Marriages Are Made in Bond Street

Long before people went searching for their soulmates on the Internet, there were discreet businesses where, for a fee, you would be put in touch with your ideal match as potential wife or husband. London’s first such marriage bureau was founded by two friends, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, just months prior to the outbreak of World War II.
 
Written by Penrose Halson, a subsequent owner of the business, and based on Jenner’s personal archives, this tells the story of the Bureau’s early clients and also how it struggled initially for acceptance when society still had fixed ideas about how one went about finding a suitable partner, never mind the suspicions that two attractive young women in business might be up to something immoral.
 
Although marketed as non-fiction, it’s pretty obvious the truth has been greatly embroidered with fiction in the same voice throughout. It has all the “carry-on regardless” attitude that prevailed during war-time London and in places almost borders on a Brian Rix farce, with clients such as a dodgy Arabian “sheik”- or is he really Welsh? - and a man who wants a wife with only one leg. These, and many other peculiar and occasionally hilarious demands of the clients and notes by the interviewers, fill several pages of appendices at the end of the book.
 
A few working-class types did venture into the elite preserve of Bond Street in an effort to find partners, but on the whole there is a preponderance of certain types from the upper middle classes, retired brigadiers and daughters of peers, gay (in the old-fashioned sense) divorcees, trembling virgins, bumbling chaps from the colonies, twerps called Cedric and frumpy spinsters called Myrtle. Some of the owners and secretaries who worked at the bureau were quirky as well and apparently there really was a woman called Picot Schooling. The loneliness, desperation and tragedies at the heart of some of these personal lives are glossed over and the result is lightweight rather than insightful or philosophical.
 
If you love all those rather twee British TV series such as “Call the Midwife”, “Father Brown” or “Home Fires” then this book is definitely for you. Must admit I did enjoy its nostalgia and look forward to another wallow when the Bond Street Bureau comes to our screens - as it surely must!
 
Perhaps not quite four toodle pips, but a jolly spiffing three.

Note: This book has the more pragmatic title of The Marriage Bureau in the US, I guess with the assumption Americans are unaware of the prestige of a Bond Street address.


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