In the years before the war took hold of the world, Margaret and Tom were just sweethearts falling in love. The young dressmaker and carpenter lived in Prahran and the two had been courting since 1912. Although they’d discussed marriage it seemed far in the distance; they were both so young, after all. But as the clouds of war gathered and Tom signed up for service, it seemed only proper that things were made official. Tom proposed to Margaret with a diamond ring, and their engagement was announced.

Sweethearts: The young couple became engaged before Tom set out for the war. The Prahran Telegraph, 13 February 1915 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Throughout the war they exchanged hundreds and hundreds of letters. After a while, though, Margaret noticed that Tom’s correspondence had slowed. She worried when she learned that he had been admitted to hospital with illness, but nothing prepared her for his letter in 1917.

My dear Dolly . . . Well, I am sorry to say that there is a nurse here in England whom I like very much; in fact I love her. So it rests with you what we do. You said in your letter that should I love another girl in another country that is the end. So I am letting you know that I love another, and whom I should like to make my wife. This girl – I have met her in England – is the only one I could make happy in marriage.

Margaret couldn’t remember making any such concession to her fiancé. Tom continued his letter, trying to explain how he’d ended up so ill:

You remember I told you I was in hospital with diphtheria. Well, after seven weeks, they found out I had not diphtheria, but a syphilitic throat. God knows where I contracted that disease, for I know it was not caused through any fault of my own. I have looked after myself in every way. The only place I can think of is in the dirt of Egypt as where I got it . . . 

This letter was a great shock to Margaret. She was devastated that the future she’d planned had evaporated and she was furious that she’d spent some fifty pounds stocking her glory box with cutlery, linen and other things to make a home for her and Tom. She wrote back to him:

My dear Tom, your letter has come as a great shock to me, and I want more reasons. Remember, I will not say I will let you free. You have known me five years, and, at all accounts, this woman three months, yet you say you love her . . . This is a great upset, and I do not care what becomes of me; and remember you are responsible for what I do, for I am a miserable girl . . . I have received a note from England, telling me you had V.D: but I cannot believe it. If you say you have got what you have got you can’t marry for years, so what do you think I am? . . . The folly of it all was that I had too much love and affection in you . . . I would like the address of this nurse you have. I will tell her all about this, for she ought to know. Can it be you, dear, who has written to a girl you really love? . . . I want to say a lot; but my head is swimming, so I must close, hoping you are well; but you have left me a broken doll.1

Perhaps it had been the ‘soothing touch’ and the ‘gentle eyes of a ministering angel’;2 perhaps it was the time and distance away from Margaret, or the cold reminders of life and death, that made falling in love with another woman possible for Tom.

Tom claimed he never received Margaret’s last letter. In March 1917, he married his young English nurse, Belinda. The couple moved to Australia after the war.

Margaret was hopelessly sad but she was also affronted by the dishonesty of her fiancé. She thought he ought to pay. Margaret took Tom to the Supreme Court, suing her former beloved for £750 in damages for breach of promise. On the day of the trial, she stood in the witness box and told the judge how her heart and Tom’s promises had been broken. It all became too much and the fragile young woman fainted. The judge allowed her to compose herself in the fresh air before she continued her testimony. ‘You left me like a broken doll,’3 she cried to Tom and the courtroom.

The judge found in Margaret’s favour and ordered the young soldier to pay his former fiancée £150. Tom had just eight pounds to his name, no property, no savings in the bank, just a paltry pension and an insufficient and unsteady wage. With nowhere near the sum found against him, Tom was declared insolvent.

Margaret was heartbroken at losing Tom, but part of this young woman’s distress was likely her worry that she now might never find a husband. After the war, Britain had two million ‘surplus’ women, an already unequal sex balance worsened by a lost generation of men. Australia experienced a similar demographic change, albeit on a smaller scale. Whatever the reason, many young women would never marry after the war. A cohort of spinsters is an abiding memory in postwar Australia. The majority of men who enlisted in the AIF were single, and so the war also affected the pool of eligible bachelors in Australia. Quite apart from the terrible loss of life during the war, there were tens of thousands of men who died slowly in the years beyond 1918. And of the returned men, countless came home so deeply damaged by their physical and psychological injuries, so changed by their experience, that they felt unable to marry.

The women of that generation who, because of the war, never married, have been described as ‘imaginary widows’.4 In the early twentieth century, most women were expected to become wives and mothers. Female fulfilment was thought impossible in any other role.

Imaginary widows: After the war, many women worried that there were not enough men to go around. Truth, 3 February 1917 courtesy National Library of Australia.

However, not all women found their single status a burden. Some women discovered that as spinsters they had the opportunity to pursue satisfying and remunerative careers. Some also developed relationships that had once seemed off limits – many women established close and compassionate friendships with those of their sex. In some cases, these were lesbian relationships.5

Margaret Broadhurst did find a husband, though; she married Harold Bower in 1923. Tom Archer died in 1940 at the Caulfield Repatriation Hospital; he was 47 years old, hardly an old man. He left behind his beloved Belinda and their four children.

Sources and further reading: This story is based on contemporary newspaper reports of the court case; the Supreme Court record, Broadhurst v Archer, PROV VPRS267, unit 1652, no. 308, 1917; and Thomas Archer’s service dossier NAA: B2455, ARCHER T R. For an examination of Britain’s ‘surplus women’ see Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (London: Viking, 2007); and for work on ‘imaginary widows’ see Kate Holden, ‘Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War’, Journal of Family History, vol. 30 no. 4, October 2005, pp. 388–409.

1 Truth, 20 April 1918.

2 Leader, 20 April 1918.

3 Truth, 20 April 1918.

4 Kate Holden, ‘Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the “Lost Generation” in Britain after the Great War’, Journal of Family History, vol 30 no 4, October 2005, pp. 388–409.

5 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (London: Viking, 2007).