Army wives

[Ed McKie]

I will need to give a bit of background first before posing a question. My grandfather was a Scot married to a Maltese. According to family lore they met and were married in Malta when my grandfather Peter Mckie was serving there in the Army. After searching for some years for a Maltese marriage we were lucky to actually find them marrying in Bermondsey in 1878, so assumed that the story was just that. My grandmother Gessippa Mamo was born in Malta just after her father died in 1866 and her mother remarried some six year later to a man in the British Army. Shortly after they left Malta and went on to India and subsequently home to England and we assumed that Gessippa and her older sister Rosina went with them. This now appears to be not the case, Rosina stayed behind in Malta and married there in 1878 (another military marriage) and we now assume that Gessippa stayed there also.

it seems strange to us that a woman would leave her two orphaned children in Malta when she went off with the army and her new husband. Does anyone know how the military authorities handled the travelling arrangements of soldiers wives ? would there have been a restriction on children who were not the children of the soldier perhaps ? Would wives have to pay there own fare on the troopships ?

Any info or even inspired guesses would be helpful.

Cheers..
Ed