MEN WHO HAVE TO PAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21136, 19 March 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

MEN WHO HAVE TO PAY.

EX-HUSBANDS' BURDEN,

LARGE SUMS IN ALIMONY. Ex-wives of men in Britain get £6,000,(XX) a year of the money earned by their ox-husbands! And year by year tho allowance is increasing. Tho humble shillings paid by workerhusbands who aro separated in the police courts and tho third of their total income which divorced husbands have to pay combine to make the. colossal total, says the Sunday Express. Forty-fivo thousand men aro to-day paying either alimony or maintenance. Twenty thousand of the women receiving it aro childless.

Thoro aro women travelling irom hotel to hotel all over the world on the alimony paid by their husbands. Now they are in Cannes, then on to Venice, and later they turn up in Cairo. . . . " Ono of my clients," said a famous divorco court lawyer to ati interviewer, "is in a desperate position. His first wife keeps a servant and runs a small car. They were married for only two years, and during this time ho was making £ISOO a year. For tho past eight years he lias been paying A 139 a monLh alimony. " To-day this man's business is on the point of bankruptcy. Ho is not making £36 a month. If that man applied for a reduction of his alimony/the news of his failure would reach his creditors and complete tho wreckage. His second wife is finding the money for the first wife. " In another case—it was a war marriage—the first wife has been receiving £5 a week maintenance for eleven years. For nine of those years tho man has been married to another woman, and tho two aro devoted to each other. But ho lost all his savings in a Stock Exchange crash, and on top of that ho lost his job. " This man wrote to his former wife, and for a month or two managed to send her enough to live on. His present wife, who had never worked previously, gob a job as a housekeeper. " The man gob another job, but after three weeks the firm heard that his former wifo was suing him for arrears of maintenance and dismissed him. " The former wifo has saved nothing, and although she earned her living before sho' was married she has not attempted to earn a penny since."