As a keen genealogist I have many family photographs that I
would regard as “special”, but this is one that I wasn’t supposed to see. Nor
were any other descendants of the couple who are pictured. The couple were my great aunt, Florence “Florrie” Cox, and the
Rev. Frank E. Paice, on the day they were married in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in
December 1914.
Both were Baptist missionaries from Australia, stationed in
the early 1900s in East Bengal, now Bangladesh. The marriage fell apart in scandal for two reasons: 1) Frank
Paice had fallen for another missionary, Olga Johnston, during the two-year
engagement that the church required Florrie and Frank to spend apart. 2) Florrie
had a rare variation of the intersex condition, Androgen Insensitivity
Syndrome. Although she looked and felt like a woman, she had male chromosomes
and could not function in several important respects as a female.
When Frank and Olga’s scandalous affair became known, both
were forced to resign. Florrie returned to Melbourne, but was a family
embarrassment with the breakdown of her marriage a relentlessly taboo subject.
The Australian press – normally addicted to such juicy
stories – was prevailed upon to look the other way when the divorce went
through the Supreme Court and the judge ordered that the file be “closed for
all time”.
Frank and Olga married on their return to Bengal where Frank
took up an engineering management job. When they returned to Australia some years later, they had
reinvented themselves as pillars of society, with Frank taking on a number of
high-profile civic positions in Melbourne. No mention was ever made of Frank or Olga’s time in India or
their six years as missionaries. Not even their only son and close friends knew
of their missionary past. I learned of the scandal only because my mother let it slip when
we came across a photograph taken just before Florrie was about to depart for
her wedding in Calcutta.
It took me 18 months of email exchanges, letters and
telephone calls to get a Supreme Court judge in Melbourne to lift the ban on
access to the divorce file, revealing Florrie’s condition. But nowhere could I
find photographs of Frank and Florrie’s wedding as they had been destroyed by
the family – probably out of embarrassment and anger. Then I got lucky. A very distant cousin showed me a photograph of two people
he could not identify. I was stunned to see that it was Frank and Florrie after
their wedding at the Circular Road Baptist Chapel, Calcutta. Somehow it had survived the family's photographic purge and my hunt was over.
The story of Florrie
Cox and Frank Paice is told in my book God’s Triangle, available in paperback and ebook.
Finally, an unresolved question:
Why is Frank seated while Florrie stands? I have part of the
answer. Florrie would have wanted to show off her frock and her large bouquet
to their best effect. However, it was unusual, but not unknown, for the
groom to be seated for a wedding portrait. I am unable to track down any reliable
explanation why Frank chose to sit down, but maybe it was because Frank was shorter than
Florrie.
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