SOLDIER BOY'S MARRIAGE.

Colonist, Volume LXII, Issue 15238, 27 November 1919, Page 6

SOLDIER BOY'S MARRIAGE.

~_ ffgp, CERTIFICATE OBTAINED BY FALSE DECLARATION.

[United Press Association..]

Auckland, Nov. 24. A recent marriage at the registrar's office between a returned soldier, aged .seventeen years, and a girl of hfteim, resulted in the bridegroom, Edgar George Brown, coming boforo Mr Hunt, fc>.M., to-day, on a charge of having made a false declaration for the purpose of securing a marriage certificate-. The story of the evidence clearly indicated that the accused believed in the maxim that "all is fair in love and war." At the time of his arrest Brown was an orderly in the soldiers' annexe to the .hospital at Auckland, and when taxed with having made a false declaration to the Registrar of Marriages he admitted the charge. His own account of lnm*;clf was that he war, the son of a mining engineer who lived in Sydney, and that tin 1914, when lie was thirteen years of age, ho enlisted as a bugler with the Ist Australian Expeditionary Force. He saw service in Egypt Gallipoli, and France, and was wounded at the Somme. ■He was invalided home, and discharged in Australia early in May 3 1918. The same month he came on to New Zealand, and though only sixteen years of age, he enlised with tho New Zealand Forces, giving his ago as twenty-two years, lie got as far as Sling Camp, England, where he was sorted out as medically unfit, and sent back to New Zealand. Since his return by the Kemuera in May last he had been employed by the Defence Department at Trentham, and latterly in Auckland. In August last he met a girl named Gladys Kcddaway, and though he knew she was only fifteen years of age, he married her at the 'registrar's office, giving her name as Paulino Henderson, and her age as twenty-one years, while he gave his own age as twenty-five years. He did not endeavour to get the consent of the girl's parents to the marriage, and after the marriage tho girl continued to carry on her work at a confectionery shop, and to live at home. The accused pleaded, guilty, and was committed to the Suprezae Court for sentence.