Edwin Charles Barnes Cotgrave must have been personable. He must have been persuasive or agreeable. People must have liked him.

When he joined the British army in India in 1882, he was almost immediately chosen for the Staff Corps – the team of bright young things running things for the senior officers – but he certainly did not get the job on the basis of exam score as a cadet, which was distinctly below average. When in 1900 Lord Arthur Cecil (a close relative of the Prime Minister) was in India to lead a Horse Breeding Commission and needed a sidekick at his side to act as his secretary, it was to Edwin Cotgrave that he turned. And when Viceroy of India had visited the Maharaja of Gwalior in 1895, it was Edwin Cotgrave who was chosen to spend time entertaining the Indian prince, and event that was preserved in an impressively posed photograph.

But there was one person who in the end decided he was not to her taste – his wife Lilian. When Edwin became the first member of his family ever to seek a divorce at the High Court in 1915, the case was a scandal with salacious details of night-time assignations and adulterous liaisons hiding behind seemingly prosaic lists of dates on which the parties had visited hotels in London and a riverside bungalow in a Buckinghamshire village.

Born in 1862 in Karachi where his father was stationed, Cotgrave was always destined to join the British Army in India.

While stationed in Ireland, Cotgrave met and married the daughter of a local landowner, Susan Frederica Lilian Lloyd, who seems to have preferred to be known as Lilian.  They lived briefly in her home area in what was then known as King’s County (now Offaly), where he joined the local hunt, and for a short while at an unmemorable hotel in Paris (he later said he could not remember the name or where it was).  In November 1899, Lilian gave birth to a daughter named Periwinkle but within weeks, Edwin was back in India serving as Brigade Major to the Inspector General of Cavalry while the mother and baby got on with their lives.  

Cotgrave was clearly enjoying his military role in India, which does not seem to have involved much in the way of real military action.  He served as a staff officer then a brigade major and as secretary to the Horse Breeding Commission but there is little if any evidence of his ever being in a battle.  That does not mean he did not experience real danger.  He was shot at by a solider on parade but the trooper was apparently “insane” and was arrested.  And in an incident described as “very bad luck,” a horse kicked his chest just before a polo match, he played anyway, damaged his knee during the game but was “naturally, not in his best form”.  Cotgrave was not entirely without active service and had been present at the capture of the Sampagha and Arhanga Passes in 1897.  He enjoyed the traditional pursuits of a British gentleman in India, so that when he colleague John Law was married, the happy couple received a tiger skin as a gift from Edwin Cotgrave.

After promotion to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1908, there was a brief period of leave in London travelling via Sydney in 1910-1 before he returned to service in Guna.  Colonel Cotgrave retired in 1914 at the age of 52 and returned to England.

It was plain to everyone that his marriage to Lilian Lloyd had not been a success.  The truth is that with him having spent the overwhelming majority of the previous decade and a half out of the country they barely knew one another.  When their daughter Periwinkle was 16 and on the verge of adulthood, Cotgrave admitted that he had only seen his daughter four times in her entire life.  Lilian had found love elsewhere and was living in a Bungalow in Buckinghamshire with a man called Walter Lorraine Bell, whom the couple had first met in Ireland, where Bell had hunted with Cotgrave.

Colonel Cotgrave wanted a divorce and easily obtained a decree nisi in 1915 when he reported to the High Court that his wife had spent the night with Bell on specified dates.  On 3rd and 4th July 1915 at the Midland Hotel, St Pancras, and a week later at Gay Reach, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, they had committed adultery. In matters concerning children, the law largely sided with men and he was granted custody of Periwinkle even though, on the witness stand in his khaki uniform, he confessed to barely knowing her. 

In theory, it was simply a matter of time before the divorce was finalised, but under the rules at the time, an official lawyer called the King’s Proctor was invited to intervene if there was any doubt about the evidence or how it was collected.  The Proctor raised two issues.  First, he thought that the Cotgraves were colluded because both wanted a divorce.  The Proctor was probably right but the couple both denied it and it was impossible to prove.  More seriously, the Proctor claimed that Edwin Charles Barnes Cotgrave had himself committed adultery, and although he did not know the woman’s name, the lawyer did know dates and places.  On 6th, 15th, 21st and 30th January, two dates in March and two in April, Cotgrave and his anonymous girlfriend had committed adultery at the Great Central Hotel in Marylebone. Initially, Cotgrave bluffed it out, denied it all and pressed ahead with his case for a divorce.  But it appears to have become clear quite quickly that if the evidence came to court it would be highly damaging, he withdrew his objections to the Proctor’s submission, the decree nisi was quashed and the divorce was not granted.

Thereafter, Cotgrave hung around the south of England apparently doing not very much, living at Frilford Heath near Abingdon before moving to Surrey, promoting concerts for the Red Cross society, and using his honorary rank of Brigadier General.

When he came to write his will in 1933, Cotgrave left everything to a woman who later fraudulently claimed to be his half sister. She went by the name of Mabel Molyneaux Seel Foley and subsequently said she was a countess, but it was all untrue.

Cotgrave’s daughter, whom he barely knew but had fought for custody of, was left nothing.

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