In our last blog we focused on suits for restitution of conjugal rights and how they could be used in repeat applications to the Divorce Court as a means to prove desertion in a divorce case and circumvent the usual two-year period of desertion. In this blog we’re going to continue with the theme of linked cases/repeat applications to the Divorce Court to reveal what happens when a divorce is not the end of the story…
On 17 February 1885 Mary Alice Riddell, the daughter of Colonel Henry Vansittart Riddell (a divisional judge in Lahore) married Captain John Hawley Burke, who, according to A Genealogical and Herladic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland, was a member of the Burke’s of Ballydugan in Ireland and boasted a High Sheriff of Galway in their ancestry. They had two sons together, Noel Hawley Michael Burke born in 1886 and Arthur Laurie Burke born in 1887. Sadly, their married life together was a short one, as John Hawley Burke died on 24 October 1887 in Rajanpur, Punjab, while serving in the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. This left Mary Alice a very young widower at only 20 years old, with two infant children to care for.
Following a period of mourning, Mary Alice married her late husband’s second cousin on 2 July 1890, (both Mary Alice’s husbands had the same paternal great-grandparents and had connections to the Guinness brewing family). Somewhat confusingly, her second husband was also called John Burke. Their marriage took place at the Parish Church in Binfield, Berkshire. On the marriage certificate Mary Alice was listed as a Widow and John as a Bachelor with the occupation of Gentleman, though later documents list him as a merchant. After their marriage they lived at Plas Dinan in Cambridge and then Birch Hall in Windlesham, and on 22 July 1891 their son, John Lawrence Burke, was born.
It’s on the 9 October 1894 that we see the couple involved with the Divorce Court for the first time when John Burke petitioned for a divorce from Mary Alice on the grounds of her adultery with Francis Balfour Carr. They had been married for only four years. As a husband petitioning for a divorce, John only had to prove his wife’s adultery, which he alleged took place ‘during the month of September 1894’ at the Hotel de la Plage in the Republic of France and on the 6 and 7 of October 1894 at 27 Craven Street, Strand, Middlesex. On 26 March 1895 the case went to trial at the Divorce Court in front of The Right Honourable Sir Francis Henry Jeune, who found Mary Alice guilty of adultery with Francis Balfour Carr, and granted John a decree nisi and custody of their child John Lawrence. A few months later on 8 October 1895, John and Mary Alice’s marriage formally ended when a decree absolute was granted.
This should have been the end of the story for John and Mary Alice and the end of their joint involvement with the Divorce Court, but, just over four months later, on 15 February 1896, they decided to remarry. The marriage took place at the Register Office in the District of St George in Hanover Square London. The marriage certificate reveals some potentially misleading details, with John describing himself as a Bachelor and Mary Alice as a Widow, rather than making it clear they were divorcees. This creative interpretation of their legal status was not unheard of, although it is not clear whether they were seeking to deceive people with regard to their marital status or just putting the ‘best’ spin on their circumstances. You can read more about another couple in a similar situation in this article.
After John and Mary Alice’s remarriage they lived together at 30 Bramham Gardens, Kensington, London and on 9 October 1897 they welcomed a daughter, Yvonne Lilian Gervaise Burke. On 11 March 1901, when John Lawrence was ten years old and Yvonne Lilian Gervaise age four, Mary Alice filed a petition for a Decree of Restitution of Conjugal Rights on the grounds of her husband’s desertion and failure to render conjugal rights. Less than a month later, on 3 April 1901, John himself filed a petition for a divorce in which he made a counter allegation that he had not deserted his wife, and in actual fact she had deserted him in September 1900 after informing him that ‘she did not intend to live with him again’. In his petition, John also alleged that prior to Mary Alice deserting him, she had committed adultery with a man named John Ferguson (who was cited as a co-respondent in the suit) on various instances throughout 1899. Both Mary Alice and John Ferguson filed formal answers in which they denied all allegations made against them in each other’s suits.
At an impasse, both cases languished in the system while John paid £100 per annum (£13,670 per year in today’s money) in alimony (maintenance) pending the suit to Mary Alice. Eventually, Mary Alice withdrew her petition for the restitution of conjugal rights and John’s divorce petition went to trial in front of Sir John Charles Bigham the President of the Divorce Court. John’s case was eventually heard on 17 February 1910, some nine years after it was first lodged with the Court! At the decree nisi trial Judge Bigham found Mary Alice guilty of committing adultery with the co-respondent John Ferguson. Mary Alice and John Burke’s son, John Lawrence, was by then 18 years old, and no custody decision was made related to him, but Judge Bingham granted custody of their 12-year-old daughter Yvonne to her father John. This was to be expected when a mother was found guilty of adultery – adulterous fathers were not always subject to the same standards. Judge Bingham also ordered that the co-respondent, John Ferguson, was liable to pay all of John Burke’s legal costs related to the case, a staggering total of £335 18s 8d, the equivalent of over £46,000 today. Six months later, on 24 August 1910, John and Mary Alice were finally granted a decree absolute, thus ending their second marriage.
We know much less about John, Mary Alice, and their children following the end of their second divorce trial. At the time of the 1911 census Mary Alice was the proprietress of a tearoom on St Dunstand Road in Hammersmith, perhaps established with some of the funds she was awarded by the Divorce Court. As per the judge’s ruling, Yvonne did not live with her, but the census does reveal that Mary Ann was living with a young man called Noel, her eldest son by her first husband. Noel was listed by the enumerator as a medical student, and he would eventually go on to become a surgeon. We have not been able to find John Burke in the records after 1910, so it is unclear whether Yvonne ever did go to live with her father. Sadly, Mary Alice and John’s other child, John Lawrence Burke was killed in action at Flanders in 1916. The 1921 census shows a 21-year-old Yvonne living and working at King’s College Hospital, London alongside nurses from Worcestershire, Lincolnshire, South Africa and India. By the time the 1939 England and Wales Register was taken at the outbreak of WWII, Mary Alice (by now aged 73) was living at the Kilmeen Briar Estate in West Wittering with her other son from her first husband, Arthur Lawrie Burke who was married and working as an Estate Agent’s Clerk. Mary Alice remained living at that property until her death in 1951.
Without the divorce court files we would have no idea of the emotional turmoil that shaped the lives not only of Mary Ann and John, but of their assorted children as well. Their files from the Divorce Court give us a unique glimpse into one couple’s attempt to reconcile their romantic entanglements with legislation and societal expectations and shows that real world situations were much less tidy than legislators might have envisaged.
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