Now the Bureau needed an office. Heather wanted to be in Mayfair, somewhere like Bond Street. Everybody knew Bond Street, she reasoned, and its shops attracted wealthy people, who were more likely to become clients than poor ones, who would not be able to afford the Bureau’s fees. Mayfair was the most glamorous and sought-after part of London, largely residential with gracious family houses, many of them home to rich debs in search of a husband. Heather remembered two who had had a bet as to which of them would sleep with their hundredth man first. The competition ended in a draw, but both contestants married well and wearing virginal white, which was the end product of the very expensive business of being presented at Court and doing the Season. ‘It was a very costly and commercial marriage market,’ commented Heather. ‘Our Bureau will be much cheaper and much more effective!’
Mary agreed that Bond Street or nearby was a desirable location, easy to find and highly convenient for the clients who had inspired Uncle George’s idea: men living abroad, with only a limited time in England to find a wife.
In a newspaper advertisement, Mary found premises which sounded perfect: ‘Comfortable office facilities near Piccadilly Circus, 12s 6d per week.’ The address was ideal, and they still had £10 of her original capital, enough to pay the rent at least for long enough to find out if the Bureau could work.
Mary hesitated at the office door, staring into a gloomy, ill-lit, freezing room heaving with men huddled in grey raincoats or ill-fitting overcoats. Some sprawled in their swivel chairs with their feet on their desk; others drifted round, laughing and chatting, puffing on malodorous pipes and cigarettes whose smoke intensified the greyness of the atmosphere. They paused only to stare in amazement as Mary picked her way around, carefully skirting the desks and overflowing wastepaper baskets, a diminutive figure in a long coat of scarlet hunting cloth with a black velvet collar, totally out of place in the mob of travelling salesmen.
It rapidly dawned on Mary that the sole empty desk, sandwiched in the middle of rows of brown-varnished, grimy old wooden wrecks, was where she and Heather would have to sit and listen as the clients poured out their secrets and longings, while the men pricked up their ears and leered and winked. Ignoring the admiring and suggestive remarks assailing her from all sides, she beat a swift retreat, emerging into the street like a soul released, longing for a scented bath to eliminate the stale smoky stench clinging to her.
Heather listened to Mary’s tale of woe but did not shrink. ‘We’ll try another route. Never mind advertisements – let’s consult a house agent.’
Together Heather and Mary visited agencies where a warm welcome greeted the two disarming, well-spoken young women, the one statuesque, blonde and cool, the other petite, dark-haired and friendly. But the minute they said they were looking for an office to start a marriage bureau the agent stopped smiling, gave an embarrassed cough, shuffled the papers on his desk, regretted (unconvincingly) that he had nothing suitable nor was likely to, and ushered the hopefuls out with positively indecent haste.
‘They have no vision, no imagination – not even common sense!’ grumbled Mary. ‘We have good money to pay, but they jumped like March hares when we uttered the fearsome words “marriage bureau”. Anyone would think we are intending to open a back-street gambling den or white slave bureau!’
At this low point, there stole into Mary’s mind an image of a small office in Bond Street. She had come across it on an earlier visit to London, when she had inspected several small flats and offices, wistfully imagining herself living and working in the city. She had passed the building one Sunday, seen the agent’s board, and dreamily visualized herself installed in such a hideaway, far from the farm, busily engaged in some as yet unimagined work. She had never revealed this dream to a soul. Whenever she looked contemplative, her mother assumed that she was picturing the knight in shining armour who would surely win her heart. Poor Mrs Parsons would have been stricken had she known her daughter was staring up at a house agent’s board fixed to the wall of a Bond Street building. Much of the painted lettering had flaked off, making the wording hard to read, but Mary and Heather could just make out ‘SMALL OFFICE TO LET’.
The hairdresser on the ground floor remarked despondently that nobody wanted the pesky office: he’d shown it to a few possible takers last year but not a soul had turned up to see it for a good six months. It was too small – you could hardly swing a cat in it – and too dusty and dirty, and up too many stairs. The lavatory was even further up, in the attic, and the drains were none too reliable. The room wasn’t a ha’penny-worth of good to a smart West End business. And it wouldn’t be long before Hitler dropped a bomb or two on Bond Street, which wouldn’t do his hairdressing business any good, so he didn’t rightly know what he himself would do, but he’d probably get out of the West End, Lord love you, he didn’t want to be a sitting duck, were the two young ladies in their right minds?
Mary and Heather were well aware of the grim black cloud of impending war darkening the country and disrupting plans of all kinds, but both remained optimistic, philosophical and unflinchingly dedicated to Uncle George’s brainchild. They assured the melancholy hairdresser that they did know what they were doing, and would be most interested to view the office. Shrugging his shoulders in resignation he foraged in a drawer, found the key and handed it over with dire warnings about the dangers of the unlit stairs. Impatiently, Mary and Heather bounded up five narrow flights and unlocked a rickety door which creaked open as they gazed inside.
The room was small and shabby, the brown linoleum on the floor blotched with ink stains, the white paint faded to a dirty, jaundiced yellowy-brown. It was furnished with two battered old desks (one of them three-legged, propped up against the wall), two dilapidated swivel chairs which had long since lost their ability to revolve, and a bookcase fixed to the wall at a strange angle, apparently about to fall to the floor. A grubby and cracked telephone trailed a frayed cord. The lighting was a single bulb dimmed by a scorched and torn lampshade, dangling from a disintegrating plaster ceiling rose. Heating was a two-bar electric fire (of which, they discovered later, only one bar ever lit up, however often a chilly person tried to kick it into life).
A dirty slip of paper pinned to the wall gave the rent for this urban rabbit hutch as twenty-five shillings per week, by the week. Included were a poky and squalid lavatory, plus all fixtures (what fixtures? wondered the two match-makers), fittings (though nothing fits, they observed) and rates.
Mary was sure that destiny had struck. Heather was ecstatic.
‘We’ll take it!’
‘We’ll paint it!’
‘The clients will love it!’
‘So shall we!’
The Marriage Bureau had found its home.
3
Open for Matrimonial Business
The two match-makers set about cheering up their scruffy little office. Heather bought buckets of sunshine-yellow paint, and for several days they clanked up and down Bond Street wearing slacks and old clothes, hoping nobody they knew would spot them among the smartly dressed shoppers. While they were painting, their friends visited the office, full of curiosity and fascination, but usually disapproving: ‘You’re young and not obviously criminal, so people will think you mad rather than bad, but even so you’ll probably end up behind bars for white slave trafficking or prostitution. We’ll come and visit you, and bring you some decent food to supplement the prison muck, so you won’t starve!’
A practical-minded friend asked how people were going to hear about the Marriage Bureau.
‘We’ll advertise,’ Mary cheerfully asserted, unaware that the prestige papers would not take advertisements from such a suspicious-sounding organization for another fifty years.
The week before the Bureau opened, Mary rang up the newspapers, in alphabetical order, artlessly asked for the Features Editor, and, with the luck of the naïve, got through every time.
It was early April 1939 and, following the Munich crisis, the papers had a lot of
pages to fill, but with a declaration of war anticipated, editors were looking for cheerful, upbeat stories to counterbalance the gloomy world news. Apart from the serious Daily Telegraph and The Times, most of them sent reporters round to New Bond Street, and Godfrey Winn, a very well-known and popular journalist, did his whole column in the Sunday Express about the strange but intriguing phenomenon and its charming proprietors.
Near the end of the week, with Mary and Heather’s pictures in every paper except the more sedate ones, Heather thought she should telephone her mother and father. She had not told them or her autocratic grandmother what she was up to, nor that she was using the name Jenner, which came from her mother’s family, rather than her real surname, Lyon – she thought Jenner went better with Heather. Brigadier and Mrs Lyon read only the very staid Morning Post, but Heather knew that news of the Marriage Bureau would eventually percolate through to them.
Heather hoped her mother, the less reactionary of the two, would answer the telephone, but she got her profoundly conservative father and, taking a deep breath, she broke the news. To her amazement he merely snorted, ‘Thank goodness somebody in the family is trying to make some money at last!’ The next morning he and some club cronies came round to the office, fizzing with charm and enthusiasm, laden with a huge box of chocolates and a magnificent bouquet of flowers, the lilies dripping orange pollen all over the furniture and exuding a hothouse scent.
Mrs Lyon was annoyed, but the Brigadier, blessedly converted to the whole venture, won her round. Curiously enough, it turned out to be almost the only thing Heather ever did of which her ninety-six-year-old dragon grandmother approved. ‘My generation, my dear Heather,’ she breathed fierily down the telephone, ‘had a dreadful time marrying off our daughters. As you know, I did not succeed with all of mine, not for want of trying, I assure you. And the cost of the balls and parties and other shenanigans was astronomical, far higher than the fees of your organization – your “Marriage Bureau”, don’t you call it? I wish you good fortune.’
Heather’s grandmother sent round two dozen red roses. Perhaps luckily, she did not read a less than encouraging piece in an Australian newspaper, in which Brigadier-General S. Price Weir, described as ‘Australia’s only marital conciliator’, censured the Marriage Bureau as ‘a very stupid and dangerous enterprise’ which would cause people to marry in haste and repent at leisure. ‘Surely,’ blustered the Brigadier-General, ‘there are no people so incapable of finding a partner in life that they have to use such a crude and ridiculous means of finding one?’
‘What a pompous twerp!’ cried Heather. ‘And I have no idea what a “marriage conciliator” is, but he doesn’t sound remotely conciliatory!’
On the morning of Monday, 17 April 1939, Mary and Heather arrived at the office at 8.30. They paused momentarily in the street to admire the wooden notice board, its silver lettering standing out clearly against the black background: MARRIAGE BUREAU: PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. Anticipating having nothing to do, and having always thought she wanted to knit, Heather strolled in carrying knitting needles, wool and a pattern book. Mary put in the drawer of her wobbly desk her intended reading: Contract Bridge in Twenty Minutes.
Heather never learned to knit, nor Mary to play bridge. Thanks to all the previous week’s publicity the postman had put so many letters through the door that they had difficulty in opening it. Having fought their way in, they each started on half of the letters, assigning them to one of three piles: ‘Men’, ‘Women’ and ‘Uncertain’, on account of dreadful handwriting or a dubious photograph (the prospective client as a baby, flat on his/her tummy on a tiger-skin rug, sucking his/her thumb, labelled ‘Me aged 7 months’).
A knock at the door interrupted the sorting.
‘It must be a client!’ whispered Mary. ‘Quick, let’s toss to interview whoever it is!’
Hastily she flipped a sixpence and Heather won. At the second impatient knock Mary took some letters out into the passage while Heather opened the door.
Major A. was a smart, upright, retired army officer in his middle forties. A kindly soul, and no doubt a good leader of men, with great courtesy he took Heather through the interview rather than the other way round. To her horror he paid to register – the fee was five guineas (to be followed by the After Marriage Fee of ten guineas each if a couple married through the Bureau). He filled in his form, very politely gave a little bow, and said goodbye to a stunned Heather.
‘Mary, come and help! He’s too old for any of our girl-friends – they’d all think him middle-aged. What shall we do?’
‘Look at the letters!’ ordered Mary, holding out a handful. ‘There’s a woman in at least half of these envelopes! And if we can’t find anyone suitable we’ll keep his money for a few days and then return it to him.’
Mary and Heather busied themselves with the letter-slitter, and were relieved to discover several possible wives for Major A.
‘Whoopee!’ cried Mary as she read another letter from a promising woman, ‘we—’
She was cut off by another knock at the door.
It was a young man, very haughty and full of himself, who refused to sit down while telling Mary that several of his connections were titled, and that anyone to whom the Marriage Bureau introduced him must be in The Book.
‘Titled, my eye!’ declared Mary, raising her eyebrows and grinning, as she heard his footsteps descending the stairs. ‘He’s all puffed-up pretence, the titles are “Mr”, “Mrs” and “Miss”, I’m sure! And does he mean the telephone book or Debrett, do you think? What a conceited ass! But he’s paid, and he’s coming back for an interview tomorrow as he has some very important appointments today – the dentist, I would lay odds on it! He just wants to dazzle us.’
The British press remained on the Bureau’s side. In July the Daily Mail’s Charles Graves wrote enthusiastically about the venture of ‘Miss Jenner, a magnificent blonde, and Miss Oliver, an entertaining brunette’, and was so intrigued that he asked them how often they were proposed to themselves, to which Heather coolly replied, ‘As a matter of fact most of the men propose to us. But really it is a matter of politeness and they don’t mean it. I can tell you, though, that we both often get quite attached to some of the clients.’
The telephone rang incessantly, most calls coming from enquirers, others from well-wishers, journalists and the model agency for which Heather had worked, begging her to do another show for them.
Clients poured in, and as there was no waiting room they had to queue up the narrow stairs. When the staircase was full, Mary would give the hopefuls her most appealing smile and guide them to a decrepit ladder leading up to a small trapdoor, saying apologetically, ‘So sorry, we shan’t be long, would you be so kind as to wait a few minutes up on the roof? Thank you so much!’
Beguiled, nobody ever protested, and they climbed the ladder, probably anticipating a scenic roof garden full of flowers and elegant benches, only to find nothing but a dirty bit of concrete surrounded by smutty chimney pots.
The clients came from all levels of society. One newspaper quoted Heather as saying that they ranged from plumbers to peers, and from charladies to countesses, which was true, as she wrote later:
The first five hundred men did indeed include a plumber and an earl, as well as businessmen, farmers, land-owners, members of the armed forces, labourers, stable boys, postmen, clergymen, lecturers, waiters, motor drivers, architects and doctors. We had a London, Midland & Scottish Railway Traffic Officer (a poppet), an owner of a factory making artificial limbs, a nib-maker who examined our fountain pens with a critical eye, a manufacturer of silk stockings whose eyes kept wandering towards my legs (which are rather splendid), a rat-catcher and a ‘cowman in charge’, whatever that means – I am not a country girl.
Some letters brought not clients but strange requests and offers: some from charitable organizations, one from a man who wrote that he would not mind marrying either Mary or Heather if it was going to cost him only five guineas.
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Some clients turned out to be practical jokers: during a difficult interview, Heather was interrupted by the door opening to admit a man with a blackened face beneath an exotic turban, demanding replacements for his harem. Heather recognized the voice of an old friend, and was not at all amused by his idea of humour, nor by other acquaint ances who telephoned, disguising their voices to give impossible requirements.
One real client was an MP. ‘Goody goody!’ exulted Mary. ‘If we get him married off he’ll tell lots of people in Parliament and in his constituency!’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Heather. ‘He’s noted for raising tricky questions in the House, and confounding those who oppose him with smart answers, and crowing over them in the bar afterwards. He’s not a nice man. He might even raise a critical question about us and the Bureau, so be careful.’
The MP was fifty-five, tall and, at first glance, quite good-looking in a traditional English way, though his chin flowed over-smoothly into his neck, the continuous curve giving him a faintly reptilian look, enhanced by smallish eyes which darted hither and thither like a snake’s. He reminded Heather of cobras she’d seen performing at the command of fakirs in India. He was dressed in a Savile Row suit and a tie from one of those antique gentlemen’s clubs which women – if admitted at all – have to enter through a poky side door at the bottom of a flight of out side steps. He had a dry, sharp, put-down manner, and Mary particularly disliked the arrogant way in which he addressed them as if they were servants, demanding introductions to young women aged no more than thirty-five.
‘My wife died before we had any children,’ he snapped. ‘Most inconsiderate of her, although I suppose she did not choose to contract scarlet fever. I want an heir, I have a position and the wherewithal.’
Heather stifled her laughter as she wondered exactly what he meant by ‘wherewithal’. The MP was not a man with whom it would be wise to attempt a joke. He was adamant that his prospective wife must be a lady, English, of good birth, educated by a governess or private school, Church of England, Conservative, of independent means (through inheritance, not anything so vulgar as working), cultured, refined, in good health, well dressed, slim, not too brainy, accustomed to moving in the higher echelons of Society (he talked as if the word had a capital S) and single or widowed, without children.
Marriages are Made in Bond Street Page 3