The majority of bigamy cases I’ve come across in the English press over the 19th and early 20th centuries involve men being charged with the offence, following the discovery that a first wife still survived at the time of a second marriage. It gives the impression that this was a male-dominated offence, whereby a man tried to pull the wool over the eyes of an innocent woman.
But although it may have been committed more by men, this does not mean that women did not commit bigamy, knowing that they had a husband still alive. Where cases were reported, and resulted in a charge and/or trial, they received press coverage highlighting their relative rarity. One case that was reported in 1900 was particularly newsworthy as it involved the woman’s abandoned husband prosecuting her for bigamy.
The case centred around a young woman, Sarah Elizabeth Chamberlain, who was, at the time of her trial at the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Assizes, still only 21 years old. Her husband, James Albert Chamberlain, of Kilburn, accused her of having committed bigamy with a man named Charles William Johnson a year before. Sarah was convicted, and sentenced to three months in prison.
This is the basic story, but looking a bit more into the background of those involved suggests a more complex story than one of a calculating woman seeking to take a second husband knowing that her first is still alive. It instead suggests a young woman fighting against the expectations that society placed on her, and wanting to experience a bit more life than most of her age and in her community typically expected to do.
Sarah was one of eleven children born to agricultural labourer George Pickering and his wife Ann. Unusually, perhaps, for the time, George and Ann would only lose one of their children in childhood – their daughter Alice, who died in infancy; her twin brother, Amos, survived. Sarah was the eighth surviving child, the fifth surviving daughter. This was a large labouring-class family who were from the local area, and who did not venture far. Mother Ann was the only member of the family born outside of Barholm in Lincolnshire, as she was originally from Holbeach, some 20 miles away. But the family’s horizons were set firmly within Lincolnshire, with there being little expectation of life or excitement further afield.
Although it is not clear how Sarah met James Chamberlain, she appears to have done so around 1895, when she would have been just 15 years old and a naïve country girl. He, however, would have been around 26 years old, a Londoner born and bred. He was from a more industrial background, his late father being a labourer at a local gas works. All his family worked, both men and women: his mother was a shopkeeper even while her husband was alive; his sister Elizabeth was a dressmaker, and his brothers were vellum binders. James himself worked as an upholsterer.
After around 18 months of courting, James Albert Chamberlain married Sarah Elizabeth Pickering in Barholm in April 1897. Sarah was barely 17, and her life now changed drastically. She had spent her young life in Lincolnshire, as an ag lab’s daughter; now, she would moved into apartments in Kilburn, to be shared with her new husband.
In early 1898, Sarah was about to give birth to her first child. Unsurprisingly, she told James that she wanted to have her baby back home in Lincolnshire – it was not uncommon for girls to return home in such cases, surrounded by family and familiarity. James understood, and Sarah duly set off from London for the Pickering home.
That was the last James heard of Sarah for some time. It’s not clear when he became concerned; it was noted in the press that ‘six months’ later, he was unable to find any trace of her, and ‘bushels’ of letters he had sent to his mother-in-law, Ann Pickering, were returned unopened to him. It became clear to him that his young wife had left him, only a year into their marriage, and despite being heavily pregnant at the time she had left.
Sarah was young. She bounced back after the birth of her son, Arthur; perhaps her mother was willing to babysit while her daughter tried again to live a carefree life as a teenaged woman. Perhaps inevitably, Sarah started a new relationship, this time with a man named Charles William Johnson, and moved in with him. In August 1899, at Stanground in Huntingdonshire (now part of Peterborough), she married him, under her maiden name, and declaring that she was single.
Sarah knew she was married; she must have known that James had been looking for her, and that only divorce or death would let her legally marry again. But perhaps she wanted the excitement, the frisson of marrying fraudulently – or perhaps she was simply carried away with her new romance and didn’t think it through.
James found out about this marriage – it’s not clear quite how, although he may have carried on investigating his missing wife until she finally was located. He decided, in September 1900, to prosecute her for bigamy. She was charged Norman Cross Police Court, and her case was then sent for trial at the Assizes, although she was allowed bail.
At the Assizes, she pleaded not guilty, but the prosecution was successful, and she was duly jailed. The second marriage was not legal, but the first one was, and Sarah and James remained married even after she was released from prison. In both the 1901 and 1911 censuses, James is listed as a married man.
What the newspaper coverage of the case fails to detail is Sarah’s motivations: her voice is almost completely absent, apart from her comment that implies her relief at being found out. The focus is on James, his views, his detective work, his decision to prosecute his errant wife. The coverage fails to name Arthur, their child; it also fails to record the fact that Sarah was jailed after having recently had a second child. She named this child, conceived sometime in late 1899, John William Chamberlain, as Chamberlain was her legal surname and thus his; but it could not have been James’ child, and the timing shows that the boy’s father was Charles William Johnson.
In 1901, Sarah is found at her parents’ house, her brief spell as a Londoner behind her. With her is her younger child, John William, but her older son is not. It appears that, as was usual in cases where an errant or independent wife was involved, the custody of the child of the marriage had gone to the father. In 1901, three-year-old Arthur Chamberlain is living with his father James, James’ siblings and his widowed mother Anna in London, miles away from his mother and her family. Ten years later, a now teenaged Arthur is at school in the Paddington area, and still living with his father and the rest of the Chamberlain family.
Yet Sarah was not such a flighty individual as her court case might have suggested. It seems to be more the case that she had married young, to an older man who represented a bit of urban glamour to her – and she soon repented, instead starting a relationship with a man nearer her own age. This marriage – albeit bigamous – actually lasted. The 1911 census records Sarah Elizabeth Johnson, aged 32 and apparently married 11 years, living with her ‘husband’, Charles William Johnson, three years older than her, in Woodston, then in Huntingdonshire. Charles was working as a brickyard labourer.
The couple had four children living with them – three sons, John William, age 10; George Frederick, six; and 11 month old Sidney, and an eight-year-old daughter, Ethel May. All were Sarah’s children by Charles, John William now taking on his real father’s name, having born as a Chamberlain. Another child was also recorded in the ‘children who have died’ column – likely to be a child born between George in 1905 and Sidney in 1910. It was not Charles but Sarah herself who signed the census form.
I’m not sure how long Sarah lived, or when she died. However, what it clear is that she and James did not divorce, but simply lived separate lives. James is to be found in the 1939 Register, an old aged pensioner living in Willesden. He describes himself as a widower, but was he, or was it another example of him not knowing where his wife was, of having to guess that she might have died?
James himself died in 1941, his brief marriage nearly half a century in the past. Just as he is more evident in the newspaper coverage of the court case than Sarah, he is as well in the subsequent archival record – a man more recorded than an interesting girl who strove to live a life beyond that which had been proscribed for her.
Tweet