House of Dogs: The Last Squires of Trecwn, part 4.

The Second Robins v. Robins Divorce Trial, 1896

We continue our series about Trecwn in Pembrokeshire which traces colourful family histories and tells the story of a quiet valley’s transformation into a naval weapons depot.

Unhappy Families

Howell Harris

Francis did not take his public humiliation lying down.  His three older children, aged 12 to 15 in 1888, had sided with his wife, so he disinherited them along with her.

The only child with whom he attempted, for the next twenty years at least, to maintain loving fatherly relations was the youngest, Rita.  She was just 5 at the time of the separation and had not yet begun to annoy or learned to loathe him, so he made her his sole heir.

But this relationship was fragile, and mostly conducted by letters.  They must have been difficult for a little girl to make sense of, as he veered from affection (“I have nothing against you, little pet”) to cool distancing (“I have seen you so little — it would be embarrassing to meet you in the street without recognising you.”)

He took continuing vengeance on Mary and the others by reducing the alimony he paid her as soon as the children turned 16, which was lawful but ungenerous as offspring of the gentry were still dependent at that age.  So she only received the full £250 for one year, and then her income steadily fell.

Alimony

Her alimony declined to £220 in 1889-91, £210 in 1891-2, £190 from then until 1898, and just £170 thereafter.  She also had to go to law repeatedly to get him to pay even that much.  He made her life difficult even though it cost him money.  His bank account was subject to garnishment, and he kept on having to pay her lawyers’ fees on top of the overdue maintenance.

As a result she was in constant financial difficulties, and Francis made it clear that he neither could nor would afford any extra help, notably with school fees.

Cyril, 15 in 1888, therefore had his education disrupted, transferring from Charterhouse where he was a day-boarder to complete his studies at King’s College School in London, probably a cheaper option as he could live with his mother and sisters in Brixton.

However, it would be fair to add that Francis’s lack of generosity may also have been a product of the difficulty of maintaining two upper-middle class households on a fixed income.

There is a hint about his straitened circumstances in the 1891 Census, by which time he was living in a terraced house in Croydon as James Robins with a Miss Henrietta St. Hilaire (Camille Bornier) as his housekeeper.

Both of them were probably trying to live down the notoriety they had gained through the trial by adopting rather weak aliases.

They also altered their reported ages to eliminate the 21-year gap between them by both claiming to have been born in 1850.

Francis gave his occupation as “Professor of Languages” – the only evidence we have that he ever tried to earn himself a living after leaving the Rifles, with what success we do not know.

The deeds to Trecwn also told a story of his financial difficulties – in addition to the two pre-trial mortgages he had taken out in the mid-1880s, there was another in summer 1888, perhaps to pay for legal costs, a fourth (jointly with his mother) in 1891, and a fifth in 1896.  He was spending his inheritance long before he got it.

The Second Divorce

Francis’s continuing contact with his separated wife was not just through their lawyers.

There were the  children too. They could keep watch on her and report back.  He  had some leverage over them through the conditional offer of financial support, which they would all need in due course.

His son Cyril, 21 in 1894, was particularly pliable.

Francis dangled the prospect of having his inheritance restored in front of his eyes, provided that he met his father’s other stringent demands.

He must go to Oxford and secure a B.A. and also a Bachelor of Civil Laws degree (a postgraduate qualification requiring a further year of demanding study), before going on to the Agricultural College at Cirencester and getting a Diploma.

This was presumably to fit him for a future managing the estate at Trecwn, and a respectable professional career until he inherited.

He entered St. John’s to read Jurisprudence in 1895.

Adultery

Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also when Francis concluded that he had enough evidence of fresh adultery to drag Mary through the divorce court again.

Why was he so ready to accept the cost and risk (not least to his reputation) of another divorce case?  There are at least four plausible explanations, none of them mutually exclusive.

First, he might have wished to be free to marry Henriette, his partner of thirteen years, while she was still of childbearing age so that he had a chance of producing a more acceptable heir to Trecwn than he had managed with his first marriage.

Second, with his mother already 85 and the prospect of inheriting Trecwn surely imminent, it made sense to try to ditch Mary so that she would not be able to stake a larger claim on his income and wealth once he acquired it.

Third, he sought custody of his daughters, and particularly of Rita, his favourite and his heir.

Fourth, he simply wanted the satisfaction of winning, of paying Mary back for his unjust defeat seven years earlier and leaving her as the one whose respectable reputation had been destroyed.

Any one of these motivations could have been enough; put them all together and the argument for action must have seemed compelling.

Lonely

Mary was almost 50 by the time the case came to trial, but still (as one report observed) “a fine looking woman,” though, as her counsel put it, “lonely and dull” [bored] as well as finding it hard to live within her shrinking means.

In 1894 she was staying in Ramsgate and in trouble with her creditors, who appointed a local solicitor for the Trade Protection Society to collect their debts.

His young clerk, Alfred Ferne, twenty years her junior, came to her house about the business.

He went from being “a useful friend, who was helping her out of her difficulties,” into rather more than this, visiting their home, as she put it, “morning, noon, and night,” because he was also, in her counsel’s words, an “amiable young man of social qualities.”

One of Francis’s witnesses fleshed in Alfred’s portrait: he was “an attractive man for small parties, and … a good singer.”

He addressed family members by their first names and joined them at meals and games of cards as well as in music-making.

On one memorable occasion related by the same witness, Mary played the piano “while Mr. Ferne sang ‘Molly Darling,’ and when he came to the last line — ‘Let your answer be a kiss’ — he leaned forward very affectionately, and Mrs. Robins called him ‘Alfredo, darling.’”

Other witnesses also reported her calling him “Alfredo dear” and greeting him with kisses on both cheeks, or seeing him with his arms around her neck, or hearing the key turn in the lock when they were in a room together, or sleeping in the same house in rooms with only a thin partition between them.

When Cyril came to visit in 1894, Alfred met him at the station with Mary.

They struck him as being “on rather affectionate terms,” and by the following year he was remonstrating with her that Alfred was “not a desirable acquaintance,” a message she also received from other local friends and that he shared with his father.

He supplied an affidavit in support of his father’s case, unlike his sisters Sybil and Rita, who were on their mother’s side, and at the trial in 1896 he gave damaging evidence against her.

Thanks to him and other sources, Francis was able to make a well substantiated claim that Mary and Alfred had been committing adultery habitually between March 1894 and September 1895 at three addresses in Ramsgate and two in the Kent countryside.

Mary did not dispute that she and Alfred were fond of one another, but denied any impropriety.

He just “visited the house in the ordinary way and no doubt she liked his society.”

His presence was entirely innocent, and was not just on her account. “He was very good company, and to a lonely boy like her son was very welcome.”

He had also been courting her older daughter, and stopped, like a gentleman, when Winifred, 19 or 20, told him to.

Besides, as her counsel emphasised, Mary was old enough to be his mother and it was ridiculous to suggest that any “misconduct” might have taken place between them.  (The Daily Telegraph report on the trial included this ageism in its headline — “Robins v. Robins and Ferne — An Elderly Respondent.”)

“He did not care to take out an old woman like herself, and she never went out alone with him.”

As for the matter of sleeping arrangements, Rita, by then 14, testified that whenever she visited her mother and Alfred was there too, she shared her bed – not a watertight defence, given that she did not live there all the time.

Reputation

Mary’s case was weakened by Alfred’s reputation, of which she claimed to be ignorant, or to disbelieve though she had been told — that he was married with five children, but not living with his family near Margate when Mary knew him; that he was a known drunkard; and that he was said to have proposed to every young woman in Ramsgate, not just Winifred.

She certainly found out that he was engaged to a barmaid, a Miss Grover, at the same time as he was canoodling with her (awkwardly, Miss Grover saw them through open curtains), and was furious about it.

She also admitted that she had heard “that almost every girl in Margate had applied for affiliation orders against him” (to support their resulting illegitimate children).

This might have been a slight exaggeration, but Alfred did have at least one such order, from 1895, for 2/6 a week until the child of Amelia Baker, a single woman of Ramsgate with whom he had had a three-year affair, reached the age of 14.  So Mary and Amelia overlapped.  With Mary, at least, there would have been little risk of another pregnancy.

The greatest problem for her was that she and Alfred were seen together at the farm near Canterbury, Sparrow Court, that she had moved to in 1894, perhaps in search of lower rent after her financial difficulties in Ramsgate, or maybe of a more secluded place for their assignations.

She used a friend in town as an intermediary, enabling her to write to Alfred asking him to call on her without having to send him letters to arrange his visits addressed to his office or home.  But, she said to the, as it turned out, undependable acquaintance, “don’t you ever admit he has been here.  Think of  all that depends on it.”  She was right to be cautious, but they were found out anyway.

Extraordinary testimony

The Thanet Advertiser, otherwise the best source about the trial, was uncharacteristically discreet about this: “evidence was given of familiarities observed to pass between them.”

This refers to the extraordinary testimony of a man called Greeve, “the remarkable upholsterer,” who claimed to have lain all night on a hayrick with a clear view into the bedroom at the farm, where he could watch everything that Mary and Alfred got up to.

Mary accused him of having written threatening (blackmailing?) letters to her, which of course he denied, hoping to undermine his credibility; but without success.

And what of “Alfredo darling”?  He was neither present nor represented.

He was, instead, supposed to have run off to South Africa, perhaps to escape his affiliation orders rather than this divorce trial.  But even if he had been present, he would not necessarily have supported Mary in her denials.

As the judge said in his summing-up, “one of the most extraordinary features of the case was that Ferne had written anonymously to the petitioner [Francis], offering to supply inculpatory evidence against the wife if he received remuneration.”

So it is possible that if he had not scarpered he might have been willing to help Francis get his divorce, for the right price – just like Cochrane would have eight years earlier, if he had not escaped to the United States and died of his own self-inflicted wounds instead.

Francis was as consistently unlucky in his choice of co-respondents as Mary was with her affairs.

There was no jury in this case, just the President of the Divorce Court, Sir Francis Jeune.

Like Mr Justice Butt eight years earlier he was quite sympathetic to Mary, but found it impossible not to conclude that she had had an affair with Alfred.

He found her age no dependable defence: “experience showed that women of almost any age could become infatuated and be even more foolish than in their younger days.”

She “ought certainly to have kept clear of a person of doubtful reputation, as she must have known the co-respondent to be.

She chose to consort with him after she had been warned in regard to his character.”

However, it was still possible for Jeune to find in her favour.

Despite Mary’s bad judgement and misconduct, Francis still did not deserve to win.  This was because her “adultery was in a measure caused by the separation, and the petitioner, whose cruelty had brought about the separation, was not in position to complain of her adultery in the sense that he could get a divorce.”

The judge adjourned the case to give himself time to read the shorthand notes of the 1888 trial, and having done so agreed even more strongly with Mr Justice Butt, rejecting Francis’s divorce petition and ordering him to pay Mary’s costs once more.

Francis’s reputation had again brought him wide public exposure, humiliation, and considerable expense.

Even though English divorce law was formally discriminatory against women’s rights, and judges were socially quite conservative, it was in practice much more even-handed in its treatment of husbands and wives.

In both Robins cases Francis’s behaviour earned him much more disapproval from one jury and both judges than did Mary’s, which was treated quite considerately.

She emerged from the whole process with some reputation remaining; him with none.

However, he was left, though bruised and rather threadbare, his relations with his daughters in tatters, a gentleman with hopes of a better future soon; she in genteel poverty that would only get worse.  The next time she appeared in court was the following year, being pursued by an employee for unpaid wages.

In the next episode we will leave Francis’s unhappiest decades behind and follow him at last to Trecwn, which he finally inherited, burdened with debt, in 1899, and where he spent most of the last quarter-century of his life.