I did, in fact, resist the urge to elaborate upon the situation

The other day I virtually attended this presentation: 'Homosexuality, Bureaucracy and the Admiralty: The Suppression of so-called ‘Unnatural Vice’ in Churchill's Navy, 1911-15' (as one would).

And pretty much in passing, the speaker mentioned an instance involving an officer (most were the lower ranks), during WW1, who resigned his commission rather than being court-martialled for an 'unnatural offence', and later on his wife asked the Admiralty for the information as she was divorcing him, and they refused. But apparently she got the divorce anyway on adultery.

Speaker assumed this meant he was bisexual, but me, being nerdy about the English divorce laws and its intricacies, went:

If this is before 1923, even if he was adulterous, she still needed an additional matrimonial offence to get quit of him: one of those in the relevant Act was 'sodomy'. Post 1923 there is a fair amount of evidence of the 'fake adultery in hotel rooms with hired co-respondent' and one dares say that may have happened (alongside the other necessary matrimonial offences, 1857-1923).

I have nobly refrained from communicating this to someone whose area is actually the history of the Navy.

But I will, I think, inform the author of biography ms I am reading, as to the probable reason why an 'arrangement' which had been ticking over apparently placidly, or at least being accepted by the relevant persons, for a couple of decades, suddenly had a divorce occuring in 1972.

The Divorce Reform Act 1969. One member of this menage was relatively well-known and very likely did not want the publicity and possible career repercussions that would presumably have accrued from a divorce case under the previous dispensation. Whereas - and given that after this Act there was a torrent of divorces (plus remarriages of a lot of people who had been living with partners they could not legally marry) - it went largely uncommented upon.

I think it is worth mentioning that, it makes the divorce a whole lot less 'out of the blue' than it looks like.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

calimac

If he was married to a woman, the possibility that he was bisexual has to be considered, though it's not proof.

oursin

It's possible, but not conclusive (he might have been doing the J A Symonds thing...); and given that even hetero men were fake-adultering for the purposes of divorce, would not take divorce court evidence as terribly persuasive that anything more than being found in a hotel bedroom together had taken place.

I'm not addressing the adultery, which you're quite correct could be purely nominal, but the marriage itself. If a homosexual man marries a woman, then if the marriage is not entirely celibate (unusual, but it happens), then either he has to grit and bear it, or else he's at least partly bisexual. Which of the latter two Symonds was I don't know. Children without extracurricular carryings on disproves the first; otherwise I agree there's no proof, but the third is a possibility. What I've read is that very few people are exclusively hetero or homo, however strongly they may lean towards one or the other.

I would imagine, on the basis of his Memoirs, that in happier circumstances Symonds would have been a Kinsey 6. As it was he felt under enormous pressure to suppress, or at least, not enact, his desires for men, and marry. The impression one gets of his married life is 'closing their eyes and thinking of England' on both sides, even if they did manage to beget 3 daughters.

I just thought the speaker, who clearly knew a great deal about the intricacies of Admiralty administration, was somewhat astray in understanding how the divorce law worked at that date and how couples managed to wangle one without being accused of collusion, which would void their case. (*Bores for Europe on English divorce law: different in Scotland*)

oracne

This is FASCINATING.

The Divorce Courts, providing salacious entertainment for the British newspaper reader that quite evaded the usual strictures pertaining to Obscene Publications (freedom of the press!), as various people pointed out at the time of the prosecution of Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion in 1898. Until 1926, when the personal intervention of George V put a stop to all that.

violsva

*does some math* Did that personal intervention have anything to do with his eldest son?

No: he was just, shocked, shocked, at the awful things that came out about officers and gentlemen and other members of society who Ought To Be Setting An Example: the final straw is said to have been, not actually a divorce case but a wife subsequently petitioning for payment of alimony, in which it came out that her former husband, an army officer, had been pimping her out to senior officers for preferential postings.

But on his eldest son, and put-up fakedultery: Wallis Simpson: new divorce details revealed in solicitor's notes.

silveradept

I am too young to have been part of a world where no-fault divorce wasn't the reality of the world, so some of the requirements for divorce from the past seem like a significant amount of effort had to be put into place to create something that the courts would accept. Of course, with the way that women's rights are being rolled backwards in the States, I might end up thinking fondly about the days where divorce was easy to obtain and marriage wasn't a required part of life for every person societally determined to be a woman.

And you couldn't just go and get divorced in some jurisdiction where they were less stringent: famous case of Earl Russell who went to USA and - possibly not Reno? - around 1900 and got divorced after a decade of him and his countess being in the papers in a state of matrimonial discord, remarried, returned to England, and was promptly tried for bigamy before a jury of his peers, i.e. the entire House of Lords, who sent him down for it.

Interesting. I know the concept of denying another country's authority to make decisions about marriage and divorce, but again, somewhat young that my only real examples involve which countries recognize non-het marriages and which do not.

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog