ABSTRACT
On 25 June 1929 John and Helen were divorced. In the manner of the time, the divorce had hung about for a while before they got the decree absolute, and someone had to be to blame. Fortunately, someone was. Helen petitioned on the grounds that “the respondent has frequently committed adultery with Violet Marion Bourchier” (Kyrle Bellew) and was living with Kyrle in Bourne End. Helen asked for, and got, custody of their daughter Lesley and John was to pay her, for life, maintenance of £133.6.8 a year, and was to pay the legal costs. Just four days later, on 29 June, John and Kyrle married in a blaze of publicity. It looked unseemly. He could have waited, and done it more discreetly, and it would have been politically prudent to do so. Three decades later he gave me his account of how it happened. The two of them, he said, were driving to Glasgow with two other Labour MPs, who turn out to have been Elijah Sandham from Liverpool Kirkdale and John Kinley from Bootle, to help Labour’s candidate for John Wheatley’s Glasgow Shettleston seat, John McGovern. At Gretna Green, they stopped for coffee, or so John thought. But as he got out of the car he found Kyrle at his side and the pavement full of photographers.
