Bigamy proves to be a dangerous game
Today, with divorce a relatively straightforward procedure cases of bigamy are rare. A century ago, in Hamilton, it was a different story. A 1924 bigamy trial made national headlines.
Frederick William Page was just 19 when he married Clarice Hilda Dangerfield Matthews, in Sydney in 1916. If ‘danger’ was literally Clarice’s middle name it provided insufficient warning of her delicate psychological state. In the words of contemporary reportage, she became “mentally deranged”, requiring institutional care. With his wife committed to the Callan Park Asylum for the foreseeable future, Page was left alone with an infant to care for.
Clarice’s mother, a certain Mrs Matthews, took on responsibility for raising her grandchild. Page eventually left Australia, settling in Hamilton, where he found employment as a kitchen hand at Waikato Hospital. It was there that he met Helena Maude Keefe, an English immigrant five years his junior and - as the Waikato Times was later to state the case - “intimacy took place between the young couple”.
Pregnancy complicated the romance. Page claimed that he would like to marry Helena but was still legally bound to Clarice. Helena wrote to Callan Park, whose Superintendent replied that Mrs Page was still in residence, “very unstable mentally” and had only a “remote” chance of recovery. The correspondence motivated deception. Wishing to give his second child a semblance of legitimacy, as well as to “save the honour” of the woman he was now “greatly attached to”, Page falsely claimed that he was a widower and wed Helena on July 4, 1923. If it were not for the intervention of Mrs Matthews, the bigamy would likely have gone unnoticed.
Compelled to protect the interests of her incapacitated daughter, she wrote to the New Zealand police, inquiring as to the marital status of Page, who, when confronted, readily confessed.
The trial resulted in unexpected sympathy from the press, the public and ultimately the bench.
Helena stood in dock, bearing “...a baby in her arms, and wept throughout the proceedings”.
Of the opinion that imprisonment was unwarranted, Mr Justice Mcgregor delayed sentencing indefinitely, provided the couple “...continued to live decent lives and did not commit any other offence”.