During the First World War the British government persistently rejected calls to legalise marriages between a man and the widow of his brother killed in action. Drawing no distinction between blood bonds and those acquired by marriage, sections of the Church of England regarded these relations as incestuous. Bruised by the protracted debates over the passing of a parallel measure, the Deceased Wife’s Sisters Marriage Act of 1907, Prime Minister Lloyd George refused to act. Although rectifying this inequality of treatment between the sexes would have been relatively simple, he knew the dangers of interfering with the law in this matter.