The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1927-05-13
NEW LAW CURbS
SUNDAY MORNING
ORGY OF BRITISH
Sensational Papers Forbid
den to Print Details of
Divorce Case.
BIZ United Press

BIZ United Press
LONDON, May 1S.-Millions of
routine-loving British men and
women are looking for a new indoor
sport to fill up their vacant Sunday
mornings. For years they have been
used, after breakfast, to read their
meaty equivalent of the child's book
of fairy stories-the sensational Sun
day newspapers.
The papers supply them with vi
cariouS adventure and romance
stories Of flirtatious peers and peer
esses, of happy homes wrecked by
amorous milkmen, of simple servant
girls who believe what the plausible
stranger tells them, of murder, black
mail and divorce.
Particularly divorce. and that's
what caused the trouble.
Large Calculations
There are four or five of the "hot"
newspapers. One has circulation
Of more than 100000 week. Poor
ly printed, stodgily written, they
supply their public nevertheless with
passion, served warm and fresh
from the courts.
They consist almost entirely of
plain reports of court proceedings,
written according to a formula
names of the people concerned fol-
lowed by a full, free and frank re-
port Of the proceedings and ending
with the result of the case.
The difference between them and
the sensational papers is the differ
ence between an old-fashioned steam
calliope and symphonic jazz band.
Where the American jazz band hints
at a melody, the London calliope
blares it forth honestly and loudly.
Interested in Love
In the servants halls of big
homes, in farm laborers' cottages, in
cheap suburban flats and houses in
the city slums, Mr.. and Mrs. Sapp
and 1S-year-old Sadie sit over cold
remains of breakfast clad in carpet
slippers, wrinkled pants and braces,
or in flannel wrapper and curl pa
pers, and read with bullying eyes the
stories of love and hate. Naturally
they pay attention mostly to those of
love, and also naturally they find
or found-that predominant in the
divorce stories.
Parliamentary kill-joys, perhaps
impelled by the increasing divorce
rate and the falling birth rate, passed
law forbidding newspapers to re-
port any but the essential facts of
divorce cases-names of the litigants
and witnesses, grounds of the suit,
and anything the Judge may say in
his summing-up.
It was body blow to the Sunday
morning newspapers and the Sunday
morning programs of their millions
Of readers. The stories of murders
and so forth remained, but there was
a noticeable blank. British people
like their sex stuff pure; meaning
unalloyed.
Soma Of the newspapers were SO
staggered that they began to print
uplift stories. They went down for
a long count. But they were not
out.
Now they have come back strong.
They sum up the divorce cases In
half column, It is true under some
such headline as "Sundered Lives"
and publish series of four-line items
such as:
Mrs. Ethel Souray, of Broad
stairs, had her marriage dissolved
with her husband, Alfred, who, 1t
was alleged, was unfaithful at the
Imperial Hotel"
The space they formerly devoted
to divorces is beginning to be filled
with amplified reports of other cases.
One of them last Sunday had, as the
plums in an already rich pudding,
reports in detail Of:
A girl who sued a man for money
she lent him when he asked her to
marry him. He said the money was
her share of the expenses on a fifty
fifty informal honeymoon they took
around the country, and said that
during the trip the girl seemed to
be having the time of her life.