Details of poet’s hazardous journey to marry her lion tamer to go online

it WAs a marriage of a German lion tamer and his poet compatriot which captured the imagination of the scottish public in the build-up to war.

now details of the union between vera Husing and circus performer Alfred Kaden in Glasgow will be among those going public for the first time as a tranche of official records is released in the new year.

the bride was described as a “vivacious, flaxen-haired and handsome” in reports at the time, but the journey from Berlin to her scottish wedding was marked by one of the worst tragedies of the day.

the 25-year-old was

caught up in the castlecary rail disaster of December 1937, which saw 35 killed and 179 injured at the north Lanarkshire station when two passenger trains collided in whiteout conditions.

However, Miss Husing emerged unscathed from the wreckage and wed Mr Kaden, then ten years her senior.

the ceremony between

the two divorcees took place Glasgow lawyer’ s office.

Among the witnesses at the marriage was John smith clarke, a radical politician and newspaper editor based in Glasgow, who had begun his career as a lion tamer.

the marriage among almost ages of birth,

in

a certificate is 222,000 immarriage and death records that will be made available to family history researchers, including those of well-known people and unusual stories.

tim ellis, Registrar General and Keeper of the Records of scotland, said the archive was “crammed full of fascinating stories about scotland’s people and history”.

He added: “if someone out there recognises the story of the lion-tamer and the poet, we would delighted to learn what became of them.”

the records of births from 1913, marriages from 1938 and deaths from 1963 will go online for the first time from tomorrow, at the scotlandspeople.gov. uk/ website.