ABSTRACT
Edwin Kempson Mole was born in the mid-1840s, the son of a small farmer in Worcestershire. When he was 7 the family moved to London where Mole attended school. At 16 he was working for a builder, and after a disagreement with his foreman, he enlisted in the 14th King’s Hussars. Shortly before his regiment was sent to India in 1876, Mole married in Dublin. In India, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, and subsequently died giving birth to a second child, who also died. Mole sent his daughter back to England to live with her maternal aunt. He remained in India for the rest of his time in the army, rising to the rank of Troop Sergeant Major. He married again while in India, to an Englishwoman who had been born there, but it does not seem to have been a happy union. This wife barely figures in his memoir, and when Mole returned to England, she chose to remain in India, apparently on account of his violence. Mole retired in 1888 with a pension of £40 a year, but once back in England his life seems to have been problematic. He lived with his daughter and his sister-in-law in the village of Great Conard near Sudbury in Suffolk, and in 1889 was charged with “carnally knowing his daughter”, who was then 12. 3 Due to lack of evidence the magistrates declined to send the case to trial. In 1917, at age 70, Mole was charged with bigamy, having married a third time to an 18-year-old in 1891, claiming to be a widower. He told the court he had believed his second wife to be dead of cholera in India, which the court accepted. As was the case with his second wife, Mole’s third also claimed that she feared his violence. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Mole spent several short spells in insane asylums, although the causes of his entry are not clear. Edwin Mole died in 1937.
