Divorce Is U

The fact that Britons, unlike Americans, are created unequal is a source of fascination to British Journalist Ron Hall. 27, a Cambridge-educated bricklayer's son with an encyclopedic knowledge of what is U, non-U, and parvenU. Two years ago, he formulated Hall's Law, which states that "the higher a person's social position, the more names he's likely to have (e.g., Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunketty-Earnle-Earle-Drax)." Delving further into the small print of Debrett's Peerage, Hall emerged with another proposition, published last week with a statistical breakdown in Town magazine. Hall's Second Law: "Proneness to divorce increases in direct ratio to position in the social scale."

The divorce court, says Hall, "is the only seat of British justice where invariably the parties to a case are better shod than the witnesses." Though the House of Lords periodically deplores Britain's divorce rate (about one divorce in 17 marriages), more than 20% of its own members have wound up in Splitsville.

Leaving out those noblemen born after 1925 as being "too young to have realized their full divorce potential." Hall discovered that 30% of the dukes have had their marriages dissolved. 26% of the marquesses, and 22% of the earls. "In other words," says Hall, "the higher the degree, the more the decrees."*]

Wealth and generations of superiority, says Hall, have made the nobility independent of public opinion. "The divorce court today represents more happiness than the silver wedding parties of our fathers," says Lord Kinross (only one marriage dissolved). The prevalence of silver or even golden divorces does not seem to dimmish the peerage's optimism about marriage; Earl Russell took a fourth wife at 80, and the Marquess of Winchester, now 99, tried for the third time at 89.

Further threatening titled monogamy is the manner in which women set their caps for a peer ("One day he'll come along, the duke I love," Nancy Mitford's sister Deborah, now Duchess of Devonshire, once prophetically crooned). Especially guilty, says Hall, are American women, who represent "the most substantial marital hazard." Says Statustician Hall: "They are just that much more unstable than, say, a clergyman's daughter. Some 43% of second and third marriages by English peers to American women have so far broken up. Let's face it, if a peer marries an American, he's on to a loser."

*Not so in the U.S., where lower-class families have higher divorce rates than the rich and highborn.

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