These are two of the newspaper reports where I found most of the information.
Hull Daily Mail 06 July 1918
ONE-LEGGED BIGAMIST.
(FROM OUR GRIMSBY CORRESPONDENT.)
Ernest Allison James (22), a soldier, who lost a leg in action, and who walked into the dock on crutches, was yesterday, at Grimsby, committed to Lincolnshire Assizes for trial charged with bigamy.
In July last, while a patient at the No 3 Western Military Hospital, Neath, prisoner made the acquaintance of a young woman, Annie Louisa Knight, and after a courtship extend to the beginning of December, he married her. On March 19th they quarrelled, and prisoner left home. In the last week of March he met at Grimsby Nellie Mackenzie, a girl of 18, and after acquaintance of less than three weeks he went through a form of marriage with her at Grimsby Registrar’s Office. Subsequently she discovered a letter, which disclosed to her the fact that prisoner was married. She declined to live with him, and informed the police. Prisoner meanwhile had surrendered to Detective Inspector Dixon, admitting that he had committed bigamy.
Next from Lincolnshire Echo 30 October 1918.
BAD CIVILIAN: GOOD SOLDIER
Ernest Allison James, 22, ship’s cook, pleaded guilty to bigamy at Grimsby on the 15th Dec. – Mr Sandilands said the defendant met his wife, Annie Louisa, while a patient in a military hospital, and married her in December, 1917, and they parted after a quarrel. He went to Grimsby, and met Nellie Mackenzie, to whom he represented himself as a single man, and went through a form of marriage with her on the 12th April this year. Subsequently she found he was a married man, and left him. He gave himself up to the police. A sad feature of the case was that Nellie Mackenzie was expecting a baby. – Detective Dixon, of Grimsby, stated that having been twice birched when a boy, prisoner was sent to an Industrial School in 1907, when only 11 years of age. He had several times been convicted of larceny, and at the Lindsey Quarter Sessions for shopkeeping. In January, 1918, he enlisted in the Lincolnshire Regiment at Grimsby, and had twice been wounded in France, once while with the Tank Corps, to which he had been transferred. – The prisoner pleaded for leniency, on the ground that he had lost a leg. His Lordship said the prisoner had been a good and brave soldier. The offence was a bad one, but in consideration of the act that he had been awaiting trial for four months, the sentence would be six weeks’ hard labour.
I know he is the person born in Sunderland because I have the school records of the 'Industrial School' confirming he had been birched twice, and I found this article in the Lincolnshire Echo 01 November 1913
Only released from an industrial school in February, Ernest Allison James, a Sunderland youth, yesterday, at Grimsby, pleaded guilty to stealing a pair of trousers belonging to a coloured seaman, named Albert Alexander. Sentence of 28 days was passed.
