Marriage Bureau

Mary Oliver

Description

At a time when internet dating is booming across all ages and classes and women are setting the agenda as never before, some things have not changed: You can't always leave love to chance. And whether the search begins with an app in the 21st century or a visit to two young but savvy matchmakers in the 1940s, the desire for lifelong happiness with a perfectly suited partner remains the same.This is the remarkable true story of the Marriage Bureau; its successes, its rare failures and its many clients, told with wit and honesty in Mary and Heather's own words.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Dating

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 23 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781914169267
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Marriage Bureau
The True Story That Revolutionised Dating


written by
Mary Oliver & Mary Benedetta
with additional material and photographs by
Richard Kurti




Marriage Bureau
First published in 1942
This edited edition published in 2021 by
B7 Enterprises Limited
Unit 2, Whitegates, Berries Road
Cookham, Berkshire, SL6 9SD
www.b7media.com
Digital edition distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2020 Mary Oliver, Mary Benedetta & Richard Kurti
The rights of Mary Oliver, Mary Benedetta and Richard Kurti to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Every attempt has been made to contact the original copyright holder of all intellectual property featured in this publication. All media have been used with the copyright holder’s permission. Where this has not been possible, please contact B7 Media and we will endeavour to rectify any identified anomalies immediately.



Photo Credits
Title pageCourtesy of... Jane Borthwick
vi...R Kurti
2...R Kurti
5...R Kurti
8...R Kurti
10...Jane Borthwick
15...R Kurti
67...Jane Borthwick
85 (Chelsea Pensioner)...Anizza Dreamstime.com
85 (Postbox)...R Kurti
87...Jane Borthwick
98...R Kurti
146...Jane Borthwick



Preface: The Dating Game
It was pure chance that led me to discover this forgotten gem.
I was doing some research for a screenplay about a royal chef, when I came across a simple footnote: ‘On 17 April 1939, two 25 year old women opened Britain’s first marriage bureau in Bond Street.’
Immediately I was intrigued. When it was clear that the world was slipping towards a cataclysmic conflict, why on earth would two young women set up a business devoted to love and marriage?
Digging deeper, I discovered that one of the women, Mary Oliver, had written a book about it in 1942. It was only published once, possibly due to the wartime rationing of paper, before vanishing altogether, but I managed to get hold of a copy.
From the moment I turned the first page, I was hooked. This was a million miles from the stiff Brief Encounter world I had expected. Mary’s voice was modern and blistering. Any woman who in 1942 can write “so few wives have the intelligence to imagine that perhaps the most devoted husbands may not want to see too much of them,” deserves an audience. Somehow I had to bring this book back to life.
In order to do that I needed to find out who owned the rights. I started on google, expanded my search through libraries and records offices, spent many days phoning lists of people who shared a surname, and finally, after 18 months, discovered seven people across two continents who, unbeknown to them, now owned the rights to the book. It was a fascinating journey, and along the way I discovered many things about Mary Oliver that showed just how ahead of her time she was.
Nowadays we take dating for granted; with online dating, virtual flirting, speed-dating, slow-dating, dinner-dating and singles’ nights geared towards all ages, religions and sexual orientations, there’s never been a better time to look for love. But if you wind the clock back to 1939, you find yourself in a very different world...


The horrors of WWI and the Spanish flu pandemic had left Britain with an excess of nearly two million women; hard on the heels of war, the Great Depression caused huge social upheaval, disrupting whole communities and traditional ways of meeting the opposite sex. At the same time, expectations were rising; women who had worked in factories during the war had their horizons expanded, and now they had the vote as well, they set their sights higher in all aspects of life and love.
It was this yearning for something more that 25 year old Mary Oliver sensed when she set up the Bureau with just a few pounds in her pocket.
‘A simple, quiet, rather demure young girl, with an intelligent, pretty face and gravely sympathetic dark-brown eyes,’ is how her co-author describes Mary.
‘Flamboyant.’ ‘Tough.’ ‘Sharp.’ ‘A loner.’ ‘Self-sufficient.’ ‘Single-minded.’ ‘Streetwise.’ ‘Dogmatic.’ ‘Formidable,’ is how people who met Mary Oliver remember her. She was the child her parents always worried about. In 1935 they thought they’d married her off to a respectable civil servant in colonial India. But just as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, Mary decided she didn’t like the man after all and sold the wedding presents to buy a ticket back to England.
Thank goodness she dumped the dull fiancé, because it was on that steamship that she had her revolutionary idea: to set up the UK’s first ever marriage bureau.



Chapter I
An unfortunate experiment – How Mary Oliver thought of the Marriage Bureau and why she started it – Journey to India with a one-way ticket – What happened in India – Plans to start the Marriage Bureau – Looking for an office.
Somebody had left the gate open. I noticed it because it was one of those single iron gates that had dropped on its hinges and you could never shut it casually. You had to coax it over hummocks in the gravel path and I remembered doing this when I went out.
I wondered vaguely who had come to call. Probably it was one of my mother’s usual country visitors, and I didn’t give it another thought, as today I was feeling particularly happy and carefree.
I had been for a walk in the rain, rejoicing secretly, while my feet seemed to float over the clogging mud paths, and I wanted to sing stupid songs to the two spaniels who were flurrying in and out of the dripping hedges. Nobody knew what those last three weeks had been like, or what a release I was now celebrating.
What did it matter if it was a gloomy day? I looked across the lawn at the square-towered village church, and its wet grey walls; at the mulberry tree in the middle of the lawn standing like an old man in a heavy damp cloak, and the dark group of yew trees at the end of the path. And I took hold of a branch of rhododendrons and shook it light-heartedly as I went past, so that the overloaded raindrops showered on my mackintosh. Nothing could possibly be sombre for me that afternoon.
The short garden path belonged to my home in Cambridgeshire, a simple farmhouse that had stood there for five hundred years. Still in my gayest mood on this summer afternoon, I opened the front door into the wide stone hall ... and heard something that made me stop quite still.
Suddenly I realised the awfulness of what had happened. My gay mood vanished before the mockery of the disaster I had done so much to avert.


The farmhouse where Mary Oliver grew up, with the mulberry tree and church beyond
I dragged off my Wellington boots and stood them in a corner on the stone floor away from the rug. I was staring at the familiar copper log box, and listening to the slow tick of the grandfather clock. It seemed hours instead of seconds before the voices spoke again and made me more certain of what I dreaded to believe.
The farmhouse where Mary Oliver grew up, with the mulberry tree and church beyond.
For the past three weeks I had sat in that hall, listening for footsteps outside. Whenever they came, I darted towards the door, and as the maid appeared from the back of the hall, I had to look as if I 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 towards the gate.
There was the same vigil on the telephone. For three weeks I had never dared to bathe properly, but made a cautious splashing in the bath, while I kept my dressing-gown near to hand, ready for the headlong rush to reach the telephone before anyone else. Sometimes I was beaten – usually by my schoolboy brother who so inconveniently was home for the holidays.
Mealtimes were an ordeal of anxiety. Often just as I was lulled into a false sense of security, enjoying my soup and thinking the whole thing was safely over, my mother would say: “Mr— rang you up.” She always said it without comment, but in a way that made me feel she wanted him explained. Or my father would suddenly come out of a reverie about the cows and horses to give me a message from yet another caller on the telephone that they had never heard of before. I used to think how scandalised they would have been had I told them I had never heard of them either.
How could I ever tell my family that I had put an advertisement in a 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, so that I could follow my own lines with the bureau and be sure I wasn’t copying anything that already existed. What better way to find out than to become a client?
So I paid £5 and advertised for a husband. But in my zeal over the experiment I never gave a thought to the consequences. And these took the awkward 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.