Mary Oliver: The lonely heart who invented the marriage bureau

Martin Lewis provides advice on marriage tax allowance scams

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It was 1939 and women outnumbered men by around two million thanks to the impact of Spanish Flu and the First World War. There were many thousands of lonely ­people longing to find someone to love. What, Mary pondered, if someone could help them? She had £15 in her pocket, the proceeds from selling her unused wedding presents. So she spent £5 of it on research. She placed a lonely-hearts advert in a newspaper – then the only way to meet someone outside of one’s social circle.

She was inundated with responses from men of every size, shape, age and social class, all united by their search for romance.

Something needed to be done, she decided. So, using her last £10, she teamed up with her friend and fellow socialite Heather Jenner, and set up Britain’s first marriage bureau in London’s Bond Street.

The plan was to create “an organisation that could arrange the actual matchmaking and see that only suitable people met each other,” she wrote in 1942 in a book about the early days of a service which paved the way for the era of internet dating and Tinder.

The book, ­written with ­journalist Mary Benedetta, has just been republished after it was discovered by scriptwriter Richard Kurti.

He was researching a project about the 1930s when he saw a footnote about two women who had set up the UK’s first marriage bureau when they were both in their early 20s. “One of the first things I was curious about was why anyone would set up a marriage bureau just as the world was about the plunge into a cataclysmic new war,” recalls Richard.

“But when I managed to track down a tattered copy of the book and opened it up, I was amazed.

“I sat down to read, expecting it to be very Brief Encounter, but I was hooked immediately. It was like a manual to ­marriage; it was like she had opened up the bonnet of a car and said, ‘This is how it works’. In many ways it was quite unromantic; she said this is what men want, this is what women want and it was very practical.

“Mary was clearly someone who didn’t tolerate fools gladly. But at the same time, she gave case after case of people who had come to her – people who had been in a rut – and she had been able to lift them out of it.

“She was someone who struggled to find happiness in her own life and wanted to ­liberate others.

“The bureau was set up on a shoestring – they barely had enough money to cover the rent, but within a few weeks they were a success. I love that she was so fearless – I see both of these women as real rebels against the status quo.”

Now Richard has not only ensured the book’s republication, he is also working on a TV series about the bureau for a Hollywood production company. Mary’s stories are extraordinary. One of her first clients was an isolated young woman who was a carer for her aunt and whose only joy in life was doing the flowers at the local vicarage.

She saw a small article in a ­newspaper about the bureau – the flowers had come wrapped in the paper – and took the plunge. It completely changed her life. Her dowdy appearance prompted the agency to expand beyond introductions to helping clients make the best of themselves; eventually it also helped organise weddings too.

“She was 34, she had a hat like one in a cartoon in Punch magazine and underneath it a face that had no sort of visible attraction beyond reasonably clear skin,” wrote Mary of her first make-over client.

“Her whole appearance was so mouse-like and ordinary.

“She lived in a village in Somerset and her days were spent doing ‘social work’ visiting the chronic invalids, arranging the flowers in the sanctuary and having passions for the vicar. She was locked in a prison of her own making because she lacked the initiative to turn the key and walk out of it.

“Then, by pure chance, she saw a newspaper column about the Marriage Bureau. While she was talking, I was wondering whether I could not somehow recreate her and make her into the person she wanted to be. I decided to try. I whipped her off to choose some underclothes. Next, I took her to get a tailor-made suit and an attractive dress and I took her to the hairdressers.”

But Mary underestimated the effect of that the transition and was soon wondering if she had created a monster.

“After her first meeting, with a retired civil servant who tried to kiss her, my little sanctuary mouse underwent such a terrifying change that I began to think my recreation had gone ahead of me most alarmingly,” she recalled.

“She had run through an MP, a bookseller, a farmer, a naval officer and a textile manufacturer in the space of five months. It was always the men who fell back from her unabashed advances. One day a letter from her arrived at the office to be ­forwarded to the young man she was writing to. As I picked it up, a snapshot tumbled out.

“There was my sanctuary mouse, standing full view in a pair of very short scanty knickers and the barest little bodice.

“Feeling rather as if I was dreaming, I pushed it back into the envelope and in doing so I caught sight of a second snapshot – the same, only back view.

“The end of the story was that she did marry the young man who had the letter with the snapshots – they were very happy.”

Soon the agency was setting up would be lovers from all over the British Empire.

One customer was a whaler from the Seychelles requiring a wife who wouldn’t mind the smell of carcasses.

Others included aristocrats, MPs and servants.

Working class clients were allowed to pay off their £5 joining fee in instalments – ditto the £21 newlyweds would pay for a successful match.

One vicar tried to get around this by claiming the lady they’d introduced him to was now living in his house as his housekeeper, not his wife.

Then there was the multi-millionaire who insisted on taking his dates to the cheapest restaurants and the social climber who was only interested in a woman aristocratic enough to regularly appear in Tatler.

The number of people who got married on their books was an indication of just how successful they were – by the time she wrote the book, three years after they’d started, there were 932 married couples and a further 250 who were engaged.

But the marriages may not have been the bureau’s only success.

Richard tracked down Mary’s niece, June Borthwick, 65, an agricultural consultant from Lincolnshire. The pair have a hunch that the bureau may have been set up, in part, to snare foreign agents landing on British soil in desperate need for a spouse for their cover.

“When June started working in London she wrote to her aunt, who was living in America, and said she had been to see the Bond Street office where the bureau had started,” says Richard.

“Her aunt was furious and wrote back saying, ‘Never do that, never follow me up again.’ It was one of the things that fuelled this idea that the bureau was also a form of intelligence gathering. June also has a picture of Mary at Hitler’s bombed out villa in the Alps in 1945, which seemed quite an odd thing.

“We’ve got no proof of it but June is determined to find out more. One thing we know is she never did things conventionally,” adds Richard.

Mary left the bureau and the country in 1947 and moved first to Canada and then America, where she married twice and worked as a tour guide at a waxwork museum before dying at 74 of lung cancer.

Heather married three times (she was already divorced when she started the agency with Mary) and continued to run the bureau for many years, as well as becoming a well-known agony aunt.

The Marriage Bureau was to continue ­putting lonely hearts together until 1992 when it was finally taken over by a rival.

“It was hugely successful, with many imitators,” says Richard. “Thousands of marriages happened and kids were born because of Mary and Heather. They were revolutionaries.”

• The Marriage Bureau: The True Story that Revolutionised Dating by Mary Oliver, Mary Benedetta and Richard Kurti is published by B7 Media, priced £16.99 in hardback and £7.99 in paperback. Also as an audiobook from iTunes and Audible

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