Marriages are Made in Bond Street by Penrose Halson review – Tinder, 1940s-style

‘Terrible. Looks like hell’, ‘Rather like a ferret, though friends of the Coxes’, were two instant opinions of clients at a wartime marriage bureau – but there were weddings galore

Before sex-before-marriage there was marriage, and to help it happen there was the personal column, the matrimonial papers, the season and less dignified means such as the fishing fleet, whereby young middle-class English women were sent out to the colonies as potential brides for lonely tea planters, soldiers and administrators. It was the plight of the colonial bachelor in particular (pointed out to them by an uncle in Assam) that inspired two young women in the late 1930s to set up the London Marriage Bureau. They suspected they could fix up plenty of suitable matches from among their own circle of acquaintances – men and women – and make money at the same time.

The scheme took off in ways they could never have imagined, and soon the two founders – Mary Oliver and her friend Heather Jenner, both 24 – had moved to an office in New Bond Street and had clients queuing on the stairs and waiting on the roof. They had devised a comforting formula, something between social work and therapy, asking each punter for detailed information about themselves and the kind of mate wanted, while making private assessments of character and looks, with a classification system that allowed for shading such as “Near Lady +”, “Gentish” and “MBTS” (Much Better Than Some). They then tried to match up one with another, a process that obviously became easier the more lonely hearts signed on.

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