page_title: R. W. Symonds
section_title: Mrs Bamberger
hierarchical_section_title: R. W. Symonds / Mrs Bamberger
caption_attribution_description: English: Thelma Bamberger
context_page_description: Robert Wemyss Symonds FRIBA was a British architect, and "the pre-eminent 20th century scholar and authority on English furniture". His complicated love life, before he married respectably, included affairs with two women, the first of which produced children he never acknowledged, and the second with a woman who he discovered was already married and who was subsequently jailed for perjury in her divorce case.
context_section_description: Symonds also had an affair with Thelma Dorothy Bamberger who, according to his account, he met on the London Underground in 1914. He did not serve in the military during the First World War due to ill health, instead working as a designer and decorator. Symonds and Bamberger became engaged and lived together for four years despite Symonds discovering not long after they met that she was married. Symonds requested that Bamberger obtain a divorce from her husband who was serving in the military, resulting in a complicated divorce case heard in 1920 that soon after resulted in Bamberger's prosecution for perjury in respect of her testimony.
  Bamberger claimed that Symonds had threatened her with acid and tried to kill her, but Symonds said that he had never been violent towards her, but that she had cut his head open and on another occasion thrust a pair of curling tongs in his ear; he also claimed that she had poured acid over him at a hotel where they were staying. Bamberger was found guilty of eight counts of perjury relating to her testimony in the divorce court and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in a case that was regarded as unusual at the time due to the rareness of prosecutions for perjury arising from testimony in divorce proceedings.
caption: Mrs Bamberger
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