ALICE’S LETTER FROM THE ADMIRALTY OFFICE, dated 5 March 1918, was exactly six months after her wedding. The letter informed Alice that her application for the Navy Separation Allowance had been rejected. The allowance consisted of a portion of a soldier’s pay, matched by the government, to provide for the dependents of those on active duty.
It’s not clear to me when Alice submitted her application. The Christmas season is hectic for a choirmistress in any year, but in late 1917 Alice would have had to rehearse two concert programs with choral parts she amended herself to counteract the imbalance in her two choirs. With the war still raging, she would have been missing—for a second year—most of her tenors, and was probably too heavy in the bass section, with more older men filling in the gaps of the younger ones away in service. Perhaps Alice waited until the new year to apply. Perhaps she hoped that she wouldn’t need it by then.
The letter declining her application, part of a bundle of correspondence my aunt Charlotte has kept for decades, contained an explanation, but it made no sense.
Madam,
With reference to your application for the grant of Navy separation allowance in respect of John Henry Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer 305849, I have to inform you that as it is reported that the man was already married and had a wife living when he went through a form of marriage with you in September last, it is regretted that you are not eligible for an allowance.
Your Certificate of Marriage is returned herewith.
Alice knew he’d been married. John had sat across from her at dinner and told her whole family the story. Ann had died in childbirth. The letter’s wording was ugly, but clearly there had been an administrative error.
James Taylor determined to get to the bottom of this bureaucratic puzzle for his daughter’s sake. Having expected that Alice would soon no longer represent a financial burden to him, James must have been outraged both for moral and financial reasons, and impatient for an answer. He sought the advice of George Bradley, a local solicitor.
The next six months unfolded between the pages of Mr Bradley’s correspondence with the Admiralty. At first, the office would provide no new information regarding their decision to decline Alice’s claim for support. They repeated their policy of not divulging additional details.
Admiralty,
10th July 1918
Sir/
In reply to your letter of the 15th ultimo, relative to the wife of John Henry Edwards, Stoker, Petty Officer, 305849, I have to inform you that it is regretted that the information asked for cannot be furnished.
I have to add that all the circumstances were fully investigated in connection with the claim to Navy Separation Allowance received from this Petty Officer’s present Allottee, and that the Department is satisfied that the facts are as represented in the letter addressed to her on the 5th March last.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) Frank Porter,
pr Accountant-General of the Navy.
But Mr Bradley, who would not take no for an answer, wrote again to the Admiralty. This time he set out in greater detail the circumstances in which Alice May Morrison Edwards, née Taylor, found herself in the summer of 1918.
Let’s put ourselves in Alice’s shoes as she greets John Henry Edwards, the man she married last September at the church she grew up in, as he returns to Glasgow for a conjugal visit. It’s not clear exactly when he arrived, though from the correspondence I conclude it must have been in early summer. Did she greet him at the docks, or wait impatiently at home? Had she dreamed of being alone with her husband again, in whatever version of privacy the newlyweds—who until now had only spent a handful of days together—could muster? Perhaps she was torn between excitement, anticipation and an anxious knot in her stomach. On seeing his new wife again, did John lift Alice in his arms? Hug her with his whole body? Or greet her awkwardly, like the almost-stranger that she was? Even if Alice briefly regretted marrying him so soon after meeting him, I suspect, on seeing him again, she felt immediately reassured by his presence.
We don’t know what, if anything, John knew about the Admiralty Office’s decision before coming ashore. We don’t know what Alice’s mother made of the letter, though it’s easy enough to imagine her being horrified at the mere hint of impropriety in relation to her daughter, even if it would turn out to be a simple clerical error. We will never know just how awkward the reunion was.
As expected, John Henry Edwards gave his wife and his in-laws a perfectly reasonable explanation for the mix-up. The ‘present Allottee’ of his Navy Separation Allowance was his dear mother. The mistake had all been his, in not informing the Admiralty of the change in his marital status. He apologised to Alice, James and Charlotte, reassuring them that he would sort everything out.
Did they believe him?
Would you?
As John was on a brief shore leave, he was desperate to be with his new wife. And, despite the bureaucratic bungle, she with him, I imagine. But I find it difficult to see Alice taking her husband upstairs to her bed while her parents were in the house. Perhaps Charlotte and James Taylor begrudgingly gave the newlyweds some time alone, and spent an afternoon staring into their drinks, thinking all the thoughts they dared not say out loud. Or they gave John the benefit of the doubt because they knew his history and it made sense that he’d been sending money to his mother after he had been widowed. Or they were riddled with doubt but from neither a legal nor moral standpoint could do anything about it, until Mr Bradley could pressure the Admiralty for an answer.
In early July, John Henry Edwards went back to sea aboard the Mameluke. On 10 July, a letter arrived from the Admiralty. Again their office refused to supply further information. One week later, Mr Bradley composed the following letter in response. It paints a vivid picture of the anxiety and despair now gripping the household at 370 Dumbarton Road.
102 Bath Street,
Glasgow, 18th July 1918
The Accountant General of the navy, Admiralty,
4a Newgate Street,
London, E. C. 1
Sir,
I duly received your reply dated 10th inst. to my letter to you of 15th ultimo, relative to the wife of John Henry Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer, 305849, and your refusal to supply information asked.
I must ask you for your authority for withholding information. My client who supposes herself to be the wife of this man is at present in a terrible position, as since I wrote you John Henry Edwards has been living with her during a short leave, after persuading my client and his daughter that it was his mother who was getting the allowance. My client and his daughter are respectable citizens of this country and should it be the case that the Department is satisfied with the facts, as represented in the letter addressed by you to the lady on 5th March last, she must at once be put in possession of the necessary details to release her from the intolerable position in which she finds herself.
All I require from you is the name and address of the present allottee. I shall make all other necessary enquiries myself. I cannot conceive why you should conceal the name of the present allottee from a woman, who if your history be well founded, is the victim of a thorough paced scoundrel.
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) George Bradley
But not a word of correspondence, no fresh scrap of information, arrived for the next two and a half months. Not one step was taken nearer to resolving what had by now surely become a torment to Alice. Mr Bradley refers to her ‘intolerable position’ and the possibility of Henry being a ‘thorough paced scoundrel’, but we have no way of knowing if these descriptions are Alice’s. I doubt it; they sound much more like the words of her father and family solicitor, older men with a cynical suspicion of what the truth might be.
Mr Bradley followed up with the Admiralty on 4 September, the day before Alice’s first wedding anniversary, with another inquiry, given that so much time had elapsed without response.
Finally, in the first week of October, Alice got her answer.
Admiralty,
5th October 1918
With reference to your letter of the 4th ultimo, and previous correspondence, relative to the wife of John H. Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer, 305849, I have to inform you that the question of withholding the information asked for by you has been re-considered, and, in the special circumstances, it has been decided to make an exception to the general rule in this case.
I have accordingly to inform you that this Petty Officer was married in the Parish Church of Falmouth on the 13th September 1906 to Ann Barrett, and that, in February last, the latter was living at No. 2, Pembroke Lane, Devonport.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) C. M. Muir,
for Accountant-General of the Navy.
Her husband was still married to Ann. She had not died giving birth to their baby son. She was living in their home on the Royal Navy base in the south of England, carrying on the unpaid labour of child-rearing, while John Henry Edwards enjoyed shore leave and—after a hasty wedding to satisfy appearances in Glasgow—the affections of his shipmate’s sister.
Alice reverted to her maiden name, though now it reverberated, if only between her own ears, with her humiliation of being neither married nor a maiden. Alice May Morrison Taylor fulfilled all the non-technical requirements of a spinster. Soon the people of Partick looked at her as they always had, with a mixture of respect and pity. The novelty of her having married a bigamist faded into the fabric of town life like a stain on carpet.
Yet how did Alice perceive herself? Double standards being what they are, I’m guessing her parents—perhaps in spite of efforts to avoid talking about it—made her feel like soiled goods, as though she would never appeal to any man now that she was no longer a virgin. What did the parishioners say about her? The members of her choirs? The neighbours? Perhaps they said nothing, and their silence roared in her ears as self-recrimination.
Or maybe Alice rejected their unspoken judgement, and felt furious that John’s lies—so many lies!—had damaged her reputation while he sailed clear away.