Simple Weddings

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 684, 8 June 1929, Page 1

Simple Weddings

j TRAGEDY AND COMEDY IN THE OFFICE OF THE i REGISTRAR. ! i

Condition of the bride. —Good. That is one of the amusing blunders perpetrated by a prospective bridegroom- when filling in the form containing the particulars of parties to be married by the registrar. It might be added that "condition” relates to the bride’s status—whether spinster, widow or divorced. Mr. Frank Evans, Registrar of Marriages at Auckland, sent 496 couples along the matrimonial road last year. For the past 17 years he has been marrying people who prefer a quiet ceremony to the more spectacular and melodious business of going to church. But Mr. Evans’s duties are not always amusing. Once, certainly, a harassed bridegroom volunteered to take his chosen one as “his awful wedded wife,” He was asked to repeat the sentence properly. Then there was another bridegroom who, when filling in the length of his residence in the district, said: “I can’t tell you the length, sir, but it’s a fourroomed house.” Sometimes marriages in the registrar’s office are tragic ceremonies. The day previous to one bride’s marriage had been the occasion of her mother’s murder. That was the saddest marriage Mr. Evans has ever performed. “I’ve married all kinds of people— Dalmatians, Chinese, Germans, Jews and Maoris,” said the registrar. “When they come to me the order of the ceremony is not changed. Sometimes I require the services of an interpreter, as I did recently when marrying a Dalmatian couple. The bride had arrived on a boat the day before the ceremony.” A bridegroom of 84 and a bride of 80 appeared before Mr. Evans this year to celebrate tbeir wadding. It was a pathetic story of friendship and old age.

The groom, a Crimean war veteran, wearing all his medals, said that he had been living next door to tbe old lady for a number of years, and that she always cooked him his dinner. One day the old lady got notice to vacate her house, as It had been condemned Then the veteran decided to pop the question, and another happy couple left the registrar’s office. “She was a good cook, and I didn’t want to lose her,” was the old man’s, comment.

“Several old couples have come to me to be married,” remarked Mr. Evans. “Probably they have been friends for years, and then decide that they will end their days together.” Very young folk often go to the registrar to be married, but if they are under 21 he cannot perform the ceremony without the consent of the parents in writing. This must he obtained on a special blue form.