When We Are Married

About the show

Alderman Joseph Helliwell and his wife, Maria, are joined at their house in Clecklewyke in the West Riding of Yorkshire by Councillor Albert Parker and his wife, Annie, together with Herbert Soppitt and his wife, Clara. They are celebrating their silver weddings, all three couples having been married on the same day in the same nonconformist chapel in Lane End, Clecklewyke. Their characters quickly become clear: Helliwell and his wife are easy-going, but he is self-satisfied and inclined to infidelity; Parker is a narrow-minded and parsimonious bully and his wife is under his thumb; Soppitt, contrariwise, is bullied by his domineering wife. The men are all prominent elders of Lane End chapel, and after the celebrations in the dining room, they gather in the sitting room, replete with port and cigars, to confront the chapel organist, Gerald Forbes, whom they intend to sack, because he has been seen walking out with young women, and, worse, is a southerner. Gerald turns the tables by revealing that on holiday he met a church minister, the Rev Francis Beech, who confided that thirty years ago, as a young minister at Lane End, he conducted four marriages – three of them on the same day – under the impression that he was qualified to do so, but, he later discovered, he lacked the requisite licence for it. The three men are horrified. Their marriage services, conducted by Beech, were invalid. They foresee a scandal, and dread the reaction of Maria, Annie and Clara: "Then t'balloon goes up properly. Talk about a rumpus. You'll 'ear 'em from 'ere to Leeds". Their anxiety is intensified by the discovery that a domestic servant, Mrs Northrop, has been eavesdropping and knows what Gerald has revealed. Worse, a reporter and photographer from the regional paper, Fred Dyson and Henry Ormonroyd, are on the premises, having come to report on the anniversary and take pictures of the three couples. The three men agree that Mrs Northrop must be bribed to secrecy, and the newspaper men bluffed and kept in ignorance. Mrs Northrop tells Maria, Annie and Clara what she has learned. The couples slowly adjust to finding themselves unmarried. The two downtrodden partners, Herbert Soppitt and Annie Parker, seem on the verge of rekindling the romantic feelings they had for each other before they paired off with Clara and Albert. Herbert rounds on the domineering Clara and asserts himself. Annie does the same to Albert. A convivial barmaid, Lottie arrives. It quickly emerges that she has in the past had an affair with Helliwell, and thinks she can assert the right to become his wife. She is an old flame of Ormonroyd, who tells her and the others that he is married, although he wishes he were not. The ceremony, he says, was at Lane End conducted by Beech. His wife – equally keen as he to become unmarried – has investigated and established that the four weddings conducted by Beech were legally valid because in those days nonconformist weddings had to be certified by a registrar, and this had been duly done. Finding they are married after all, the three couples look forward to a future without domestic tyranny or extramarital infidelity. Ormonroyd takes a group photograph of the three couples and looks forward to life as proprietor of a photographic shop, with the backing of Helliwell and his colleagues.