§ Order for Second Reading read.
§ The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the WAR OFFICE (Mr. Duff Cooper)I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."
I do not think the House will desire a long explanation of this Bill. The Bill is entirely non-controversial and simply seeks to enable soldiers and sailors and men of the Air Force to be married in their own chapels. For obvious reasons the vast majority of the Naval, Military and Air Force chapels are not consecrated. That is to enable all denominations to make use of them. But, by the law of the land, marriages cannot take place in unlicensed chapels. This Bill allows the Bishop of the diocese concerned to license the chapels at the request of the First Lord of the Admiralty or the Secretary of State for War or the Secretary of State for Air. The only objection that could possibly be urged 1905 against, the Bill would come, I imagine, from those members of the Church of England whose churches will suffer and will not be used for marriages so much as they have been used before, and who will possibly lose some emoluments which otherwise they might get. The Bill was introduced in another place, where it received the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester. They were satisfied that it was for the good both of the Services concerned and of the Church that this reform should be introduced, and they gave it wholehearted support. The Clauses of the Bill have exercised the Parliamentary draftsmen a great deal on account of the complication of our marriage legislation at the 1906 present time, but the principle of the Bill is one which I am sure the House wll support.
§ The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.
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c1906
- ADJOURNMENT. 16 words