by Rev. Geo. Hay." His Honor, in granting a decree nisi, remarked: "It is a monstrous thing that such places as where petitioner was married are allowed to exist. Petitioner was a mere child at the time, and she ought not to have been married."