Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  Unsurprisingly, the young women under thirty-five thought him far too old. Generally they disliked him. ‘He believes himself to be a wonderful catch,’ commented a young woman who fitted all his requirements but was too intelligent and far too nice. ‘But whoever marries him will pay a high price. He is looking for someone to add lustre to himself – woe betide her if she falls ill, or produces a sickly child.’

  ‘I am not surprised that he has not found a second wife in the past twenty years,’ reported another. ‘I found him far too dictatorial and set in his ways, and not at all interested in me, just in what I might do for him. He is much too glorious for me!’

  The MP was chillingly critical of everyone he met, until Heather introduced him to Lady M., a rather dim, reasonably pretty, aristocratic girl, whose main aim in life was to get away from her overbearing mother, whom she constantly disappointed by her inability to find a husband. Lady M. would put up with anybody rather than have to remain under Mama’s roof, and the MP liked her looks, her social standing, her income, her lack of brainpower, her gratitude and her willingness to comply with whatever he wanted. He wrote a curt note acknowledging that the Marriage Bureau had fulfilled its part of the contract, and paid the twenty guineas. Mary and Heather jointly breathed a gusty sigh of relief, devoutly hoping never to hear from him again. And they never did.

  Many of the women who approached the Bureau did not have paid jobs but lived on an allowance from their father, or an inheritance. An earl’s widow had money but no occupation, and was as bored and lonely, festering away stitching appliqué to linen hand towels in her draughty country house, as the penniless little seamstress client, straining her eyes sewing black sequins onto black silk evening dresses in her dingy bedsit.

  The daughter of another aristocrat turned up dressed in the dowdiest old coat imaginable, a curious, ancient, hairy grey sack lashed to her shapeless form by a broad belt, which seemed to be made of knitted string. The Hon. Priscilla’s tyrannical father gave her a most miserly dress allowance – ‘I spend in a week what he gives her for a year, the rotter!’ protested Heather, for whom good clothes were as essential as food and drink.

  This parsimonious and backward-looking patriarch did not hold with girls being educated, nor even, felt Heather, clothed; but when he died, his downtrodden daughter would inherit a sizeable amount. The Hon. Priscilla was too nice and too meek to hope that this happy event would come soon, but was concentrating on finding a husband who would take her away from the gloomy old pile her family had occupied for generations.

  She was just one of many young and not-so-young women living drearily at home, housekeeping for parents or brothers, financially completely dependent apart from little jobs such as making and selling sheepskin toys and embroidered table linen. Their only hope of a life of their own was marriage. But where were they going to meet a man? ‘I feel so sorry for the Hon. P,’ muttered Mary, a protective glint in her serious brown eyes. ‘She’s just the kind of girl we want to help. I know exactly what it feels like. The thought of still living on the farm with my parents, being a dowdy daughter and a big disappointment for not marrying, gives me the shudders.’

  Although the match-makers had thought only the relatively well-off would apply, many poorer people saved up to become clients and the Bureau charged some impoverished girls only three guineas, or even less. Some lowly paid young men also had their fee reduced, or were allowed to pay in instalments. Many of the female clients were paid scarcely a living wage, as lady’s maids, beauticians, shop assistants, nannies and nurses, stenographers and shorthand-typists, comptometer operators, dressmakers, milliners, cooks, governesses and companions. Slightly better paid were a professional violinist and a dreamy cellist, a fearfully efficient LCC social worker, a model for paper patterns, a travelling auditor who quibbled about the fee arrangements, a matron at a school for blind boys and men, and a Hoffman Presser in a big laundry.

  ‘Oh, I do remember Miss Hoff Press!’ recalled Heather. ‘She was dressed in an impeccably clean, crisp suit over a starched white blouse, with little pleats all pressed as sharp as a carving knife. She made Mary and me feel grubby and crumpled and blowsy – which we were, of course. We were so busy that we lived like nuns, seldom left the office until late at night, never had time to go to a hairdresser or dressmaker, and lived on fishcakes from the restaurant below the office. They were less fattening, we thought, than sandwiches, and easy to eat cold in one hand as we answered the telephone or wrote out introductions with the other. But they were greasy so sometimes we got marks on our clothes.’

  A few of the female clients had their own business, usually inherited from their father, such as a large, square, red-faced woman who lumbered up the stairs puffing and coughing, dumped herself down on the chair, which protested but fortunately held, got out a packet of cigarettes and proceeded to smoke throughout the interview.

  Miss Doris Burton had a small tobacconist’s shop which brought in £3 5s per week, had always worked and never married. Mary interviewed her, categorized her as Better Than Some, and reported to Heather: ‘She says she’s thirty-nine but that’s a whopper, she’s nearer forty-nine. It’s the smoking that’s done it. Her face reminds me of smoked salmon, leathery with an orangey tinge. When I half-closed my eyes I could feel the fire burning in the smokehouse and smell the fishy smoke as she gently cured. No make-up, and that broad figure, cropped mud-coloured hair and severe black suit, make her look distinctly mannish. But she wants a sound, reliable, steady, homely gent with a decent job and no children. No elderly parents, or a dog or cat either (I rather wondered if she’d accept goldfish or a parrot, but thought it undiplomatic to ask). She doesn’t mind how ugly he is – that’s just as well, as he’ll certainly have to have the same view about her! Not a gambler. Preferably an abstainer, though she would be agreeable to an occasional pint. Of course, he must be a smoker. She is offering sufficient furniture and linen for a flat, plus expectations from an old aunt, and wants the man to have sufficient income to provide the home. She’s a challenge!’

  The story of the Marriage Bureau’s first wedding, of a bride aged sixty-eight to a seventy-year-old groom, delighted the press. British Pathé made a two-minute documentary film showing the match-makers – ‘Cupid’s labourers’ – in action. A deluge of enquiries came from both the UK and abroad: missionaries, rubber planters, colonial servants, managers of tea estates, mining engineers, soldiers in Malaya, Tanganyika, Ceylon, India, South Africa, Egypt, Rhodesia, Uganda, Sudan, Nigeria. They had leave infrequently, so they were put in touch with suitable women by post, and some marriages followed lengthy correspondence.

  ‘Poor wandering ones,’ cried Mary. ‘Just the kind of men we set out to help!’

  The original idea had been to answer all letters by hand, for, as Heather recalled, ‘in those days you didn’t type letters – it was considered a little ill-bred – but Mary couldn’t spell and my handwriting had always been difficult to read, and in any case there were far too many letters for two people to deal with. On opening day alone we received 250, and the pattern continued. So we needed not only another office but also a secretary.’

  The landlord offered a small empty office on the same landing for £1 a week, and the employment exchange could supply a secretary at £3 – but she would need a typewriter. Even though there was a steady flow of registration fees, after the rent, yellow paint, solicitors, telephone bills, stationery, fishcakes and other vital expenses, the cost of an extra office, secretary and a typewriter was daunting.

  Heather went off to Harrods, where she had an account, and bought a typewriter on the never-never. Mary greeted her as she carried the precious machine through the office door.

  ‘Goody goody! I have just sent out application forms to a hundred people, and I can’t write another word!’

  The interviewing never let up. As Mary took charge of the typewriter, in walked Rosemary, a charming twenty-two-year-old ex-deb of, Heather guessed, pretty conservative outlook and
behaviour. She was polite, correct and unimaginative, but with the naïve charm of an unspoiled girl. She was pretty, slightly plump, wearing expensive but matronly clothes better suited to her mother: a well-cut but dull coat and skirt over a classic silk blouse, a pearl necklace, handmade shoes, a hat and gloves.

  Rosemary lived at home and had an allowance from Daddy, a distinguished professional man who had been knighted. She had very few ideas of her own, and had difficulty articulating her requirements to Heather. ‘Someone older than me, I think, perhaps about forty – what do you think?’ she managed after some thought, giving Heather a childlike, trusting little smile. ‘I mean not too old, but older, a man who knows more than I do, because, you see, I don’t know very much. I’ve only been a deb, which was fun, but I don’t know much, except I’m good at riding. I love horses. And flowers. I’m good at arranging flowers for dinner parties. Perhaps a man in the army, a good regiment, of course, because I should love to live abroad, I think. I know people who live there and they say it’s great fun. Not a native, of course, and not a man who has been married before, and he must be a gentleman. And Church of England of course, even if he lives abroad. What do you think?’

  As Rosemary stumbled through her appeal, Heather half-drifted into a reverie, reliving her own life in India. She pictured Rosemary in an agreeable hill station, gracefully riding side-saddle on a white horse in the cool of the day, in the evening changing into a simple but perfectly cut silk dress adorned with a regimental brooch, and talking – or rather, mostly listening – to the dinner guests, to the proud satisfaction of her heroic husband.

  Heather could not think of anybody suitable amongst her friends in England, but perhaps that polo-player from Colombo she had put on the books might fit – he was coming home on leave soon. Or maybe Mary had some suitable friend. Or the perfect man might come in tomorrow. Or perhaps he was already lurking in an as yet unopened envelope . . . Cogitating about Rosemary, colouring in a mental picture of her Mr Right, and how he was to be discovered, Heather felt a growing and glorious conviction that she had found her true vocation.

  4

  The Capitulation of Cedric Thistleton

  Pondering on her new-found feeling of vocation, Heather came to recognize that she had always had it in her. ‘I suppose I am what is called a born match-maker,’ she reflected later. ‘Ever since my fifth birthday, when I announced my engagement to two small boys at once, I have been busy marrying people off. Match-making was my hobby, so it was logical that it became my business too. I match people up with all the ardour of a philatelist with his stamps, or an entomologist with his butterflies.’

  For Mary, though, the prospect of guiding a stranger towards a potential spouse felt novel and disquieting, and it was with trepidation as well as excitement that she anticipated her first interview with a man. It was 18 April, the day after the Bureau had opened. The match-makers had just finished touching up the paint on the ceiling, so Mary took off her overall and headscarf to receive Cedric Thistleton. He had visited the day before, accompanied by a faint aroma of bay rum and dropping heavy hints about his importance, and now he had returned for an interview.

  He was a businessman of thirty-three, tall, dark and exceptionally, classically good-looking, radiating confidence and A1 health from his lightly sun-kissed face to his expensively shod feet. His dark navy suit was faultlessly tailored; his dazzlingly white silk shirt sported tasteful gold cufflinks. Without waiting for a polite invitation he sat himself down opposite Mary, while casting appraising glances at Heather as she climbed down from her painting ladder to sit at her own desk. Then he fixed a questioning but commanding look on Mary.

  Silenced by Cedric’s self-assurance, Mary returned his gaze. She had expected her first interview with her first man to be fraught with difficulty, for surely he would be nervous or shy, needing her to encourage him to speak. Or he might be longing to spill out his hopes and needs without letting her get a word in edgeways – Mary had envisioned various scenarios, and had worked out how she might proceed. But none of her imaginings had foretold Cedric’s abrupt opening: ‘I have five weeks’ leave before I return to Malaya with my wife. She must be socially acceptable to my employer and my social circle. It is your job to find her.’

  ‘Oh!’ gasped Mary.

  Cedric made it clear that he expected entire satisfaction from his contract with the Bureau: a girl of impeccable breeding (as if he were buying a racehorse, mused Mary), under twenty-one years old, willing and able to bear children, sophisticated, self-assured and worldly wise. She must be capable of entertaining the grandees they would invite to dinner, and of managing a large house with several servants. She must be upper class or at very least from the top ranks of the middle class (to compensate for his own lack of class, suspected Mary), with not even a hint of anything so scandalous as drink, divorce, debt or any other form of dishonesty. This paragon was to have no encumbrances such as children or dependent parents, and no desire to do anything but glorify her husband and impress all in his circle. He was unconcerned about his bride’s looks or tastes or character, and the possibility that she might not enjoy life in a far-flung continent had cast not even the slightest shadow over his mind.

  To Mary’s intensifying dislike was added anxiety, for most of the girls who had so far enquired were not of the class Cedric obviously thought he deserved. He would assuredly raise Cain if introduced to a shop assistant or a parlour maid. Among Mary’s friends were some upper-class girls, but she was not prepared to sacrifice friendship to the cause of appeasing this obnoxious client. So she played for time, diverting him by requesting more details about himself and the bride he sought.

  Cedric expanded so loudly and fulsomely on the subject dearest to his heart – himself – that he failed to notice Heather aiming kicks at the telephone bell underneath her desk, which made it ring. She then apparently took calls from gloriously aristocratic young ladies all agog to meet a Cedric Thistleton lookalike.

  Cedric sidled crab-wise away from Mary’s questions about his background and education. Having herself adopted a new name and persona, which involved fending off enquiries about her fictitious debutante year, in a twinkling of an eye Mary spotted the evasiveness with which Cedric ducked and dived about his ‘public school’. She grew convinced that he had left a council school at fourteen. But he waxed lyrical about his income of £800 a year and his progress up the ladder of a company which exported rubber. Hard work (and slimy toadying, Mary was certain) had elevated him to a position which would be further improved by the addition of a suitably superior wife, and he intended to gain promotion, adulation and envy by marrying into the aristocracy, or as near as possible to it.

  Quite casually, Cedric informed Mary that he had been on the verge of becoming engaged to eighteen-year-old Miss G., the youngest of five daughters of titled but impecunious parents. Choosing an engagement ring had focused his mind, and in the jeweller’s shop, fingering the little gold bands with their single large diamond, he had concluded that, despite her pedigree, Miss G. lacked the sophistication and social assurance to impress his circle. So he had summoned her to what she had doubtless imagined would be a romantic proposal of marriage, and told her he was of the considered opinion that she would not do.

  Mary was outraged. ‘Oh, how my heart bleeds for that poor child,’ she burst out as soon as she had reluctantly accepted Cedric’s registration fee, and closed the Bureau’s door firmly behind him. ‘I met many “Miss G.”s when I was with Uncle George in Assam. They were all young and ignorant, with no proper education, brought up purely and simply to get married. Just like me, in fact! And you too, Heather! I know to the last sleepless night and anxious day what they felt like, and if I’d married either of the pompous idiots I was engaged to in Assam I’d have ended up like so many of them, locked in a gruesome marriage, a prison with no escape until death us did part. Or else I’d have been a spinster for ever, paid a pittance by some tyrannical old dowager, or by rich parents needing a
governess for their wretched infants.’

  ‘Calm down, dear Mary – it wasn’t always as bad as that,’ objected Heather. ‘Some of those girls ended up as happy as anyone ever is.’

  Mary fell silent, meditating on the fate of Miss G. Immediately after he’d cast her off, Cedric had told her, she had married a widowed colonel of forty-two. She was friends with his daughters, who were her age. They were distraught at the death of their darling mama, who had not been sufficiently robust to cope with the Malayan heat. Mary felt sure they had leaned on Miss G. to marry their papa, even though he was twenty-four years older than she. But what was Miss G. to do otherwise? She must have been terrified of being left on the shelf, and with the reputation of being a reject, for everyone in that closed, gossipy little world would have known she should have married Cedric. She would have been pitied, despised, patronized. Now she would at least have some status as the Colonel’s wife, and with luck some nice children of her own, and friendly stepdaughters.

  ‘She might not have done any better if she’d come to the Bureau!’ said Heather. ‘Anyway, did you get sufficient information from Cedric?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ sighed Mary, ‘he added pages of detail to his registration form. But heaven knows whether we’ll find someone for him. He’s like a clockwork toy you wind up which just keeps moving and jerking and ticking until the little wheels slow down and come to rest. All he wants is for his social circle to kow-tow to him, and a nonpareil wife will make that happen. Given half a chance he’d marry you, Heather!’