What happened to Florrie Cox?

Florence Martha "Florrie" Cox and the newly-ordained Baptist missionary, the Rev. Frank E. Paice, became engaged to be married in 1912. There was much joy in the two families and at the church they both attended in Melbourne, Australia. But their honeymoon in Bengal, India, was a troubled occasion when they found it impossible to consummate the marriage for reasons neither could fully understand. So began the compelling saga of how the couple struggled to understand and cope with Florrie's condition, while fellow Baptist missionary Olga Johnston waited impatiently in the wings to snatch Frank away.

Why did the families and the church go to such lengths to hide what happened? And why did two Supreme Court judges in Melbourne order the divorce file to be sealed for all time? Ian D. Richardson, an Australian journalist who worked for many years for the BBC, was determined to learn the truth about his Great Aunt Florrie. God's Triangle is the result: a true story of revelation and betrayal.

Download the story here: https://www.godstriangle.com/ebook.html   

Why was this photo an embarrassment?

 

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.

Genealogy: the danger of trusting official documents

Newcomers to family history research can be forgiven for believing that official documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates are "gospel", so to speak. Not true.

When I was researching my book, God's Triangle, the story of a scandal involving my Baptist missionary Great Aunt Florence M. "Florrie" Cox, I came across the civil marriage record in Calcutta of her ex-husband and his mistress. The document contained several errors and misleading statements.

Even though the husband, Frank E. Paice, and his mistress, A. Olga Johnston, had been ordained missionaries, they were not above telling a few fibs. Olga gave her age as 32, just a year older than Frank, but three years younger than she really was. She wouldn't have been the first woman to lie about her age, but there was also a whopping deceit about how long she and Frank had been living in Calcutta. Frank claimed to have lived there for seven years, while Olga said she had been there for five years. This was blatantly untrue. They could not have been there for more than a few months as they had been in Australia for at least a year and before that, had been stationed for about six years in remote missionary outposts in East Bengal. Presumably they had lied because of residential requirements for their marriage.

There were several other aspects of the official record that could be seen as misleading, but I won't bore you with those. The point I want to make is that if the civil marriage record had been the first document I had found in my research, I would have been sent down routes that might never had led to me establishing the truth.

Similarly, anyone researching my Australian maternal grandfather, Arthur Joseph George Cox, would have been seriously mis-informed about his life had they gone first to his death certificate. His mistress-then-second-wife, Phyllis, had deliberately not mentioned that he had been married before and fathered 10 children, including my mother, Rena.

Not all errors in official family history documents are deliberate. Sometimes they are just careless mistakes. An example: the death certificate of my Great Aunt and opera singer, Reba Rangan, was wrong in several respects. For starters, Reba was her nickname, not her real name. Then her father was given as "unknown", which wasn't true. Her aunt was named as her mother, which also wasn't true, and it was further stated that she had spent all her life in Australia -- overlooking the fact she lived and worked in London for some time as an opera performer.

The death certificate details had been provided by a nephew and when I challenged him about the inaccuracies, he said simply that he had made no real attempt to establish the facts. He had just guessed most of the information.

I could give other examples of incorrect family history documents, but I hope that I have successfully made my point: treat all certificates with an element of caution.

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Learn more about the Rev Frank E. Paice by going HERE   

Learn more about A. Olga Johnson by going HERE

Learn more about Florence M. "Florrie" Cox by going HERE

Learn more about Reba Rangan by going HERE

Does God's Triangle make readers uncomfortable?

Earlier this week I met a friend I hadn't seen for a few months. We got discussing my book God's Triangle and he confessed that he hadn't been able to read all of it. The reason, he told me, was that he thought it was intrusive.

I was interested, rather than offended, by his admission and wanted to know more. My friend, who is approaching his 80th birthday, said he felt uncomfortable about the sexual element of the story -- particularly because he knew that what I was recounting was true.

My friend's wife said he was rather naive and embarrassed about sexual matters, despite having been married twice and having had several long-term relationships.

It is always interesting to see how people react to sex. My friend's comments, although providing me with useful feedback, are fortunately very much a minority view, as far as I can tell. The overwhelmingly number of people who have contacted me have expressed sadness and understanding about what happened in my Great Aunt Florence "Florrie" Cox's marriage. That was my intention when I wrote the book. Here is a selection of reader comments and newspaper reviews.

If after scanning these comments, you would like to read God's Triangle, a Kindle version is currently available at a special reduced rate here.