Hilda Edith Frances Margaret Quarry and Gaslighting

 Hilda Edith Frances Margaret Quarry and Francis John Quarry: 1918 divorce and Petition for Protection of Earnings Case.


        This is an enormous file of documents, letters, receipts, affidavits, and lawyers' letters collected by both Hilda E.F.M. Quarry and Francis in the course of their long and bitter separation and divorce. Some highlights are below.

We are finally up to the age of typewritten documents, which makes my life vastly easier, but also leads to the occasional unexpected horrors of documentary evidence like the item below, presented by the wonderfully multi-named Hilda Edith Frances Margaret Quarry. CW for domestic violence and abuse.
One of her last letters in this trove of evidence reads: "You would have been a better man to have gone to fight in 1914 and I am sorry now I stopped you, but in those days I hoped against hope for some happiness with you."
In a later response that feels like it belongs in a "How to Gaslight Someone" manual, Francis Quarry responds:
"I have often told you I am always right and I can see your future so plainly. Street, Age, loss of looks, suicide, unwanted and forgotten. Try and think, Francis."
I don't really know the full end of this story, but I do know that Hilda remarried someone named Barnett in 1920 at St. George's, Hanover Square, which I know well from Dorothy Sayers is not the least fancy church in London at which to be married! (Mo Moulton probably has far more opinions here.) Hilda Margaret Barnett then dies 31 years later, in 1951, as a widow, with 520 pounds to her name, so, well, screw you, Francis. (Francis dies in 1947, with a widow Germaine inheriting 120 pounds.)
Much of the case is very much a he said/she said set of claims and accusations, with some supporting witnesses on each side, but wow, as the letters and affidavits pile up Francis to me goes from seeming quite convincingly aggrieved and confused to being a smooth-talking manipulative liar. I'm glad Hilda Margaret won her divorce!













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