A FATHER-OF-SIX charged with bigamy came face-to-face in court yesterday with the three women he married.

Former guest house manager Robert Hutchings, 53, married and divorced Jean Thomson, then wed teenage student Samantha Bone, while he was still married to his first wife, Violet Anne.

But the 53-year-old, who once tried to join the French Foreign Legion, yesterday claimed that it had all been a big mistake.

A jury at Teesside Crown Court heard him deny two charges of bigamy, on the basis that he honestly believed he had been divorced from his first wife, before marrying again.

Hutchings even told police officers who interviewed him after he had been arrested for bigamy that his first wife had told him she had remarried.

The court heard that the 53-year-old, of Clavering Road, Hartlepool, married for the first time, in a Catholic church in the Falls Road area of Belfast, in 1966.

After the couple, who had four children, separated in 1978, Hutchings moved to London.

There, in 1981, he met Jean Thomson, before moving with her to Newcastle. They married in 1988 and had a son.

On his first two marriage certificates, the court heard, Mr Hutchings described his father as a being labourer and then as working in the import-export trade.

But by the time he married heavily pregnant, 18-year-old student Samantha Bone in 1995, that had changed dramatically.

This time he said his father was a senior barrister, a claim he later explained as being a joke. But prosecutor Michael Bosomworth told the jury: "This was a man who didn't take the details he gave to the registrar of marriages with any seriousness at all and it didn't bother him that he was still married to Violet back in Belfast."

Mr Bosomworth added that on the marriage certificate with his second wife, Hutchings described himself as a bachelor, but that if he believed he was divorced he should have said he was a divorced person.

And Hutchings's spouses lined up to tell the court the different stories that the accused had told them.

Mrs Hutchings, from Belfast, told the court she had never taken steps to divorce him, nor received any papers from him, and did not consider herself divorced.

She admitted visiting a solicitor to ask about a legal separation, but denied she had told her husband they were divorced.

"If I had wanted a divorce I would have got one," she said.

Ms Thomson told the court her husband - who briefly left her in a failed attempt to join the French Foreign Legion - had told her he had never been married before.

She had confronted him with the truth, after a telephone call from his first wife, but he had denied it.

Ms Thomson said: "If I thought he had still been married, I would not have gone along with the marriage."

Ms Bone, who fell pregnant to Hutchings while he was working as a hotel manager in Newcastle, said he had told her he was divorced from his first two wives. She discovered the truth after they split up in 1998. She said: "I feel like a fool."

The case continues.