They married in the registry office at Warminster and rented a large home at The Bungalow in Ballington as they waited for a berth on one of the ships returning servicemen to Australia. While they waited, Captain Giblett eagerly told his new bride more about his home and family.
‘We’ll live in Thornleigh in Sydney, where I grew up,’ he explained. ‘I’ll probably go back to working in my father’s shop, which is also the post office.’
‘Tell me about your parents. Do you think they’ll like me?’ Ethel asked.
‘Of course they will,’ Norm replied, placing his arm around her shoulders reassuringly in the drawing room of their first home. ‘What is there not to like?’
In June 1919 they finally left England on board the troopship Katoomba to Sydney, where his parents greeted them at the docks, eager to meet this lovely English girl their son had married and to welcome them both home.
Ethel happily started to settle into life on the outskirts of Sydney as Mrs Daphne Giblett, and was getting used to her new name and their respectable social standing in the close-knit community. Her husband built them a new weatherboard house in Short Street, Thornleigh, walking distance from his father’s store. Their brand new home had all the mod cons, a gas stove and lights, and was decked out just how she wanted it.
Ethel really wanted this marriage, this new identity, this new shot at life to work—but she wasn’t prepared for how dull life in the outer suburbs would be, especially as Norm kept a tight string on their finances.
She was pleased though when Norm took over the Thornleigh Post Office and General Store from his father the following year; she was now a respectable postmistress, working alongside her husband, and was getting quite good at sidling a little cash away for herself so that she had some spending money. But all that ended when Norm hired another former army mate to help him out, relegating Ethel back to the role of doting wife.
She began taking the train into the city as regularly as possible, and eventually convinced Norm that being in an empty house in the outer suburbs wasn’t for her. He rented her a small house in busy Falcon Street, North Sydney, across the harbour from the city, and he would catch the train down from Thornleigh and visit her on weekends.
From her new home she wrote to her father, explaining that things hadn’t worked out between her and Alec, and that she had married a decorated captain from Australia and was now living in marital bliss in Sydney, apologising that it had all been a bit of a rush, but that she was happy.
Her father replied promptly. He was glad she was safe and well, but worried about her and his grandson, Frank Carter. Ethel hadn’t even thought about her son since she had left, and wrote back to her father that baby Frank was better off without her, and that she had a new chance at happiness. Her father replied, saying he just wanted her to be happy, and they kept corresponding from then on, Ethel relating wonderful stories of her new life in far away Australia, and her father telling her about life back in England.
Unfortunately for Ethel, on one visit to Falcon Street, Norm happened to come across her father’s letters, placed carefully back in their envelopes and tied together with a ribbon. She instantly snatched them away from him, ran into the lounge room and threw them in the fire burning in the grate—but not before he saw the sender’s name and address: Mr Frank Swindells, Manchester.
Incensed, Norm demanded she tell him what she was hiding.
Giving her best theatrical performance, Ethel stood in front of him and burst into tears. ‘It’s just memories from home … from my time before the war,’ she managed to get out. ‘It is nothing important, just news—I … I’m glad I’m here with you, Norman,’ she sobbed, looking up at him through tear-filled eyes.
He looked at her for a moment, then opened his arms for her. Ethel rushed into them, forgiven.
But Norm was suspicious after that, and on another visit to Falcon Street found blotting paper she had been using to dry the ink on her letters to her father. Using a mirror he read enough of the reversed scraps of her handwriting to work out her father was alive.
How could she be writing letters to her father, when he was supposed to be dead? Norm interrogated her, shooting question after question at her until he had all the details he wanted.
She decided to come clean. Her parents were alive. Her name was not Daphne Pollard, as she had claimed when they first met, but Florence Elizabeth Ethel Swindells, then Carter by marriage. She had married Alexander Carter when she was young, at the start of the war, and they had one child, Frank. She tried in vain to tell Norm she thought her first husband dead when she went off working for the War Office, but he wouldn’t have it: the War Office would have informed her when he was found alive, he shot back at her, so of course she would have known.
When asked about her child Frank, she told Norman she thought he was probably living with his father, who had filed for divorce on desertion allegations, but admitted she hadn’t signed the papers when she became Mrs Giblett.
That was the last straw: she was a bigamist and she had known.
Norm was furious, and despite Ethel’s best pleas, left.
Within a week, Ethel was presented with Norman’s divorce papers.
After seeking her own legal advice, Ethel sent Norman a typed letter, imploring him to return, and assuring him she would do ‘all in my power to make you happy’.
She didn’t have to wait long for his handwritten reply.
Thornleigh
Feb. 3rd 1922
Dear Daphne,
In answer to your letter, I refuse to return.
Yours sincerely,
N. Giblett
After three years, her marriage to Norman Giblett, and hope of a new life, was over.
9
MRS HOURN
Ethel booked herself into the fashionable Australia Hotel, across the harbour into the heart of the city, again using the movie-star name Daphne Pollard. With its modern plumbing, stylish decor and imposing staircase inside the grand entrance, the Australia was the place to stay in Sydney. It looked like it was straight out of a movie set, and all the best travellers stayed there.
Within weeks Ethel had bewitched another decorated soldier, Captain Midford Stanley ‘Stan’ Hourn. His family and friends were delighted with the charming young English lady Stan was marrying, and in celebration held a fashionable handkerchief party that made the social pages in the women’s section of the local newspapers, to Ethel’s delight.
Ethel finally got her big church wedding, on 2 May 1923, at the Methodist Church in the city. Mr and Mrs Hourn moved out to the suburbs, and within days of their marriage Ethel had stripped her unfortunate new husband of cash and vanished again.
After his wife disappeared with his life savings, Stan searched the suburbs around Belmore, where he lived, and travelled into the city, but she was nowhere to be found. He asked all who may have known her where Daphne may have gone, including the young lady who had witnessed their marriage, Mona Lambert—but even she had to admit only knowing the charming Daphne a short time.
Not long after, Stan received a telegram from Ethel in Brisbane informing him the marriage was over, and asking him to send her belongings and wedding dress back to her. She insisted there was no hope of reconciliation.
In late May, he was reading the Sydney Morning Herald over breakfast when an article on the front page caught his eye. It was about a peculiar upcoming case of bigamy, being brought by William Thornton Giblett against an English girl whose divorce was not absolute when they married in 1919. The girl was Florence Elizabeth Ethel Carter, formerly Swindells, falsely calling herself Daphne Vivienne Pollard—the same name as his wife! It couldn’t be.
Stan noted the date and fronted to the Divorce Court, where he learnt that he too had been a victim of bigamy, confirmed with a photograph of his smiling wife supplied by her other hapless husband.
Captain Giblett secured the order for nullity of marriage, but it would take poor Stan many years until he was able to d
o the same.
Ethel, meanwhile, was on her way back to England; she’d had enough of Australia. And she was travelling first class—much better than her trip out on the troopship with Norm—on the SS Suevic, a jubilee-class White Star ship, built by the same company as the ill-fated Titanic, sailing from Brisbane via Perth, South Africa and on to Southampton.
On board she socialised with the other first-class passengers and told them a fanciful tale about being a war widow whose brave husband had been killed; now wanting to forget, she was on a world trip and was heading back home. Her parents were both dead, she told them: her father, a doctor in the Great War, had perished in France, while her mother, a cousin of the famous Coats cotton family, had died when she was quite young (Coats was a more recognisable name than Swindells outside of England).
With her smooth-talking charm, elegant clothing and regal manner, they readily believed her tragic tale and welcomed her into their social circle. This was where she believed she belonged in society—not gaol, or living in some dreary suburb. She was living the high life, just like a movie star. All it took was money to buy the passage, and she had the lifestyle that she craved and felt she deserved.
On the deck most days, the young men would play cricket, which the ladies would watch as they had their high tea; in the evenings there were fancy dress balls, music and dancing, and they played cards and parlour games. Ethel found the entire trip both fun and luxurious as she dined and partied all the way back to England.
In London she booked herself into The Strand and went looking for her next husband among its well-heeled clientele.
Little did she know at the time, but she’d brought back a little souvenir to always remember that luxurious trip back from Australia.
10
MRS ANDERSON
At The Strand, Ethel met an Australian businessman, George ‘Addie’ Anderson. He was fifteen years older than her, and a man of the world.
They married in March 1924, and on 12 October that year, her little surprise souvenir from her voyage back to England was born, Frank George Anderson. Ethel had given her second son the same first name as her first child, in honour of her beloved father. Ethel’s marriage certificate was issued in South Dublin, Ireland, as was Frank’s birth certificate, which listed George Anderson, occupation salesman, as his father; even though Ethel and George met and married just over six months before he was born.
Mr Anderson travelled the world, or so she liked to tell everyone, taking his new bride on overseas trips, always first class on the best liners. She loved first class. They travelled with lords, ladies, the rich and famous, to New York regularly, only staying about a week before sailing back.
In 1925, when baby Frank was just five months old, they sailed to exotic, far-away Shanghai. Ethel was thrilled to find Lord Cavan, chief of the Imperial Staff and good friend to the King, on board with his young wife and their baby, Elizabeth, who was only a month older than Frank. She was sad to see Lady Cavan and her family leave at Gibraltar without exchanging particulars, but perhaps Lord Cavan could pick an upstart, and stopped any association before it even began. Still, the name Lady Cavan was to feature in her most impressive tales from then on, in her eyes, they were firm friends.
Their own journey then continued on through the Suez Canal to Singapore, Hong Kong and then finally Shanghai.
This was the height of the roaring twenties, with Shanghai full of Americans, the French, English, and even White Russians who had fled the 1917 Russian Revolution—with women wearing elegant, fashionable dresses, and spiffs parading around the streets in their flashy get-ups as they enjoyed everything Shanghai had on offer. There were cocktail parties at sunset, jazz playing in smoke-filled nightclubs, entertainment of every kind on offer. The twenties in Shanghai was a cosmopolitan, freewheeling powerhouse of entertainment, opium and gambling.
What George Anderson sold for a living was never entirely clear, but even with a small baby in tow, Ethel was having the time of her life.
They were only in Shanghai a month when Ethel found out she was pregnant again. The decision was made for her to return to England with Frank to have the baby, leaving her husband George in Shanghai.
Ethel’s third baby boy, William Basil Dwight Anderson, was born at Streatham Manor on 15 December 1925. After World War I, it had developed into the entertainment centre for the West End of South London with a large theatre, three cinemas, the Locarno ballroom and an ice rink, but no manor, unless you include the Manor Arms hotel down the road in Mitcham Lane.
On St Patrick’s Day, 1927, Ethel and her two young sons left cold, grey London for Sydney, aboard the SS Baradine, a slick P&O passenger liner.
Ethel’s father, who had paid for their passage to Australia, sadly waved the little family off as they followed the elusive Mr Anderson back to his home country. The Baradine was a migrant ship that gave free passage in third class for nearly 500 migrants travelling to Australia in the lower decks, including a dozen or so young boys known as the Wembley Boys, child migrants from an orphanage.
In the early evenings, Ethel would gently rock little Basil to sleep as Frank lay in his bunk, telling them they’d see their daddy soon. When he was finally asleep, she’d lean over, tuck Frank in tight and give him a peck on the cheek.
‘Look after your little brother Frank,’ she’d whisper, then head out towards the music.
One night Ethel was standing in the bar immaculately dressed, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, and surrounded by admiring men, when she eventually noticed Frank, in his pyjamas, standing by the door out to the promenade deck and gave him an annoyed look. She turned to one of the men she’d been talking with, smiled apologetically and handed him her drink and cigarette, and walked towards her son. She scooped him up without a word and walked back out into the sea air towards her crying baby in the distance. She stayed with them after that.
It must have been quite a party ship; two female immigrants had already been put ashore together with a male crew member at Cape Town, when they were found sharing a cabin one evening by the matron accompanying the female single immigrants. Such scandalous, immoral behaviour would not be tolerated.
When they eventually arrived in Sydney, there was nobody to greet their little family.
Ethel was heartbroken and angry. A man had made a fool out of her again, and she had nothing to show for it but two young children.
11
MRS BAKER
Ethel moved in with a Mr Baker, to the beachside suburb of Coogee in Sydney’s east. Thick blackberry bushes grew along the nearby cliffs, and while Mr Baker was teaching Ethel to drive, her two young boys would scour the cliff tops by themselves, searching for the sweet berries. Unfortunately for Mr Baker, once Ethel knew how to drive his big pale-blue Studebaker, she packed the boys and their few belongings into it, and simply drove away.
She then rented a flat for them in Rosebank Street, Darlinghurst, just down the road from busy Kings Cross.
Soon afterwards Ethel hired a laundress, a short, dark-haired woman called Maggie, to take their clothes away for washing and pressing. Maggie took more than their clothing, however—she completely cleaned Ethel out.
All her beautiful jewellery that had been given to her by various men over the years—the gold wristlet watch from her father, her gold and platinum twin diamond engagement ring from Stan Hourn, a diamond cluster ring, her emerald engagement ring from Norman Giblett, her engagement ring from George Anderson with five large diamonds set into the wide gold band, the gold and diamond bar brooch Norman gave her when they finished their house in Thornleigh, and a gold fountain pen she’d pocketed on the trip out to Australia the year before.
All gone. All her treasures, all her jewellery, gone. Despite filing a complaint with the local police, all her treasures were lost.
To top it off, she hadn’t been able to track down her husband George Anderson. This wouldn’t happen until years later, when she found he was married and had other children; ironi
cally, it turned out he was a bigamist as well.
Ethel had had enough. She was leaving Sydney.
Curiously, just before Ethel left again, there was an overnight break-in at Thornleigh, in the shop her previous husband Norm Giblett owned. Police records showed a full week’s trading, just over £46, was stolen, but no damage reported.
Just a coincidence, perhaps.
The first night after leaving Sydney, Ethel and the boys slept in Wollongong, in the Studebaker.
The next day they hit the road again and stopped at a picturesque little country town called Cobargo, where there were lots of dairy cows and green grass, with the ocean in the distance.
Next door to the small Catholic Church was an orphanage for approximately 40 boys, run by the nuns at St Joseph’s Convent. Large, neatly kept rose bushes, bursting with a rainbow of colours, greeted them as they made their way past the front gate. A tall pine tree could be seen behind the convent, poking over the roof of the single-storey building. It was on the large open verandah, with floors that shone like a palace, that the boys slept on mattresses each night.
This was where Ethel left Frank and Basil, aged just three and four, for the first time.
12
MRS THOMPSON & GLORIA GREY
Ethel sailed back to England. Not having much money, she had to travel third class—they wouldn’t even let her on the upper decks!—and vowed to herself that she would never slum it again.
Back in England, she went to her father, explained she was in a pickle, told him about Mr Anderson, and how she had left her two young sons in a boys’ home.
The Amazing Mrs Livesey Page 5