Dear Stan,
I came across John Marty's name by chance in the digital Hungarian press archive. Several articles first appeared in 1912 with his sensational story as the Vice Governor of Ceylon. He spent his holidays in Budapest, where he met a typewriter girl from a poor family by chance in a pharmacy. The wealthy and gentlemanly Englishman, 42, fell in love with the beautiful young girl (her name was Margit Hermanski or Hermanszky) at first sight and proposed a week later.
The girl's family requested information from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's embassy in London, which wrote this about the man:
"Y. C. K. Murty is at present chief official in the island of Ceylon, East province. He has an annual salary of thirty-six thousand crowns, besides a large landed estate, so that his annual income may be estimated at one hundred thousand crowns. He is extremely popular in Ceylon, and his beautiful palace vans was last year the guest the Crown Prince of Germany. Murty, who is a passionate elephant hunter, comes from a prominent Irish family, and is a welcome guest in high society on his visits to Europe."
The girl's family agreed to the marriage and the wedding took place on 16 June 1912 in St. Elisabeth's Church in Budapest. After the wedding, the couple travelled to London and returned to Ceylon at the end of the husband's holiday.
Two years later, in April 1914, a new article about the couple was published in a Hungarian newspaper when they were visiting Budapest. In the interview, the Hungarian wife told of a happy married life, a lively social life and idyllic circumstances. The only dark shadow of the past two years was the birth of a son in Ceylon, who died in babyhood.
The rest of the story was written in 1930 by a Hungarian newspaper. In the early summer of 1914, the couple travelled on from Budapest to London. In July, world war broke out, and communication between the enemy countries became very difficult. It was not until 1925 that the Hermanski family was able to get information about their daughter. According to the article, "the couple left England for Ceylon by boat in mid-August 1914. On the boat, the vice-governor got pneumonia and died. When they lowered her body into the sea, the woman tried to jump into the water after her. ... They tried unsuccessfully to console her. She became withdrawn and melancholy. And before the ship reached Ceylon, she went mad. They never got her off the ship. Under the care of a doctor, she was taken back to England, where her husband's family placed her in a private psychiatric hospital in Salysbury."
She was still living there in 1930, at the time this article was published, and since 1925 the family had received regular letters from the hospital informing them of her condition.
The record of the Colombo hospital about Marty's death in October 1914 can be explained in two ways:
1. The journalist was wrong, the chief official didn't die during the journey, but after his arrival at the hospital.
2. He really died on the ship, was buried in the ocean and the death was administered afterwards.
I hope you found this informations interesting.
Greetings from Budapest,
Zoltán
