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Daisypetal - thanks for the heads up, I stayed up until 1am downloading a lot of cuttings I have never seen before. The site is very easy to use.

I found another cutting about Robert A S Brown, he was in trouble 4 years later when he was held in a police cell, possibly to do with this case, but it was revealed that he had TB. So he was not a well man. I wonder if his 2nd wife left him after she discovered he was already married?

There are lots of details about this story that may neve be answered. Mary had no children at that point but her sister Emma had two children and her husband who was in and out of jail had just died. I wonder if with help from David Phillips who was a witness to the marriage and went onto marry Emma, Mary and Robert agreed to marry to get Emma some finacial help and wed her knowing that she would be sent money. There is still the question of how he married if he was fighting in France, I can only imagine that he got someone to stand in for him which is possible as the signature on the certificate looks different from the one on his military papers.

Jorose - many thanks for that, there were only a few pages of his military records on Ancestry, thanks to you I now have them all. I am going them them all page by page. It seems his wife lived with her brother and his family at one point and I think she fell out with her dad because on her second marriage certificate she says he is dead but he was still alive! Maybe he didn't approve of what she had done.

I am also looking into Robert's wife Mary's sister Emma Higgins, she emigrated to Canada in 1920 with her second husband David Phillips and two sons but they returned two years later and I wondered why. The two sons later got into trouble with the law in London and were sent to prison a few times and I wondred if they committed crime in Canada. Are there any good searchable sources of emigration/imigration to/from Canada and any good searchable English language newspaper archives?

Yes she did and she died not long after but it's her first two marriages that fascinate me. I wonder if Robert was already married in Canada and the marriage was disolved as it was bigamous.

I was looking into the history of my great-grandmother's sister Mary Caroline Higgins (b 1896), she married in 1915 to a Canadian soldier called Robert Alexander Stewart Brown. I expected to find them on the 1921 census in London as a married couple or maybe if she emigrated to find them in Canada after WWI (although I was told that she lived in London in the 1940s-50s so she would have returned at some point). But I found that a second mariage took place in London just three years later in early 1918 when she married a British soldier Joseph William Cochran Gillies. The only difference is her age where she lied on the first certificate saying she was 21 when she was 19.

More research into Robert Brown's millitary papers showed that the Canadian army paid Mary a separtion allowance for almost a year until he was forced to stand down from military service as he was declared medically unfit. I wondered if the separation word meant that the marriage was disolved because they were unable to be togther when he returned to Canada, but it seems that it was just money paid to any wife of a Canadian soldier by the government as soldiers wren't paid that much.

Further research showed that Robert also married again in Canada in 1922. So does this mean that both and Mary married bigamously or is there another explanation? Was the fact that she lied about her age an issue? On the second marriage certificates Mary says she is a spinster and is using her maiden name Higgins and Robert says he is a bachelor.

Also I am unable to find Mary and her second husband Joseph Gillies on the 1921 census which is disappointng.

Any help/advice would be welcome.

Please see scans of all 3 cerfiicates below

thanks to all of you but especially to brigidmac - you are brilliant. I didn't pay much attention to the fact that there are caravans on the next page but I have just noticed something which has answered a mystery in our family. It is not a caravan park in Canterbury but a travelling circus, Baileys Circus which wre quite famous, and it seems probable that Luigi - who drove a steam roller for his work as an asphalt worker - probably worked with them part time. His job is an ashphalt worker and pavior.

In her later life my great aunt told me there was a connection to circus in the family but her memory was failing her and she couldn't remember who the connection was to and why. This must be it.

It makes sense that Luigi was working with the circus folk using his steam roller to haul rides, caravans, etc, and maybe stayed overnight and as one of you said he gave his home address. This is REALLY exciting - thank you!