Board, lodging, and illicit relationships

When asked to find out if a woman is committing adultery, why not move in with her?

In 1922, detective Ernest Elston was asked to investigate whether Mrs Mary Milne was committing adultery. 44-year-old Mary was a Mancunian who was at this point running lodgings from her house in Sheffield.

Mary Maud Gowans had married William Jamieson Laurence Milne, a mechanical draughtsman, in south London in 1902. The couple had three children - Ada, John and Dorothy - between 1902 and 1908, and had moved to Sheffield by the time John was born.

The marriage was not happy, marred by accusations of adultery and alcoholism. William accused Mary of being too close to a man named Charles Nigel Stanbridge; Mary knew that William had had at least two 'friendships' with other women - one only two years after their marriage, and one more recently, involving a woman named Ethel Brooks.

William Milne was in the Territorial Force, and when World War 1 started, he was mobilised and sent to Harrogate. The following month, September 1914, Mary came to see him, riding with Stanbridge on the latter's motorcycle. Mary explained to her husband that 'Charley' had "taken a fancy to the children and is going to be very good to me while you are away". William made his objections clear, but there wasn't much he could do.

When he came back home on leave, he found that Charley Stanbridge was now a lodger in his home, paying 25 shillings a week for board and lodging; he came in to find Mary drunk in bed and "Stanbridge and another man and woman drinking in the bedroom". He went away again, this time to fight in France, and the next time he was home was in September 1915, when he was invalided back to England. Mary was still drinking; William told her off, and Charley Stanbridge then stepped him. William's response was to 'thrash' Charley.

It turned out that Mary was trying to make money while her husband was away by opening up the small family home to lodgers. The house appears to have only had two bedrooms - one at the front, which was Mary's, and one at the back. Mary claimed the house was so full of lodgers at times that she had to share her room with her younger daughter, while the back bedroom was occupied by Charley Stanbridge and the Milnes’ son, then aged about 9. Other lodgers were, presumably, downstairs. Although William was sure that Mary and Charley were having an affair, Mary denied it, saying it was impossible with Charley sharing a room with young John. She also insisted that Charley was so young, she treated him like a son, and that William had no grounds to complain given his relationship with Ethel Brooks (he even wore an inscribed pendant given to him by Ethel while he was fighting).

However, Charley admitted that he had previously slept in the same room as Mary, although not in the same bed - he reiterated Mary's comment that she shared a bed with her daughter Dorothy, while Charley shared with her son John, known as Jack.

William Milne separated from Mary and moved initially to Leicester, getting work as a moneylender's investigator. It was only after the war, in 1922, that he sought a divorce from her. She complained that she had had to pawn her wedding ring in order to attend court, because she had no money.

What was Ernest Elston's involvement in this? He had been commissioned by William Milne to investigate the relationship between Mary and Charley. Instead of simply shadowing them, as he would normally do in such cases, he had actually gone to the effort and expense of taking lodgings at Mary Milne's house in order to see whether there was anything going on between the two. He duly claimed he had found them in bed together, and they had shared a bed while he was living with them. Dorothy and Jack Milne, the couple's children, both gave evidence in the divorce court corroborating their mother's insistence that she did not share a bed with Charley, with Jack saying Elston's evidence was simply untrue.

It seems that the children may have been coached as to what to say by their mother. In addition, in court, Mary's sexual history came under investigation, and she was forced to admit that she had not been a virgin when she married - she had 'committed herself' with another man prior to this, something that would have been held against her.

William Milne was granted his divorce, but it seems that both parties were right to have had suspicions about each other, and that Elston’s evidence was more truth than lies. In 1924, William Milne married his wartime 'friend' Ethel Brooke; and five years after that, Mary Milne married her lodger, Charley Stanbridge.