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Mar. 23rd, 2023
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.