Reeling from a failed engagement on the long boat home to England from India in 1938, Mary Oliver had a brainwave. She had cancelled her wedding just weeks before the ceremony after realising she had simply nothing in common with the man she was about to marry.
Clearly, finding the perfect match couldn’t always be left to chance. What she, and others just like her, needed was help.
That flash of inspiration was to lead to Britain’s first dating agency, the Marriage Bureau. While matchmaking sites may be common today, with around a third of new couples meeting digitally, in the 1930s the idea of paying a stranger to find you a soulmate was alien.
Yet the Marriage Bureau, set up in London in April 1939 by Mary (a pseudonym for Audrey Parsons, to spare her family’s blushes) and her aristocratic friend Heather Jenner, was an instant success — despite another war looming.
World War I and the Spanish Flu had left Britain with an excess of two million unmarried women, yet until the Bureau was set up, personal adverts in newspapers were the only way to engineer meeting someone.
Now there was a place where the lonely could be matched with another of their social class and interests, by two entrepreneurial 24-year-olds for the princely sum of £5 5s (£335 in today’s money).
Mary Oliver (pictured) experienced a failed engagement and decided women need help in finding a perfect match
Those lucky enough to secure a wedding would pay an additional £21 (£1,200 now).
The Bureau gave discounts to impoverished female clients. No male clients got a discount — Mary and Heather believed the men must be solvent enough to support a wife.
And so a social revolution began, one in which women no longer needed to depend on family to introduce them to a partner.
In the 15 years after its inception, the Marriage Bureau introduced 10,000 people to their spouses, And inspired dozens of imitators.
Mary left for America in the 1940s, but Heather stayed running the agency, which only closed for good in 1992. Now the story of the heady early days of their groundbreaking agency are set to be made into a TV series, based on Mary’s recently rediscovered and published memoir, written in 1942.
Here, in our exclusive extracts, she describes the lonely hearts whose lives she changed — and whose revolutionary search paved the way for today’s Tinder generation:
For the past three weeks I had sat in the hall, listening for footsteps outside. Whenever they came, I darted towards the door and, as the maid appeared, I had to look as if I had just happened to be going out at that particular moment.
Each time, I had somehow manoeuvred my visitor away again, and decoyed him out of earshot.
There was the same vigil on the telephone. For three weeks, I never dared to bathe properly, but made a cautionary splashing, ready for the headlong rush to reach the telephone before everyone else.
How could I ever tell my family that I had put an advertisement in the matrimonial weekly?
I did it because I was planning to start a marriage bureau and I wanted to find out how the matrimonial papers worked.
The Marriage Bureau, set up in London in April 1939 by Mary was a huge success. Pictured: A cocktail party held by Heather Jenner, wife of Stephen Potter, who helped run the Marriage Bureau
I paid £5 and advertised for a husband who was not fat. But I never gave a thought to the consequences.
These took the shape of a continuous flow of would-be husbands who made surprise attacks on my home.
Bus drivers, commercial travellers, City clerks, sanitary inspectors and railwaymen either rang up or arrived unheralded on the doorstep in alarmingly quick succession.
How much better it would be if there were an organisation that could arrange the actual matchmaking and see that only suitable people met each other. This was my idea for the Marriage Bureau. Whenever possible, I would see clients in person. I hoped to pair people off who shared the same tastes, religion, social status and income; and whose marriage, therefore, would start with a firm basis of equality and common interest. I had £10 with which to start the Bureau.
‘Who do you know socially?’
‘Nobody,’ I replied.
‘Oh, but I saw your picture in the Bystander.’
He was tall, dark and very good-looking. His suit was well cut and the figure in the suit moved with assurance. I thought our first client was going to be everything a girl could wish for.
In the 1930s the idea of paying a stranger to find you a soulmate was alien but the scheme was a huge success. Pictured: A man at the door of the marriage Bureau in Bond Street, London, in 1950
I had expected the first interview to be very difficult, was prepared for frankness or shyness, but I had never conceived the one that took place.
Who did I know of importance? I really didn’t see why I should parade my few titled friends to impress this young Englishman on leave from his job in Calcutta.
I managed to pull myself together enough to add that we did have some girls of very good family.
Actually, we had no wives to offer him at all, so I tried to describe them as vaguely as I could, while Heather kicked the telephone bell underneath her desk (we discovered we could make it ring that way) and answered fictitious calls from dazzling young women.
I felt very dispirited about our prospects of ever finding him a wife.
Among our first day’s would-be brides, we had a girl who had an interesting family tree and worked in a beauty salon.
To show ‘Calcutta’ how prompt we were, we introduced them.
He came in the next day, and while he announced condescendingly that she was certainly well-born, he took exception to her working in the beauty parlour. ‘One’s friends in Calcutta wouldn’t have liked it.’
She rang up and said he was frightful. Nobody, in fact, took a good view of him. We feared we would have to ship him back alone, when in walked the solution.
She was rather bulgy, wore putty-coloured clothes and had a putty complexion; rather like a cold pudding, with eyes like currants that someone had pressed too far into its surface.
But she was a peeress’s daughter and wanted to be taken to the colonies.
When she opened her bag, press cuttings fluttered to the floor. There she was, with all her bulges, in Tatler.
There was quite a chance she would qualify for ‘one’s friends in Calcutta’. And she did. They got engaged in about three days.
A month in, we were getting an average of 300 letters a day but we were beset with problems. For a long time, we had on our books a large number of aristocratic girls and mostly working-class men.
Heather Jenner, founder of the Marriage Bureau dating agency in Bond Street, London, registers a new client, a 21-year-old actress named Pam in December 1952
Then we had widows for whom we had to find middle-aged husbands — preferably widowers.
Besides the actual match-making, there was another side of our work which was just as gratifying.
I’m thinking in particular of one lady who was 34. She had a hat like one in a cartoon in Punch magazine, and underneath it a face that had no sort of visible attraction beyond reasonably clear skin.
Her whole appearance was so mouse-like and ordinary.
She lived in a village in Somerset and did ‘social work’, visiting chronic invalids, arranging the flowers in the sanctuary and having passions for the vicar.
I was wondering whether I could not somehow make her into the person she wanted to be.
I decided to try. I whipped her off to choose some underclothes. Next, I took her to get a tailor-made suit and an attractive dress and I took her to the hairdresser’s.
But I had not taken into consideration a whole mass of inhibitions that were still to be contended with, or the violent swing-over that would follow their collapse.
After her first meeting with a retired civil servant who tried to kiss her, my little sanctuary mouse underwent a terrifying change.
She ran through an MP, a bookseller, a farmer, a naval officer and a textile manufacturer in five months.
Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver are pictured together. They set men and women up on dates together
It was always the men who fell back from her advances.
One day, a letter from her arrived at the office to be forwarded to the young man she was writing to. She had forgotten to close it down and a snapshot tumbled out.
There was my sanctuary mouse, standing in very short scanty knickers and barest little bodice. I pushed it back in and in doing so I caught sight of a second snapshot — the same, only her back view. She did indeed marry the young man; they were very happy.
We shall never forget the day a young City typist arranged to meet a bank clerk at Waterloo station. They went to a cafeteria for tea where they had to queue and pile things on a tray.
He left her in the queue, saying he would secure a table and come back to carry the tray for her.
She had laden it with delicacies for two, looked round, but couldn’t see him anywhere.
She waited and waited, growing more dismal all the time, with the waitress eyeing her as she was expecting the young man to pay for their tea. But he never came.
Of course, we thought the young man had run away (though we were surprised because she was attractive) and tried to get in touch to tell him this was no way to treat our clients. Three weeks later, we got a letter from him saying that, just as he was going to find the table, he saw a friend in the Army whom he thought he might never meet again. He dashed out across the road and was knocked down by a car. We sent her to the hospital to see him, and a few months later they got engaged.
On April 17, 1941, with the dust still unsettled from the ruins of the worst raid on London the night before, the Marriage Bureau had its 2nd birthday.
A few yards away, there was a gaping tear in a familiar side street, where the work and hopes of several more people had been reduced to a mountain of rubble.
Further down Bond Street were other gaps. There were many more windows without glass and buildings with their contents churned into demoniacal chaos.
It was the kind of day when a sleepless night and the fate of others were enough to make one feel a futility about troubling with something that might fall in the next hour of destruction. But our office walls were lined with telegrams from happy couples, and the people who picked their way across the broken glass were mostly men and women who had found in each other something precious that shut out all the ugliness and fear of war.
Even if our offices are razed in the next ‘Blitz’, our work would not just be a memory with a monument of rubble.
There would be living testimonies to it all over the world in those 932 married couples and 250-odd people who were just engaged.
At no time in the history of any generation could they have needed love and companionship more — and we had helped them find it.
Extracted by Nicole Lampert from Marriage Bureau: The True Story That Revolutionised Dating, by Mary Oliver, Mary Benedetta and Richard Kurti (£16.99 hardback, £7.99 paperback, B7 Media).