Bigamy

Bigamy, film of 1927, credit Wikipedia

Bigamy
by Bill Hartley

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Matrimonial Causes Act, the first Act to establish equal rights in divorce for men and women. In contrast, the first Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 allowed a man to obtain a divorce by proving adultery. A woman had to prove aggravating circumstances such as cruelty or, significantly, bigamy. For some people the best way to escape a bad marriage was to disappear and start again.

The annual ‘Calendars’ (records of trials) in Liverpool, Chester and North Wales for 1923 show that the authorities prosecuted offences of a varied nature. For example, in January of that year Thomas Moore appeared in court in Liverpool charged with stealing some hen’s eggs and was sentenced to six strokes of the birch. Other cases involved theft of a nose bag (presumably belonging to a horse) and the theft of a dog collar. The Calendars also provide a rich source for trades long extinct, such as loomer and rope splicer. One accused hailing from an inner city address in Liverpool, was described as a ‘cow keeper’. Presumably he was involved in that long vanished enterprise, the urban dairy. Sounding like someone out of a novel by Sax Rohmer, Kok Lunn a ship’s cook with a previous conviction for ‘possession of a prepared opium pipe’, was fined £10 for keeping a house for the purposes of betting. Dang Con an assistant shopkeeper was prosecuted for being the occupier of premises ‘allowing same to be used for opium smoking’. He was fined £5 at the Liverpool Quarter Sessions.

Amongst this catalogue of crimes ranging from the mundane to the peculiar, bigamy occurred quite regularly. Although the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act was and remains the means for prosecuting acts of violence, bigamy was also included and designated as a ‘class one’ offence punishable by up to seven years in prison. Prosecutions for bigamy peaked during the First World War and after that went into a gradual decline. Cases attracted press attention and sometimes moral outrage. An article covering a case of bigamy in a 1910 edition of the Nottingham Evening Post was alarmingly headlined, ‘The Crime That Must Be Stopped’, though no advice was offered as to how this might be achieved.  Despite changes in the law, divorce was still difficult and expensive to obtain with both parties needing to be in agreement. For the poorer classes, it was often easier to simply disappear and make a fresh start elsewhere. Illegal remarriage was a way of regaining respectability. For vicars and registrars it was impossible to check that the information people gave on official documents was correct, because each district kept its own separate register of births, marriages and deaths.

David J Cox, in an article entitled ‘Trying to get a Good One’ which appeared in the Plymouth Law and Criminal Justice Review (2012), notes that the offence has received little attention from criminologists. His article relies on figures extrapolated from the annual Judicial Statistics which began to appear in 1850. He notes that figures remained low (below 150 cases a year) and peaked in 1915 when 211 individuals, 157 men and 94 women, were convicted. There were two further peaks immediately after both world wars.

In January 1923 at the County Hall in Caernarvon, Mair Jones a ‘married woman’ who was committed from Bangor, pleaded guilty to a charge of bigamy. The case was tried by Sir Rigby Swift and rather bizarrely the order of the court was that she be discharged into the custody of her father. Mrs Jones was aged 32. At the same assizes Frank Joseph was also convicted of bigamy and this time Sir Rigby saw fit to pass a sentence of twelve months. Cox mentions in his article that in the case of female defendants a submissive demeanour in the dock could help ensure a lighter sentence. Certainly Sir Rigby seems to have been especially lenient when dealing with this female defendant. Overall though, considering the maximum penalty available, sentences recorded in the 1923 Calendar were generally light.

Examples of such sentences can again be found in January of that year at Chester Castle. Charles McAllister a boot salesman pleaded guilty to bigamy and received three months imprisonment. Charles West a brick maker from Preston also pleaded guilty before the same judge and received six months. In March, Frederick Duxbury a butcher also appeared charged with bigamy. A clue to what he might have been up to or perhaps who had an incentive to pursue him, is revealed in his previous convictions; on two occasions he was brought before a court charged with failing to pay maintenance. He received six months hard labour. This addition to the sentence appears to have been a sign of judicial displeasure. In contrast, William Lette appeared at the same sessions and received only four months. John Eccles a labourer appeared at the Assize court in Liverpool in June of that year and received nine months. Most defendants had no previous convictions. Those that did tended to receive similar sentences unless their record showed some element of domestic neglect, such as a failure to pay maintenance.

At the same court a female defendant Helen Fletcher, a ‘married woman’ aged 35, escaped with merely a binding over. Her co-accused Frederick Wilbraham, a labourer, charged with aiding and abetting the commission of bigamy was also bound over. At Chester Assizes in July James Stewart a clerk pleaded guilty to bigamy and received six months. William Roberts a ‘motor driver’ also received six months for the offence but with hard labour. His co accused, Nellie Pritchard a 21 year old domestic servant, was unfortunate enough to have hard labour added to her sentence too, the only example of a female receiving such a  punishment.. Perhaps this was an early example of inclusion and equality.

Bertrand Piper a tailor aged 39 also appeared at Chester Castle. Justice finally caught up with him when he was prosecuted for a charge of bigamy which had been laid in 1914. Following a guilty plea he received 12 months with hard labour. At St George’s Hall in Liverpool another couple, Mary Jones a married woman aged 38, pleaded guilty and received 10 months imprisonment as did her co accused Harry Hardacre a 52 year old railway porter, for aiding and abetting. At the same assizes George Lambert, described as a ‘Showman’, received the heaviest sentence recorded in that year of 15 months, although he did have previous convictions for unlawful possession of mutton and receiving tea.  

Historically, convictions for bigamy have been low compared to other offences. There were increases notably in the war years with the inevitable disruptions to family life. It is possible then that these effects were subsequently still being felt, given the number of cases recorded over a wide geographical area in 1923. Although no judicial guidelines existed at the time, the relatively short sentences reflect the overall trend shown in Cox’s article. Judges were prepared to exercise considerable discretion and bring extenuating circumstances to the attention of the jury. As Cox says, ‘whilst the judicial rhetoric was often harsh, the sentences were relatively lenient’.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

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Endnotes, September 2023

Endnotes, September 2023

Jean Sibelius by Favén (1925), credit Wikimedia Commons

In this edition: Walton in Mediterranean mood; Sibelius in Nordic splendour. Plus, Bach sonatas and a Russian romantic masterpiece. Reviewed by Stuart Millson

On August 3rd, The Quarterly Review was at the Royal Albert Hall for a Proms concert of Walton and Sibelius, given by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under its Finnish conductor, John Storgards. The works of the maestro’s great countryman, Jean Sibelius, have greatly enriched the Chandos CD catalogue in recent years, with the Storgards/BBC PO cycle of symphonies garnering much critical approval. And a special sound from this partnership has also emerged, transferring to an equally memorable Carl Nielsen cycle: a velvety sound, with prominent, sometimes rugged brass, and superb attention to tiny detail ~ particularly woodwind writing.

The audience could hear ‘in the flesh’ that brilliant recording-studio/broadcast-orchestra sound ~ the Albert Hall stage and acoustic, doubling that intensity. Storgards carefully shaped a ‘spotlight sound’, meaning that each wind instrument, each pluck of a harp-string, gained prominence and attention. About five minutes into the Sibelius Symphony No. 1, after the immense initial symphonic argument and establishment of a theme, a contrasting delicate ‘dance’ appears, involving flutes, woodwind and harp; a fleeting, sparkling moment, before an angry section on timpani breaks the idyll.

A pizzicato passage then takes root, building up with glimpses of strange forest light ~ cellos and basses thrumming, as flute and clarinet phrases tumble and whirl. Critics often remark on the Tchaikovsky-like quality of Sibelius’s two early symphonies ~ big tunes, Russian-sounding romanticism ~ and yet, appearing out of the mists, comes the pure, Nordic Sibelius who would go on to give the world masterpieces such as the Fifth and Sixth symphonies and En Saga.

Storgards and the BBC Philharmonic are versatile musicians and seemed just as at home, bathed in the Neapolitan warmth of William Walton’s 1939 Violin Concerto, for which they were joined by Canadian-born soloist, James Ehnes, whose playing captured the work’s mixture of intense lyrical yearning, and shadowy, jabbing ‘malizia’. The latter sensation in the second movement ~ a take on a Neapolitan-type tune, perhaps heard in a cafe or club ~ creates an image of night-time harbour-lights, dark streets, intrigue. Yet at times, Walton appears to be looking over his shoulder back to England and the muscular, impetuous lyricism of Elgar’s own concerto for the instrument, with which this 1939 work stands shoulder-to-shoulder.

However, there was one incongruous element in the concert: the ten-minute world premiere of Kafka’s Earplugs, composed by Gerald Barry, whose programme note referred to the Czech writer’s obsession with noise and “hiding from it”. The BBC commissioned this work. One promenader was evidently not impressed and shouted out ‘Total rubbish!’ at the end.

Next, to a recording made at St. John’s Baptist Church, Loughton, Essex, of the Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord by J.S. Bach (1685-1750). Performed by violinist Adrian Butterfield and harpsichordist, Silas Wollston, the disc offers followers of the baroque/early-classical period an absorbing hour of the great German composer’s harmony and invention; music that filled Lutheran churches and stately homes in Brandenburg ~ music that because of its beauty and relentless complexity, could almost go on forever. Yet here we find Bach with a more human face: the genius behind the Passions and B-minor Mass even finding it possible to enter into a playful mood.

The CD sleeve notes quote the following letter from Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, to his friend, Johann Nicklaus Forkel:

‘In somewhat of a rush, I have pleasure in sending you, my dear friend, the remainder of my Sebastianoren. The 6 Clavier Trios, BWV 1014-19 are among the works of my dear departed father… They contain some Adagii that could not be written in a more singable manner.’

Note the phrase, ‘singable manner.’ The Violin Sonatas in E minor and G major complete the disc, and how thoroughly well-played they are.

Finally, to Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony which received a sumptuous, bravura performance by John Wilson and Sinfonia of London on a recent CD from Chandos. A wide dynamic sound and a sense of a large-scale romantic orchestra, fully at one with the Russian composer’s passions and struggles, overflows from this production. That said, some earlier recorded versions: notably, for this reviewer, Mariss Jansons and the Philharmonia (again, on Chandos) and Owain Arwel Hughes and the Royal Scottish National on BIS, provide a greater ‘undertow’ to the orchestral sound. But this is not to deny that John Wilson is a commanding conductor. Perhaps the sound of orchestras ~ timbre, pitch, the ‘aura’ of instruments, even timpani ~ has become a little lighter.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

Recording details:
Bach, Sonatas, SOMMCD 0664-2.
Rachmaninov, Symphony No. 2, John Wilson, Sinfonia of London. CHAN 5309.

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Endnotes, August 2023

Gustav Doré, illustration for Idylls of the King, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, August 2023

In this edition: English music for strings at JAM on the Marsh Festival; songs by Eric McElroy; reviewed by Stuart Millson, the Classical Music Editor of Quarterly Review

Still preserving a sense of rural remoteness, Romney Marsh in Kent is one of the country’s most unusual localities. Once a watery world of creeks and salt marsh, then drained and given over to crops and sheep-grazing, the green low-levels extend as far as Dungeness and Denge Marsh, a unique shingle promontory jutting into the English Channel ~ and designated as our nation’s only official desert. The scene is partly dominated by the atomic power station, which is linked to its sister-facility in the North-West of England, by way of a single-track railway line (spared by Beeching) that threads its way through the hamlets of the Marsh. The tower of Lydd Church provides a contrast to the austere atomic monolith on the Ness; and rising above the landscape just to the east is the equally impressive Church of St. Nicholas, New Romney ~ the venue for a London Mozart Players concert of English (and American) music for strings, held as part of the JAM on the Marsh Festival.

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How the West was Wrung

 

No Country for Old Men, credit Wikipedia

                   How the West was Wrung

Last month, the death was announced of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. Newspaper obituaries described him as a reclusive man who gave few interviews and let his books do the talking. For many years, success eluded him with none of his first five novels selling more than 3000 copies and as a consequence he lived a penurious life. McCarthy finally reached a wider audience when his 2005 novel No Country For Old Men was turned into a multiple Academy Award winning film. The book has been described as a modern Western and the American South West was a location which McCarthy used in other works. Indeed, he travelled extensively in the region whilst undertaking research, eventually settling in El Paso, Texas.

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Love’s Vicissitudes

Duel of Pushkin and George d’Anthès (1869), by Adrian Volvo, credit Wikipedia

Love’s Vicissitudes 

L’elisir d’amore at Longborough Festival Opera, Tuesday 27th June, 2023, The Queen of Spades at The Grange Festival, Thursday 29th June, 2023, reviewed by David Truslove

Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades may have little in common, but both these new productions drew inspiration from their immediate surroundings. A typical Cotswold village was lovingly created for Longborough Festival Opera’s Donizetti, while an orangery, echoing past affluence in leafy Hampshire, provided the setting for The Grange Festival’s Tchaikovsky.

At Longborough, its picture book charm well suited to country house diversion, it was summer season fun with director Max Hoehn declining to take the plot’s love-conquers-all theme seriously. Jemima Robinson’s designs updated Donizetti’s 1832 rom.com to contemporary rural Britain; stone walls, phone booth-turned-defibrillator, post box and park bench framed by a jigsaw puzzle of birdlife with a topical slogan declaring ‘Green, pleasant and now protected’. When the stage was not already crowded, it was then peopled by a postie (Nemorino) and a chorus of villagers; policeman, builders with hard hats, a Goth, two pensioners and a schoolgirl (Giannetta) on a scooter.

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Em notes, July 2023

English Music Festival founder, Em Marshall-Luck

Em notes, July 2023

In this edition: new works at the Sixteenth English Music Festival and a CD tribute to Walter Leigh. Reviewed by Stuart Millson.

Approaching Dorchester-on-Thames from Henley takes the traveller through the England of Three Men in a Boat and The Wind in the Willows – via roadsides garlanded with early-summer cow parsley and, in the distance, the remnant rings of Anglo-Saxon earthworks. Close to Dorchester is the famous landscape feature Wittenham Clumps, a tree-crested hill, a symbol of pastoral continuity and the venue for this year’s English Music Festival.

Arriving at the great church in fine weather, QR enjoyed a preview of the opening-night concert: the BBC Concert Orchestra and their conductor, Martin Yates – with Raphael Wallfisch, soloist – hard at work in rehearsal for E.J. Moeran’s Cello Concerto. Written at the end of the Second World War for his wife, the cellist, Peers Coetmore, the concerto is a soulful piece – especially in the sad beauty of the slow movement – conjuring in the mind’s eye the lonely west coast of Ireland; although, it seems, there was no specific spirit-of-place intended by this gifted but troubled composer. Experiences in the First World War and a lifelong battle with alcohol had evidently taken their toll. Continue reading

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Dialogues des Carmélites

Jean-Baptiste Lesueur (1749-1826). “Tricoteuses”. Gouache sur carton découpé collé sur une feuille de papier lavée de bleu. Paris, musée Carnavalet. 

Dialogues des Carmélites

Opera by Francis Poulenc, directed by Barry Kosky, on Saturday 10th June 2023 at Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex; London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robin Ticciati; reviewed by David Truslove; performances continue until 29th July

A floor-shaking thud from an amplified guillotine sends a pair of shoes flying across an empty stage. This is the first of 16 gut-wrenching moments portraying the execution of the nuns of Compiègne in the final tableaux of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. Presented at Glyndebourne for the first time, Barry Kosky’s new production of this operatic masterpiece, based on a true story, underlines the fears, courage and dignity of a group of Carmelite nuns during the last days of the French Revolution as they face the choice of renouncing their vows or accepting the certainty of death.

Martyrdom is hardly a common operatic subject, or an obvious choice for country house entertainment, especially after last year’s staging here of Poulenc’s absurdly comic Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Yet, as an interrogation of fear and belief, Carmélites (premiered at La Scala, Milan in 1957) develops Poulenc’s religious preoccupations initiated some thirty years earlier in works such as the Litanies à la Vierge Noire and his Mass, both signalling the composer’s return to his catholic faith following the death of fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car crash in 1936.

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What friends are for

                   

Sydney Friends Meeting House, credit wikipedia

What friends are for, by Bill Hartley

The Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, has been associated with the town of Darlington in County Durham since the 17thcentury. Even the local football club is nicknamed the Quakers. In the town centre there is a rather elegant Friends Meeting House which was built in 1839. Today it sits awkwardly amongst the charity shops, night clubs and bargain drinking spots. Here, the Quakers meet twice a week for silent prayer and contemplation. It seems like the perfect place for someone to go in search of a quiet, non ritualistic, religious experience. Close by they also maintain the Quaker tradition of philanthropy by running their own charity shop.

For anyone with a vague idea of what the Quakers are about, the banner draped over the portico might be confusing. It invites passers-by to ‘Join us in the fight for Climate Justice’. Below that, rather more alarmingly it adds, ‘act now to save your home’. This seems like a peculiar bandwagon for a supposedly religious organisation to climb on. Would not something about God, or a shared spiritual experience, have been more appropriate than representing themselves as a branch office of Extinction Rebellion?

Climate Justice is a complex subject. Sonia Klinsky, an associate professor at Arizona State University, distils the problem rather effectively. She points out that whilst China is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Saudi Arabia, the US and Australia to name but three all have more than twice per capita emissions than the country which is supposedly the worst offender. She adds that low income countries have been arguing for years that it would be unjust to require them to cut essential investments in areas that richer countries already take for granted, such as electricity generation.

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Rigoletto, Opera Holland Park

Helene Schjerfbeck, Rigoletto, credit Wikidata

Rigoletto, Opera Holland Park

Rigoletto, Opera Holland Park, June 3rd 2023; opera in three acts with music composed by Giuseppe Verdi, Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave; a new production by Opera Holland Park, directed by Cecilia Stinton; the City of London Orchestra and Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Lee Reynolds; reviewed by Leslie Jones

John Allison considers ‘La donna è mobile’ a ‘Me Too tune’ (see ‘Flecks of Light in a Renaissance Painting’, Official Programme). The Duke of Mantua, played by tenor Allesandro Scotto di Luzio, is a cynical misogynist, so cynical that he assumes that Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda must be his mistress. ‘Woman is fickle’, he proclaims in the aforementioned aria, ‘like a feather in the wind’.

Here, Sigmund Freud meets John Stuart Mill. For according to historian Thomas Dixon, the Duke is in thrall to ‘an excessive form of carnal appetite’, to wit, ‘concupiscence’ (see ‘Lust’, Official Programme). Women have only one use, and innocence, as represented by the overly-protected Gilda, constitutes a challenge, or even an aphrodisiac. ‘Women are cunning little demons, the Duke contends. And evidently disposable items, to be duped, or abducted and raped, if all else fails’ (see Leslie Jones, ‘Rigoletto, reloaded’, Quarterly Review, 8th February, 2017). Evil is all the more toxic when conjoined to power. Verdi had no time for what Theodor Fontane called ‘auxiliary constructions’, i.e. for religion and its consolations (Fontane, as cited by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents).

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Endnotes, June 2023

J.S. Bach, A Portrait in Leipzig, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, June 2023

In this edition, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in a new recording on the Chronos label, reviewed by Stuart Millson

J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 – stands alongside Rachmaninov’s Second, or Mahler’s Symphonies Five to Seven, written some 150 years later – as one of the great voyages in classical music: one of those rare pieces in which the composer, heart and soul, stands before you. In Mahler’s case, the journey might involve a transition from darkness to brilliant light, but in Bach’s – being the creator of a purer, abstract, but no less emotional form of music – the pathway offers endless illumination, intricacy and invention; from the wintry introspection of the 14th variation, to the carefree, courtly Canone, the dance-like variation 27 (track 28).

The Goldberg Variations (so-called) were published in 1741, but as Corrina Connor reminds us in the CD’s excellent accompanying booklet, the elaborately engraved title page of the original score read as follows:

‘Keyboard study, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for a harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for the refreshment of music-lovers’ spirits by Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer to the royal court of Poland and the electoral court of Saxony, Kapellmeister and director of choral music in Leipzig.’

As the story goes, Bach’s work soothed the spirits of one Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk, Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony; a nobleman who engaged at his establishment a musician by the name of Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-56) – an artist who could be relied upon to restore the mental vitality of the insomniac diplomat – hence, Goldberg Variations.

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