Between 1848 and 1900, an endless number of eccentric and unrelated ads dot the agony column:
You could not speak. It was so sudden. I am a good rider. Green is my favorite color. I want money.
Small House. Danger. Cross the sea.
Since Friday morning, I die hourly. Where are you and when will you return?—J.S.
My colours are nailed not tied to the masthead. T.
Hampstead Heath Enclosure. Something’s up.
If the youth that left Islington on Sunday evening can remember that he ever had a mother, he is informed he will soon be deprived of that blessing, except he immediately writes with particulars, or personally appears before her.
Cloves. Many things have forced themselves upon me. From the past let us gather strength. T wants to meet Bird. Infelix.
I entreat you to keep your word, or it may be fatal. Laws were made to bind the villains of society.
However, the most intriguing ads in the Victorian era ran in series, the interested parties corresponding through Personal ads. Readers followed these as avidly as Dickens’ serials. For example, between July and November of 1850, the following advertisements appeared:
The one-winged dove must die unless the Crane returns to be a shield against her enemies.
Somerset, S.B. The mate of the Dove must take wing forever unless a material change takes place.
It is enough. One man alone upon earth have I found noble. Away from me forever. Cold heart and mean spirit, you have lost what millions, empires, could not have bought, but which a single word, truthfully and nobly spoken might have made your own to all eternity! Yet you are forgiven, depart in peace. I rest in my Redeemer.
The mate of the Dove bids a final farewell. Adieu to the British Isles, although such a resolution cannot be accomplished without poignant grief. W.
The most mysterious series consisted of three cryptic ads in three different years. On March 24, 1849, this appeared in the agony column: “No doormat tonight.” One year later, March 28, 1850, the message was: “Doormat and beans tonight.” More than a year later. May 28, 1851, only: “Doormat tonight.” Students of the agony column have speculated for years on this series. What did the key word “doormat” mean? Did it mean the absence of a stern father or a jealous husband, or did it point to the victim of a murder? History provides no answer but the reader’s own.
The longest single series of advertisements in the agony column ran fifteen years, from 1850 to 1865, and was inserted by an eccentric millionaire named E. J. Wilson. There appeared a steady bombardment of ads, written (when The Times had as yet no ban on foreign languages) in French, German, and English. These advertisements tell a sad little story. Wilson worked in the British Customs Office, had a private fortune, married, and produced a daughter. He became involved in some smuggling scheme; his wife objected and left him. For fifteen years, through the agony column, he tried to woo her back. His advertisements followed her when she traveled to Stockholm and to Paris. His paid notices eventually accused her openly of having a lover. She replied, in the agony column, to this charge. “You are deceived. I foster none, but am true to ties of happier days. Open to me a communication and a public investigation. Mary.” Many of Wilson’s ads were in code: “ACHILLES has got the lever. Corruption sinks and virtue swims. E.J.W.” Finally, in October, 1865, having lost his job, his fortune, and his health, Wilson arranged a meeting with the wife whom he had not seen in a decade and a half. The time and place of the meeting appeared in an ad in the agony column. Whatever the outcome of this meeting, Wilson had placed his last advertisement.
And today, others take up where Wilson left off. In the tiny print of the agony column, in a vocabulary replete with words like “desperate” and “brokenhearted,” parted lovers continue to meet, schemes for easy millions continue to materialize, beautiful old Paisley shawls continue to sell, and escapists desiring “any sort of remunerative adventure, would risk all” continue to defy the ever-more-crowded columns of Mortgage Investments, Legal Notices, Business Offers—and Births and Deaths.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…
I became interested in the agony column of The Times of London while I was living at the Athenaeum Court off Green Park, and later, at the Savoy Hotel, in London during the bitter winter of 1946 and 1947. The city was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Second World War, and there were food shortages, and rationing was still in existence. The standard price for an austere postwar dinner was five shillings, although if you were in a better-class restaurant, then two to six shillings extra was added as a “house charge.” Lunch was always an omelet made from powdered eggs, and tea. Dinner was usually three courses, a soup thick with potatoes, chicken patties and brussels sprouts, and a sweet. If the diner wanted bread with his meal, he had to give up one of his three courses. Since I was a compulsive bread eater, and there was no bread with the regular meals, I was constantly famished. In fact, the highlight of that visit to London occurred when an English newspaper correspondent, connected with Buckingham Palace, appeared at my hotel room on New Year’s Day of 1947 with an overwhelmingly generous gift—a loaf of bread that he had purloined from his own mother’s ration.
During those London evenings, as I contemplated my receding navel (I lost seventeen pounds in that period), I would often try to take my mind off my stomach by reading the London Times. Since I was not interested in cricket or bird-watching or Labour’s latest program, this was not particularly diverting—until I discovered what I had for several weeks overlooked: the agony column. This discovery was a major enchantment. And from that time on, I read the agony column as religiously as the Archbishop of Canterbury read his daily Scripture. I lost my interest in the staff of life because I now had what a writer needs most of all—food for thought.
Before leaving London, I began to research the agony column, questioning the oldest employees of The Times and spending hours poring over back editions of the newspaper. Later, in Los Angeles, in 1948, I wrote my story of the world’s foremost Personal column. I wrote about it for pleasure, as one writes about an unusual hobby like collecting porcelain buttons or locks of human hair or epitaphs on tombstones. I then filed away my precious story, awaiting some future time when the immediate postwar tensions and the atmosphere of all-work-and-no-play would be supplanted by a new era of leisure and well-being. While preparing this book, I decided that such a day had dawned. Many Americans who sought escape from the harsher aspects of life, who wanted mental diversion and fleeting peace of mind, were turning more feverishly to crossword puzzles, Double-Crostics, mathematical games, and James Bond. Surely these were the ones to be reminded of the stimulations, challenges, amusements, and ultimate contentment available to them every day through their local Personal columns, heirs to the honored agony column of The Times of London.
As a matter of fact, in recent years I have found that more and more Americans are reading, and later, reciting their favorite items from, the Personal columns of their own favorite newspaper. Every so often, lately, I find myself reading a newspaper report or feature about a Personal advertisement in some other city that has led to the arrest of a criminal, the reunion of a long-separated family, the location of a missing heir, the exposure of an espionage ring, or the beginning of an exotic adventure.
In October of 1962, the Hearst newspaper chain carried the story of a Personal advertisement that had appeared in the San Francisco Examiner six months earlier, and which had led to a denouement that few authors of fiction could equal, let alone improve upon, in their most fertile imaginings.
The circumstances that fostered this dramatic Personal advertisement were these: In 1954, an elderly antique dealer named Clarke was found dead in his shop. He had been tortured, then slashed to death. In his shop were also found two ornate swords bearing bloody fingerprints. In 1960, the Federal Bureau of Investigation came across fingerprints of a steel-worker named Robert Lee Kidd, who was living in Gary, Indiana. His fingerprints matched those on the swor
ds in the shop where the antique dealer had been murdered six years before.
The authorities learned that Kidd, a former sailor, and a heavy drinker, and his devoted wife, Gladys, had lived in San Francisco at the time of the crime. A year later, they had moved to Gary, where Kidd found steady employment and settled down. Kidd was charged with the murder, brought back to California for trial, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the gas chamber. After the state Supreme Court reversed the verdict on a technicality, a second trial was held. This resulted in a hung jury. When a third trial was scheduled, Gladys Kidd, by now totally impoverished, passionately certain of her husband’s innocence, became desperate. What she wanted was a topflight criminal lawyer, who believed in her husband’s innocence as firmly as she did. Without knowledge of such an attorney, or funds to hire him if she found him, she wondered what could be done for her mate. The critical trial was only eight weeks off. At almost the last minute, she struck upon the idea of inserting a brief advertisement in the Personal column of the San Francisco Examiner.
Gladys Kidd wrote her ad, paid for it, and in the normal process of events it appeared in the classified section of May 2, 1962:
I don’t want my husband to die in the gas chamber for a crime he did not commit. I will therefore offer my services for 10 years as a cook, maid or housekeeper to any leading attorney who will defend him and bring about his vindication. 522 Hayes St UN 3-9799.
The drama inherent in the routinely printed advertisement sent Gladys Kidd’s plea and offer vaulting onto front pages of newspapers throughout the country. Five prominent attorneys immediately came forward and offered to serve her. She selected Vincent Hallinan, one of the most gifted and colorful attorneys in San Francisco, a city filled with great lawyers. Hallinan set out to prove that Kidd was a decent human being, and at the same time to imply that the police had done a poor job of investigation and to cover up their failure had built a shaky case against Kidd.
In the third trial, the defense attorney interrogated a University of California criminologist, who stated that neither of the swords in the victim’s antique shop had been employed as the murder weapon. Kidd’s attorney then interrogated an antique specialist, to show that such swords were sold, bought, resold frequently, and the same ones turned up in shop after shop. Finally, the attorney interrogated Kidd himself, and revealed that Kidd and a friend had often browsed through San Francisco antique shops, and had once visited a shop where they had come upon these same swords, picked them up, and engaged in a playful duel during which Kidd’s fingers were cut, which accounted for his bloodstained prints. Apparently, the weapons had found their way to Clarke’s shop, although Clarke had not been murdered with either weapon. The jury deliberated, and after eleven hours announced that Kidd was not guilty. But when it was time for payment, attorney Hallinan declined to accept Gladys Kidd’s offer of ten years’ bondage.
Once again, a Personal column had served not only dreamers—but justice.
Yet, it is unlikely that this Personal column, or any others in America or the rest of the world, would have existed to serve people like the Kidds had not the agony column of the London Times made such advertisements fashionable and popular.
Recently, I wondered if the situation of the original agony column, and the rules under which the column was conducted, had been altered in any way during the seventeen years since I had written about it. I made inquiries of the managers of The Times and soon had my answers.
Since 1962, The Times, as well as its advertising offices, has occupied quarters in a new building, unscarred by bombs. Mr. Canna, the advertising veteran of thirty years who had been in charge of the agony column when I had been in London in 1947, had retired from The Times and relinquished his supervision of the column in 1952. The Times appeared loath to mention his successor by name, informing me: “These days no one individual has sole charge of the Personal column…It would be misleading to introduce personalities.”
The placement and format of the column remain immutable against the changes often demanded by progress—the front page and tiny type are as ever. Today, customers cannot submit an ad of less than two lines, for which they are charged eighteen shillings and sixpence per six-word line. However, in seventeen years, many old restrictions—such as those against political ads, foreign-language ads, matrimonial ads, and ads longer than five lines—have broken down. An executive of the London Times defined the new and more liberal policy for me as follows: “There are now no restrictions on size or language (provided that we are sent a translation for our own records); we do however still exclude all forms of display advertising from these columns. Political advertisements are generally acceptable; so, within the bounds of reason and good taste, would be lonely-hearts advertisements—although I do not recall any instances of such advertising. Adoption advertisements are illegal in this country.”
But the most outstanding attraction of the agony column, its colorful contents, remains unspoiled by time. In studying the Personal notices for 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1965, I was relieved and pleased to see that the column was still a parade ground for the dramatic, the provocative, the bizarre, the comic, the romantic, the mysterious.
Only a few new trends disturbed me. While The Times always permitted the agony column to serve as a marketplace for the wares of individuals, they had also always sternly rejected any invasion from retail dealers. However, unless I misread certain ads, this commercialized invasion has slyly begun. In an issue of The Times for September, 1964, I was at first heartened, then disillusioned, by the following:
Deirdre—Fly at once. All discovered—Hugo. Everyone knows about us! All agree you must leave London now! Come and work out of town with me. If your firm won’t go, you must. Tell your fiendish bosses lots of new offices going up in Essex, Herts, etc. Get him to write to Mr. A. Galbraith at the Location of Offices Bureau…
To the true agony-column addict, this deceptive realty salesmanship is deplorable. AH purists must regard such invasions of the column’s function as beastly.
However, I must quickly add that individual sales of personal wares, or inquiries after objets d’oddity, are as tantalizing and satisfying as they have ever been. I need only quote a sampling of advertisements concerning goods that appeared between 1962 and 1964, to reassure fellow devotees:
Honeymoon tent, brand new and unused; cost 42 pounds, will accept 34 pounds. Write Box K 160.
Lordship of Manor. Ancient documents and right to use the title “Lord of the Manor” 13th century origin; will only be sold to British residents with good references. Write Box E 1470.
Covered Waggon Or Suchlike. Will any person who abominating seeing children left outside, while parents are drinking, lend any two large covered vehicles to use during the rebuilding, as a temporary children’s play place.
Regretfully, too, I found some indication, in a certain type of new advertisement, that England is fast becoming a land of many Scrooges. “A large number of people,” an executive of The Times told me, “have been putting ads of holiday greetings in the Personal column instead of sending Christmas cards.”
More or less typical of these were the persons who, in the Christmas week of 1962, placed this ad in the agony column: “C.T.P., N.J.S.L., T.A.M.E., I.M.O., D.I.A.H. are too idle and too broke to send Christmas cards”—and then offered their best wishes, wholesale, to one and all.
Happily, in Christmas week of 1964, another English couple recanted a similar heresy, when they advised the agony column readers, “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Muir will not be making an announcement in The Times this year. Instead, they will be sending their friends Christmas cards.”
As always, no week passes without some English subject advertising his gratefulness (for whatever intriguing and undisclosed personal benefits he has received) to the Maker and the Son and all the Heavenly Hosts. Glancing through the agony columns of recent years, I found F. M. T. proclaiming, “Many Thanks to Almighty God that we are justified by Faith alone,” and J. B. callin
g out, “Grateful Thanks to Our Lady of Fatima, St. Jude, and St. Anthony,” and J. A. N. flatly stating, “Many Thanks for Religious Freedom in Protestant England,” and J. P. pathetically imploring, “Saint Martin de Porres, half-caste and illegitimate, cure us of intolerance.”
The balance of the Personal columns of the last four years I found brimming with gems of dramatic promise, casual little advertisements ready to send a hundred Peter Flemings into a hundred strange adventures. Some recent examples from the agony column of The Times are:
Darling Rita—most beautiful 20-year old for the next 365 days—My love always, John.
Madame Serphoui Mendillian seeks her son, Antranik Mendillian, born…Turkey, 1910. Would anyone having any information concerning his whereabouts please contact Mme. Serphoui Mendillian…Marseille, 15c, France.
Married Couple in late 30’s would like to join lively party for Christmas, please reply to Box S 651.
Crocodile Hunting. Advice wanted, good dinner offered. Write Box P 1896.
A lady of title would like to chaperone debutante. Every advantage. Write Box M 1307.
A Persian passport was left in a train on Saturday 5th December; if found please return it to Embassy.
MacGreen—Would Mrs. MacGreen of London, who had in her care, Victor Rober Liukkonen from Finland, about year 1899, please contact Mrs. Jenny Lind, Helsinki Liisankatu 17 C 19 Finland.
Finally, on May 13, 1965, the Personal column of The Times received a unique curtsy of homage from an American visitor. On that date, the agony column carried the following advertisement:
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