ABSTRACT
The First World War produced an increase in the numbers of both marriages and divorces in England. Couples rushed to get married before soldiers were sent to the front. The prewar rate of fifteen marriages per thousand inhabitants rose in 1915 to nineteen per thousand, an unusually high percentage that had not been matched in the preceding fifty years. The marriage rate dropped after 1915 but rose again dramatically to over twenty per thousand in 1920, when men returned home and marriages arranged during the war were celebrated. 1 Many of these marriages did not last, as demonstrated by a comparison of prewar and postwar statistics. The number of petitions filed for either the dissolution or annulment of a marriage increased from 956 in 1912 to 5,184 in 1919. 2
In 1917 advocates of divorce reform responded to the increase in demand by drafting a bill that would have permitted divorce after three years of separation. Such a reform would have removed the need to prove a matrimonial offence, thereby permitting divorce by mutual consent. Opponents of the proposal used vivid language in their criticism. The Church Times proclaimed that the bill ‘reduces marriage to the level of concubinage’, and Athelstan Riley compared the proposals to ‘the social economy of the rabbit hutch’. 3 The supporters of the measure adopted a clever defense of the bill, arguing that the declining birth rate and the war had so depleted the British population that a radical reform was necessary in order to enable separated persons to marry again and have legitimate children. The argument appeared in a circular sent to members of both Houses of Parliament in August 1917: ‘When the manhood of the nation has been depleted by the most terrible of wars, it is exceptionally urgent, in the interest of the community and of the Empire, that all unnecessary obstacles to marriage should be removed’. 4 Although the tactic of shifting the emphasis from individual cases of hardship to the welfare of the community appeared shrewd, the 1917 proposal was never formally introduced as a bill in Parliament. Archbishop Davidson had organized a Memorial signed by both Archbishops, Cardinal Bourne, three bishops, five Free Church leaders, and other influential men and women to
reform would have to wait until after the war had ended.
