Catherine Carswell - First Marriage

First Marriage

In September 1904 she met her first husband Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer War veteran and artist who suffered from paranoid delusions. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" only a month later. Thinking that he was sterile he accused Carswell of betraying him upon the news of her pregnancy and threatened to kill her in March 1905. He was taken to a mental institution where he remained for the rest of his life, considered too dangerous to be discharged. He never met his daughter Diana who was born the following October.

In 1908 she made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was dissolved after she established that his mental illness had started prior to their engagement and he was not aware of what he was doing when he married her.