MAKER OF MARRIAGES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22350, 22 February 1936, Page 28 (Supplement)

MAKER OF MARRIAGES

A REGISTRAR'S LIFE TRAGEDY AND HAPPINESS MORE THAN 9000 CEREMONIES A girl, fatally injured in an air crash, lying on a stretcher ... a man standing silently by, fondling her thin white hands while tears streamed down his cheeks. With a bouquet of red roses pressed close to her face, she looked up with an eager happy smile into his face. I married them. It was the girl's greatest and last wish, writes Mr. W. J. Lickey, former registrar at Princes Row and Caxton Hall registry offices, London. That scene will always live in my memory as the most poignant incident in my career of nearly 40 years as a maker of marriages. Fourteen days after that strange and pathetic marriage the man walked into my office. Again there were tears in his eyes. Ho had come to register his wife's death. More than 9000 couples have repeated before me the declaration and words of contract of a civil marriage. I have married men and women of every station of life from a reigning Sultan down to a couple who, wearing cycling shorts, left their tandem team outside my front door while J performed tho ceremony. The life of a registrar is full of contrasts. The people who come before him may be wealthy and titled or poor and unknown. Ceremonies can, like that tragic wedding of the dying girl, be very sad, or they can. like others I remember, be happy ancl care-free. The day when I married the Duke of Westminster and Miss Loelia Ponsonby was a graphic instance of tho contrasts of my life. The duke, who was a very nervous bridegroom, had' tried to keep the ceremony a secret. It was delayed

from the arranged day in order to avoid publicity—but all in vain. Everything was completed as quickly as possible, and within ten minutes of being married a way had been found of circumventing the enormous crowd which had gathered, and the duke and duchess were hurtling down the river in a speedboat to his luxury yacht, the Cutty Sark. Then, immediately after marrying one of Britain's richest dukes, I went back to my office, where an old soldier was waiting to be married. He hadn't a penny in the world, so I paid the fee out of my own .pocket. Happiness and sorrow, death-bed dramas, pacts of business —they are all part of the days' work of a registrar of marriages. When the Marquess of Reading married Miss Stella Charnaud, his chief of staff for many years, the actual ceremony took four minutes. But for a whole morning before the ceremony an army of workmen had been busy turning the committee room into an arbour of colour and fragrance with loads of roses, pink and red gladioli, and immense lilies. I well remember that, like the Duke of Westminster, the Marquess of Read-

ing was a very nervous bridegroom, and that his hand trembled as ho slipped tho wedding ring on to his bride's finger. There are many souvenirs which I treasure as mementoes of ceremonies I have conducted.

Once I married a Belgian soldier who was in hospital blue —he had obtained special leave from a hospital in London. After the ceremony he asked me to accept a dirty-looking brass ring which he had made from a piece of metal taken from the church bells of a ruined church at Lampanesse in Belgium. Though that ring has no intrinsic worth, I value it no less than tho magnificent gift which was made to mo by His Highness the Sultan of Johore. The Sultan, who had given notice of the wedding himself, was attended by a most colourful retinue at the ceremony. " I want you to take something to remember this ceremony by," said the Sultan when all .the' formalities were over. " Perhaps you would like this?" he said with a smilo as he handed me a large rose pink pearl tie pin. I still wear that pin.