by Mike Popham
God's Triangle is a fascinating account by a former BBC
journalist of a missionary marriage in the early part of the
twentieth century that went mysteriously and
scandalously wrong. The triangle of the title refers to three
Australians - the Rev Frank Paice, the author's great aunt Florence
Cox, known to her family as Florrie, and one of their
bridesmaids, Olga Johnston.
In October 1912, Frank Paice sailed from Melbourne to
become a Baptist missionary in India. He had recently become
engaged to Florrie, then aged 24 and 'unusually tall for a
woman in that era - about six feet'. It was two years before
Florrie was finally able to join her fiance in Calcutta and,
although their wedding took place soon after, the marriage failed
within 5 years, leading to one of the most unusual divorce cases of
its time.
Ian Richardson's interest in all this was aroused one day
in Melbourne in 1997 when he happened to be going through some old
family photographs with his widowed mother. They came upon a
picture of a family group taken, they estimated, just before the
Great War.
His mother 'dismissively identified' one of the three women in
the group as 'oh, that's just Aunt Florrie'.
What particularly aroused Richardson's journalistic curiosity
was his mother's reluctant admission that the reason the
family didn't talk about Aunt Florrie was because of the
failure of her marriage and the scandal that, she claimed, had
resulted. She added that Florrie had died many years later in a
Melbourne mental home.
God's Triangle largely consists of transcripts from
Richardson's diary as he travels to Calcutta and
Bangladesh, trawls through the records of
the Baptist Foreign Mission, and writes persistently to the
Freedom of Information office in Melbourne with
various requests, painstakingly trying to fit what he calls
the pieces of the jigsaw together.
In the course of his research, Richardson
discovers Paul, Frank's son by Olga, whom
he married after his divorce from Florrie. Although Paul tells
Richardson he knew his father had been married before, he was
surprised to learn that his father had once been a missionary
in India.
Subsequently, Richardson discovers that,
though the divorce hearing between Frank and Florrie had
been held in public, and that, contrary to what his mother had
said, there had been no press reporting of the case in the
Melbourne press, the court had ruled that the papers in
the case were never to be released.
Richardson puts this down to pressure from the Baptist Church
and possibly the Freemasons.
In his dogged, determined way, and with the important moral
support of Paul Paice, Richardson gradually wears down the legal
authorities in the Victorian Supreme Court. Eventually his
persistence is rewarded. To reveal why the marriage between Frank
and Florrie did break down would be a serious spoiler. But
Richardson's uncovering of the real reason for the divorce more
than makes up for the inevitably one-dimensional depictions of the
characters of Frank, Florrie and Olga. After all, Richardson never
met them, and as the only witness to the triangle of the book's
title was a centenarian who died in Brisbane during the course of
his research, Richardson's ambition to make a film from his
material should make the main characters come to life once
more - on celluloid at least.
http://godstriangle.com/