The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, JUNE 2, 1930. GRETNA GREEN

Southland Times, Issue 21098, 2 June 1930, Page 6

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, JUNE 2, 1930. GRETNA GREEN

Although it may appear that acts of Parliament are the enemies of romance, the statutes framed by sober legislators have actually encouraged it, and there is a reminder of the fact in the announcement that the House of Commons, under the tutelage of a prosaic Labour Government is to be asked to pass a Bill which will withdraw from Gretna Green its peculiar matrimonial privileges. The blacksmiths of Gretna Green owed their lucrative and romantic business in marrying runaway couples from England to the passage of laws in England making marriage more difficult. In their efforts to check elopements, the English law-makers forgot that love which could laugh at locksmiths would also have a smile of derision for legislators while there were blacksmiths with whom they could laugh. Gretna Green’s power grew out of the fact that under the Scottish law a man and a woman who announced themselves as man and wife before another were legally mated, because this union had to be recognized in England. The validity of these marriages was upheld by the English courts, which had to keep a wary eye on the complicated structure of international law, and so runaway couples who could not obtain the sanction of the authorities, spiritual or legal, in England, found Gretna, situated nine miles inside the Scottish border, and on the highroad, the most convenient vantage point. This practice flourished unchecked from 1770 until 1856, when an Act made residence in Scotland for twenty-one days by one of the parties necessary, but even the disability of living in Scotland for twenty-one days was not enough to stop elopers taking advantage of the peculiar provisions of the Scottish law. Gretna Green was a centre of romance, and it has a special interest for New Zealanders in the fact that Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in his young days, was involved in an adventure which had a Gretna Green marriage as its object. That ill-starred effort had an important bearing on Wakefield’s career, and it may be credited with having had some influence on the history of New Zealand, since it was while in prison as a result of this exploit that Wakefield pursued those studies which awakened in him the designs that ultimately bore fruit in the formation of . the New Zealand Company and started the ordered settlement of this country. Whether it is that romance is being persistently driven out of life by the advance of the sternly practical, or whether it is that the modern attitude to the ceremony of marriage makes the need for the Gretna Green blacksmith less urgent, the fact remains that in recent times-romantic flights across the border to the Dumfries town have been so infrequent that the place has lost its significance. This latest proposal to abolish the Gretna Green marriage probably owes its introduction to the fact that a little while ago one couple remembered the peculiar properties of the Green and went through the ancient form to the discomfiture of objecting parents. If their exploit is the last it will have special interest, but it has not been enough .to restore romance to the place, and the Bill to be introduced in the House of Commons really comes at a

time when the town has lost its special charm. There may be some significance in the fact that during the war Gretna was selected by the authorities as a centre for the manufacture of munitions. The old village became a busy manufacturing town, with 16,000 workers housed in Government huts, ugly in their awful monotony, and after the war the Government decided to maintain it as a place for the manufacture of high explosives. Perhaps some poet will rise to find appropriate material in this association of munitions and marriage, and in elegiac numbers sing of the passing of romance before the persistent march of modern materialism, while moralists will see melancholy futility of abolishing Gretna Green marriages in an age in which the joining and sundering of couples is so easily accomplished.