DISCOVERY BY FILM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21431, 4 September 1931, Page 10

DISCOVERY BY FILM

HUSBAND WHO DESERTED DIVORCE ACTION BEGUN. LONDON, August 22. How a film led to a wife finding the husband who had deserted her has just been revealed in a divorce court action. When visiting London in 1929, Mrs Edwin Robotham, 60, a native of Shoreham, saw an American film called “ Buck Privates,” which featured her husband who disappeared six weeks after their marriage at Windsor in 1899, when he was a corporal in the Second Life Guards. The outcome of her discovery was the adjournment by the Portland, Oregon, Court of a case in which her husband, now a retired captain in the American Army, was seeking to divorce her on the ground that she made him unhappy. Mrs Robotham, when her husband left her, waited all night at the barracks, and when he did not come home, searched the hospitals and mortuaries for weeks, eventually securing the presumption of his death. After seeing the film, however, she wrote to the Hollywood film company, and the adjutant-general of the American Army, to whom her husband admitted his identity. He sent his wife a dollar a week, declaring that he was too poor to provide her with a home. When the divorce papers arrived, the wife disclosed the situation, as she did not wish to end her life as a divorced woman, when she had done nothing to deserve it.