BRITAIN’S RISING DIVORCE RATE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 68, 3 January 1947, Page 6

BRITAIN’S RISING DIVORCE RATE

LONDON COURT ECLIPSES RENO

POST-WAR ACCUMULATION

Where is divorce easiest and speediest? Most people would say Reno, but today the correct answer is London, where marriages are being dissolved at a rate exceeding 2000 a month. Reno, Nevada, grants 3000 divorces a year and calls this a “boom.” In London 15,000 couples were divorced in the first seven months of 1946, states a London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald.

In Reno, years ago, I watched Judge Thomas Moran sign 40 decrees of divorce in a day, and this was considered a record. In a King’s Bench Court in London the other day I watched Mr Justice Jones set asunder 2316 couples in less than a minute.

The judge’s clerk stood and read from the cause list: Numbers 1 to 1667 from the London Divorce Court, except 1375. Numbers 1 to 652 from the District Registries.” The 'judge looked down and inquired, “Any objections?”

Two of the five barristers in the well of the court rose to murmur a word or two. A quiet undertone of conversation went on, and then the judge said, “Decrees absolute!” Of course the final decrees absolute, the last irredeemable severance, is a formality compared with the initial severity of the hearing for the earlier decree nisi—literally the “decrees unless,” i.e., a divorce granted unless evidence of collusioq or other circumstances comes to light. Yet the decrees nisi of the British courts are receiving an equivalent speed-up. In a recent instance, the fastest divorce suit known in Bi’itain for the past 100 years was rushed through in four days to give a couple a humane chance to get married before the birth of their baby. On Monday, the petitioner made his application for divorce and received the decree nisi the following day. On Wednesday he sought the decree absolute, and it was granted on Thursday.

' Speeding-up Divorces

Britain’s Attoi’ney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, has also set up 35 "teams of lawyers to deal with Service divorces, and has recruited solicitors and staff for 18 new quick divorce offices in the provinces. This stepping-up of the divorce tempo should not be mistaken as a symptom of loosening British morality. Ever since Sir Alan Herbert began attacking “unholy deadlock” in Parliament and print 12 years ago, Britain’s divorce legislation has been growing progressively more liberal.

Much of the present boom in marriage-busting is part of a hangover, the accumulated, cluttered result of years of wartime legal delay bursting at last through the floodgates.

Many breakneck war marriages were too facile, but war divorces are only just beginning tp show in the statistics. These are the inevitable aftermath. On a Government estimate, 500,000 people in Britain are involved in greater or lesser degree of Service estrangements. Another potent factor in the divorce boom has been the recent decision to reduce the time-lag between decrees nisi and decrees absolute from six months to a maximum of six weeks.

Far from being unprecedented, this is partly a return to early Victorian practice, when divorces, though costing £IOOO cash, were instantaneous.

A delay of three months was imposed by an Act of 1860 as a check on collusion and other offences, and by a subsequent Act this term was extended to six months.

Three months ago the British Government appointed a committee under Mr Justice Denning to study divorce procedure. Their first interim report recommended the sixweek decree absolute—and the Government acted immediately. The impending final report of the Denning Committee, it is believed, will probably recommend legislation for the abolition of the decree nisi altogether. Divorces will then become absolute immediately. Britain’s divorces are also cheaper than they used to be. When all cases had to be heard in London, divorce lawyers made fat pickings from matrimonial disputes sent to them from the provinces. In 1946, though well-to-do petitioners may have to pay £l2O in fees and evidence for insanity cases, or perhaps £7O to prove a desertion, 40 per cent, of all divorces are undertaken under the “Poor Persons Rules” covering the £IOO-£2OO income groups.