Fanny Cradock - Marriages

Marriages

By the time of her father’s downfall, Cradock had already left the family and set up her own home with her first husband; she married four times, twice bigamously. First she married Sidney A. Vernon Evans on 10 October 1926, she was 17, he was 22. Cradock had adopted a variation on the family name, marrying as Primrose Pechey, which was a form passed down her father’s side. Sidney Evans died in a plane crash on 4 February 1927, leaving her pregnant with their son Peter Vernon Evans, who was adopted by his grandparents. Thanks to Johnny Cradock, Peter later became a sous-chef at the Dorchester Hotel.

By July of the following year Cradock had fallen pregnant again, and was obliged to marry the baby’s father Arthur William Chapman on 23 July. For this marriage Cradock used a form of her name closer to that on her birth certificate, employing her maternally inherited ‘Sortain’, rather than the paternal ‘Pechey’.

The couple had a son Christopher, but their marriage lasted less than a year before they separated. Cradock left her son Christopher and husband Arthur for a new life in Central London. Christopher was brought up in Norfolk by his father, an aunt and grandmother, although he made contact with Fanny in his adult life. Arthur Chapman became a Catholic and so would not give Fanny the divorce she later requested, as it was against the teachings of the Catholic Church, he merited only a single line in Fanny’s autobiography.

Cradock married again on 26 September 1939; her husband this time was Gregory Holden-Dye, a daredevil minor racing driver, driving Bentleys at Brooklands in Surrey. The marriage lasted only eight weeks, and produced no children, as she had soon met the love of her life Johnny Cradock. Greg’s mother had expressed a low opinion of Fanny, and ended up as a loathsome character in Fanny's first novel Scorpion's Suicide. Cradock later concluded that as Arthur Chapman had not granted her a divorce, her marriage to Greg was not lawful, and so never publicised it.

John Whitby Cradock was a major in the Royal Artillery who was already married with four children. He soon left his wife, Ethel, and children to be with her. Unable to marry Johnny, because of Arthur’s refusal to get divorced, she changed her surname to Cradock by deed poll in 1942. When she was informed that Arthur had died, she married Johnny on 7 May 1977, although Arthur actually lived until 1978. For this marriage Cradock went with a pared down version of her name, and also seemed to be having problems with her memory, as the then 68-year-old put her age down as '55' on the marriage certificate, even though she had a son who was nearly fifty.