First divorcee hid marriage for 10 years
Emily Croucher convinced a court that her husband was a drunkard and disreputable fellow, but most importantly a bigamist. Julia Bradshaw reports.
New Zealand’s first divorce was granted to a woman who lived under an assumed name for 10 years because her husband was ‘‘low and vulgar’’, a drunk, an adulterer and a bigamist.
She also had to overcome a significant double standard in the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1867, the first law to permit Europeanstyle divorces.
Under it, a husband had only to prove that his wife had committed adultery, but a wife had to prove her husband’s adultery as well as lifethreatening cruelty or desertion or other aggravating factors such as bigamy.
Despite this barrier, the first divorce to be granted in New Zealand was to Emily Croucher in 1870.
Born in Dover, England, in 1840, Emily was the daughter of a schoolmaster. She came to New Zealand in 1853 with her older brother, James Cauty, and his wife, Eliza. The family settled in Wellington.
Emily’s brother was a mariner and had a business relationship with a fellow mariner named Captain Elijah Croucher.
In 1860 Emily married Croucher – apparently because her brother owed him money.
She quickly discovered that she didn’t like her new husband at all. Fortunately for Emily, her husband departed for Lyttelton, intending to find a matrimonial home there.
She was supposed to join him but didn’t despite several letters and an £18 payment.
Finally, on December 24, 1860, and less than a year after her marriage, Emily left Wellington.
But instead of leaving for Lyttelton on the ship Emerald, she instead took passage on the Sea Gull to Whanganui, where she reinvented herself as Miss Neville, a dressmaker. Croucher arrived in Wellington a few weeks later and didn’t find his wife. She had ‘‘made off with herself’’, he said.
Emily’s brother, James Cauty, drowned in 1861. A couple of years later Croucher married his widow, Eliza. She was also his sister-in-law. Croucher described himself as a widower despite having no evidence that his first wife was dead. Emily was alive and well in Whanganui, where, as Miss Neville, she was active in the Anglican Church. Emily heard about her husband’s marriage about 18 months later and was probably pleased, as his bigamy gave her the grounds to apply for a divorce.
She did this promptly and her petition was heard at Wellington a year later, in October 1869.
When giving evidence in court Emily said that she left her husband because she ‘‘had heard that he was committing adultery, and also because I disliked him very much, and I considered myself perfectly justified in leaving him . . . The reason why I disliked him so much was because he was nearly always drunk . . . I had never seen him drunk before our marriage . . . He was very low and vulgar in his language and conduct to me’’.
At the end of the hearing Chief Justice George Arney said ‘‘that under ordinary circumstances . . . the grounds on which the petition had been presented were not sufficiently strong’’ to warrant a divorce.
‘‘But that the court considered this as not only an exceptional, but also as a specially painful case, in which a young and inexperienced girl had been induced . . . to marry a man [whom] she discovers to be a drunkard and a disreputable fellow.’’
Emily, having given her evidence with ‘‘great clearness and candour’’, was issued with a decree nisi, although the court pointed out that the case should not be thought a precedent as drunkenness and vulgarity could not on their own be grounds for divorce.
After the requisite six months, a decree absolut was issued on July 11, 1870, the first in New Zealand.
Captain Croucher drowned on the Wairarapa coastline in January 1873 after falling overboard from his cutter.
Emily married O¯ taki missionary the Rev James McWilliam at Whanganui in June 1873, with the local newspaper still describing her as Miss Neville.
To cover her past, Emily used her maiden name for the marriage registration but described herself as a widow.
After their marriage Emily assisted her husband with his missionary work among Ma¯ ori at O¯ taki. She died in 1899 at the age of 59 and was survived by her husband and four children.
Emily was remembered as dispensing a ‘‘motherly solicitude in times of trouble and sickness’’ but not as the first person in New Zealand to obtain a divorce, a story that she had successfully hidden.
The double standard relating to adultery in divorce law was removed from New Zealand’s Divorce Act in 1898 but the numbers of people divorcing did not rise significantly until after World War I.
Croucher was survived by his second wife, Eliza, and their eight children. She had five surviving children from her first marriage and died in Wellington in 1916.
Julia Bradshaw is a senior curator of human history at Canterbury Museum. She contributed the chapter ‘‘Forgetting Their Place: Women of abandoned character on the Otago goldfields’’ in the book ‘‘Rushing for Gold’’, edited by Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser, Otago University Press, 2016.