A novel based on a true story of scandal and cover-up

My novel, based on the true story of Florence Martha "Florrie" Cox, has now been published. It is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon and an ebook on Smashwords. 

Ignorance is not bliss

Florence Martha " Florrie" Cox was born into a deeply religious family in Melbourne, Australia, in November 1887. She had an unremarkable life until she married a Baptist missionary sent to India. Were it not for the author coming across a lost family group photo, almost nothing would have been known about how Florrie was innocently caught up in a scandal that led to a cover-up by the Baptist Church and the Supreme Court of Victoria. The author uses fiction, based on knowledge and plausibility, to explore the unusual events that engulfed Florrie and those around her.

Some events have been combined or imagined for dramatic and interpretive purposes. 

Of necessity, most of  the dialogue is imagined, but the author believes it is consistent 

with the personalities of the characters and events that took place in India and Australia.

FREE READ HERE OF THE OPENING CHAPTER

contact: books"at"preddonlee.com

Available from Amazon and Smashwords

The hidden years of a prominent Melbourne citizen

Frank E. Paice was a prominent and respected citizen in Melbourne, Australia, for three decades, having been, among other things, a suburban councillor and mayor, a justice of the peace, a commissioner of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and an executive in Hume Engineering Limited. But hardly anyone knew that he had been an ordained clergyman and Baptist missionary in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) from 1912-1918. He also kept secret the fact that he had been in a tragic marriage to Florence M. "Florrie" Cox and that fellow-missionary A. Olga Johnston was his second wife, with whom he'd had an affair while still a married missionary. 

The sad story of Florrie Cox and the establishment cover-up that followed can be found in my book God's Triangle. Here is an extract from Who was Who in the book, plus photographs: Frank_Paice_book_extract.pdf (preddonlee.com)

How true are film or television "true stories"?

I've learned through bitter experience that scepticism is required when coming across a movie or a television drama that is "based on a true story". Sadly, many are more fiction than fact, often unnecessarily so.

The full story is HERE on my website.

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Paperback, Kindle and ePub copies of God's Triangle are available HERE

A special photograph that escaped being destroyed

     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 Frank Paice and Florrie Cox were Baptist missionaries from Melbourne, Australia, stationed in the early 1900s in East Bengal, now Bangladesh.  

Their marriage fell apart in scandal for two primary 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 no internal female organs. 

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 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.  

      
My hunt was over thanks to a large dollop of luck, and the fact that the distant cousin's family had never been told about the scandal and didn't realise the photo's significance.  

The story of Florrie Cox and Frank Paice is told in Ian D. Richardson’s book God’s Triangle, available in paperback, Kindle via Amazon. 

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   

Talking to Bangladeshi Television

A very enjoyable chat the other night on Bengladesh television network NTV Europe with Talking Point anchor Syed Neaz Ahmad. Also enjoyable to meet network Chief Executive Officer Subrina Hossain and her very friendly team.

Neaz and I spent time discussing my book God's Triangle, which recounts the sad and true story of Australian Baptist missionary, Florence M. "Florrie" Cox, who was stationed in Calcutta, Mymensingh and Faridpur during the First World War.

We also chatted about my thriller The Mortal Maze, a morality story about a BBC correspondent in the Middle East and trapped into becoming a spy. Neaz was keen to know how my time with the BBC had shaped this story. The answer is "a great deal".

Another subject was my progression into print then broadcast journalism as a youth in my home country, Australia, before spending 27 years with BBC World Service radio and television in London.

For anyone interesting in the Talking Point discussion, click here: Part One  Part Two 
Part Three 

Read about Ian Richardson's visit to Bangladesh to research God's Triangle. Click here: Bangladesh Diary

Thank you, Blonde Lawyer

As any author will tell you, writing a book is a long and often-tedious task. Then there's the problem if getting it published and circulating it in the great wide world in competition with hundreds of thousands of other books. Therefore, I am pathetically grateful whenever I get a four or five star reviews.  Here's one from someone who appears to write from the heart:

Thank you, Blonde Lawyer, whoever you are, wherever you are, for this Amazon review of my true story of scandal and cover-up called God's Triangle

And here is one of the other very nice reviews:

And now if you want to read some of the other God's Triangle reviews and comments, go here

Two wars: one religious, one military. Which was the most important?

     While sorting out my files today I came across this item discovered when I was researching my non-fiction book God's Triangle. It's a letter written by an Australian Baptist missionary, Miss Edith King, to the missionary magazine Our Indian Field. It recounts what she saw and thought when her steamer was returning her to India, and came across a huge convoy taking Australian Imperial Force volunteers to the Middle East in the early stage of The Great War, later to become known as World War 1. 
    
    The letter, although passionately patriotic, also displays a fascinating ambivalence towards the relative merits of defeating the Germans and their Turkish allies and converting India to Christianity. Read on...

     On board the SS Osterley five of us [missionaries] were literally on our way to the front to fight for our King [our Lord] and for the extension of His kingdom. On board the forty odd vessels we passed just after leaving Fremantle, were the thousands and thousands of Australia’s young men, on their way to fight for King and country.

      It was just about evening time when we reached these troopships. What a sight they were -- travelling almost in even lines one behind the other, we counted 41 in view at once -- there were others, too, for we could see the smoke. At the four points were the warships on guard. We saw the [cruiser] HMAS Sydney very distinctly; if we could see her now she would have even more cheers than we gave her that day.

      How we cheered -- as we passed six ships one after the other; we were so close that we could see and hear the soldiers distinctly. We cheered, sang the National Anthem, “Rule Britannia,” etc., as we passed each ship, and they responded right royally. The bands played, the soldiers cheered, and waved their towels and coats, etc., and joined us in singing, “God save the King.” It was a sight we shall never forget. Many of our fellow passengers had Union Jacks, and every handkerchief was in evidence, so we did our best to give our soldiers an enthusiastic reception.

     We were travelling much faster than they, so before morning had left them far behind. Among the vessels we passed very close to were the Ophir, the Omrah, Star of Victoria, Beltana, containing WA. troops, and two others whose names I do not remember.

 One of our passengers saw her son standing on a tin waving his coat; they recognised each other at once and great was the excitement. On the way to the front  -- strong, brave, light hearted men, some of our best, prepared to give their all even to life itself, for their country.

     Twenty thousand volunteers, to fight for the honor of their King and country on their way to the front. Four thousand to fight for Christ and India’s emancipation. For this in round numbers is the total of missionaries in India.

     Is this our best response? Is this all we can spare? Where are the volunteers for India? Great the need for our soldiers to proceed to the front, but greater, infinitely greater, the need for more men to proceed to the mission field.

     Great the honor to fight for King George, but greater, infinitely greater, the honor of fighting for Christ in India. On their way to the front -- God grant that speedily many more of our best young people may hear the call of our King, so that the four may be multiplied into many on their way to the front, to win victory for Christ and His Gospel.

The story of God's Triangle 

How a missionary scandal in Australia and India was covered-up

About God's Triangle by the author, Ian D. Richardson 

This is the true story of Florence M. Cox. "Florrie", as she was widely known, was my great aunt. She died in Melbourne, Australia, in 1950, understanding little of the circumstances that destroyed her marriage and her life as a Baptist missionary in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). It is also an account of an establishment cover-up of the scandal surrounding her failed marriage, and of how her husband, the Rev. Frank E. Paice, and his mistress and second wife, A. Olga Johnston, erased a whole chunk of their past to become pillars of society in Australia.

      The story reveals much about the social constraints of an age when strict Christian virtues and rigid social taboos reigned supreme over intelligent open discussion and a realisation that life's problems must not be viewed simply as black or white, or Christian good versus evil.

      God's Triangle is about my search for the truth surrounding my great aunt. The story would have remained a secret, had it not been for my mother casually showing me a photograph that excited my incurable journalistic curiosity.

      I was brought up in a staunchly-Protestant environment, but I am no longer a believer, nor have I been since my late teenage years. Hence, this story is viewed through the prism of an atheist, but I hope believers will accept that I have done my best to tell the story with honesty and fairness.

      My great aunt and her fellow Christian missionaries in India were mostly kind souls who genuinely believed that they had a God-given mission to link "doing good" with spreading the word of the Lord and obtaining conversions, heedless of the cost to themselves or the converts.
      As part of the cover-up some years later, most of the related official documents were lost or destroyed by the Baptist Church. All that remains in the church records are a few cryptic minutes from board meetings of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board in 1918 and 1919.

      The families involved in events that I will recount also destroyed their records, or at least hid them where they hoped they wouldn't be found. Had it not been for old copies of the missionary magazines, The Southern Baptist, Our Indian Field and Our Bond, held in Baptist archives in Melbourne and in Oxford, England, it would have been impossible to get to the truth. The magazines themselves did not refer to any scandal, of course, but they did provide vital dates and other clues that helped my wife and me assemble a jigsaw.

      A jigsaw is a perfect analogy for how our research progressed. Not all the pieces could be found, but we were able over the years to put together a reasonably complete picture. Sometimes, we would go weeks or months without finding a piece of the jigsaw and even when one was located, it wasn't always possible to know where it fitted. However, since the first edition was published, further information has emerged, requiring an additional chapter in this edition.

      It would have been nice to assemble the God's Triangle jigsaw in an orderly manner, say, bottom up or top down, but it was never going to be like that. Sometimes we would find a big chunk of the picture but not fully understand what it portrayed. And sometimes we would fail to spot the obvious, or would be led off on a false trail.

      A vital part of the jigsaw was provided by the divorce file for Great Aunt Florrie and Frank Paice. But as you will learn, the divorce papers were part of the cover-up and far from easy to obtain.

      The depth of the embarrassment and anxiety that erupted around Florrie Cox, Frank Paice and Olga Johnston cannot be overstated. Worst of all, it tore apart the Paice family and spilled over into my own branch of the Cox family, even though Great Aunt Florrie was arguably an entirely innocent party.

       © Copyright Preddon Lee Limited, London W5 5QB, United Kingdom. All Rights Reserved

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Buy the paperback or download the ebook through Amazon

A PHOTOGRAPH THAT NO-ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO SEE

As a keen genealogist I have many family photographs that I regard as “special”, but this one is particularly so because I wasn’t supposed to see it. Nor were any other descendants of the bride and groom.

      The couple were my great aunt, Florence “Florrie” Cox, and the Rev. Frank E. Paice, on the day they were married in the Circular Road Baptist Chapel in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in December 1914. Both were Baptist missionaries from Melbourne, Australia, and went on to be stationed in East Bengal (now Bangladesh).

      The marriage, which began with high hopes in both families, fell apart in scandal. This was partly because Frank had developed a fondness for a fellow Australian missionary, Olga Johnson, but the greatest contributing factor was the discovery on the honeymoon that Florrie had no vagina.

      Florrie had what was identified after her death in 1950 as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). She looked and felt that she was a woman, but had male chromosomes and no internal female organs.

      The marriage took place in an age when sex was a taboo subject in strict Christian families. It was quite common for females never to be told in advance about menstruation. In Florrie’s case, she was never aware that mature women should be having periods. Nor did Frank know this until much later.

      In my years of research into why the marriage ended in a covered-up annulment divorce, I found few photographs of Florrie and no photographs of the wedding. That is, until I met a distant cousin who had been researching a different branch of the Cox family.

      The cousin showed me a postcard copy of the photo accompanying this article, but had no clue who was in it, other than the words “Florence and Frank 1914” written on the back. We came to the conclusion that this was probably the only copy in existence because all the others had been destroyed by the more immediate family members of Florrie and Frank.

      After the divorce went through in a secret session in the Supreme Court in Melbourne, Florrie led a quiet life, often battling depression, and regarded by her family as an embarrassment. Frank went back to India, married Olga, became a pillar of the engineering world in Calcutta, then returned to Melbourne years later to be prominent in local government. Both he and Olga died in the 1960s with very few people – not even their only child – knowing about the scandal or that they had ever been missionaries.

      One question that is frequently raised by those who see the wedding photograph: “Why is Frank sitting while Florrie stands?” One answer was that he didn’t want it to be obvious that he was shorter than his bride. But there are also suggestions that the photographer wanted the focus be on the bride, allowing her to display her wedding dress and her bouquet to their best advantage.

The investigation by Ian Richardson into what happened to

 Florrie Cox and Frank Paice is available from Amazon

Why readers are attracted to this true detective story

         Many more comments  on God's Triangle here: https://www.godstriangle.com/comments.html

Reasons to read the true detective story "God's Triangle"

By Ian D. Richardson

http://www.godstriangle.com/

REVIEW

Ian Richardson, a former BBC journalist, was curious about his family history, and in particular his mysterious and rarely mentioned great-aunt Florrie Cox. He embarked on a journey in search of the truth. What followed was a shocking tale of what might most generously be described as institutional ignorance as he tracked down the truth. Richardson was ruthless in his pursuit of the facts and uncovered a horrifying account in which no one came out favourably.

      Richardson’s research took him through the Australian Supreme Court, the archives of the Baptist church and Indian missionaries and uncovered a shocking catalogue of betrayal and collusion by some of the authorities whose very responsibility should have been to protect his great-aunt Florrie.

      God’s Triangle resonates particularly today – a time when our understanding of androgyny is still developing and an era when we are discovering quite how brutally un-Christian the behaviour of church authorities has been. It will appeal to lovers of a thriller, those with an interest in Australian social history, and the role of the church, and anyone who has ever thought to question their own family history. It reads well, and Richardson is exhaustive in his detail and historical accuracy.

Beth Pevsner, Durham University, County Durham, UK

See more reviews and comments about God’s Triangle HERE

Also by Ian D. Richardson: The Mortal Maze