The Marriage Bureau: The True Story of How Two Matchmakers Arranged Love in Wartime London

by Penrose Halson

Overview

A riveting glimpse of life and love during and after World War II—a heart-warming, touching, and thoroughly absorbing true story of a world gone by.

In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined twenty-four-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London’s Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking. Drawing on the bureau’s extensive archives, Penrose Halson—who many years later found herself the proprietor of the bureau—tells their story, and those of their clients.

From shop girls to debutantes; widowers to war veterans, clients came in search of security, social acceptance, or simply love. And thanks to the meticulous organization and astute intuition of the Bureau’s matchmakers, most found what they were looking for.

Penrose Halson draws from newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, and interviews with the proprietors themselves to bring the romance and heartbreak of matchmaking during wartime to vivid, often hilarious, life in this unforgettable story of a most unusual business.

“A book full of charm and hilarity.”—Country Life

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062562678
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	326
Sales rank:	889,938
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

PENROSE HALSON has been a teacher, an editor and a writer. She was first a client and later, beginning in 1986, the proprietor of the Katharine Allen Marriage & Advice Bureau, with which Heather Jenner’s agency had by then merged. She is the author of Happily Ever After: How to Meet Your Match. Penrose is married and lives in London.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Audrey's Uncle Has a Brainwave 3

2 No, It's Not a Brothel 18

3 Open for Matrimonial Business 31

4 The Capitulation of Cedric Thistleton 47

5 The Perfect Secretary and Other Learning Curves 61

6 New Clients Wanted-but No Spies, Please 76

7 Mary Transforms Myrtle 91

8 The Mansion and the Mating 108

9 Mary's Bones and Babies 124

10 While Bombs Fall the Bureau Booms 139

11 Sex, Tragedy, Success and Bust Bodices 154

12 A Sideline and Two Triumphs 169

13 Other Agendas, Pastures New 185

14 Heather Chooses Mating over Chickens 201

15 Picot and Dorothy Hold the Fort 218

16 Peacetime Problems 233

17 Loneliness and Heartbreak 249

18 Mr. Hedgehog, Journalists, a Tiny Baptist and Lies 264

19 A Chapter of Accidents and Designs 281

20 Thanks to Uncle George 297

Acknowledgments 311

Picture Acknowledgments 315

P.S. Section 316

Meet Penrose Halson 2

Requirements of Female Clients 1939-circa 1949 3

Requirements of Male Clients 1939-circa 1949 9

Interviewers' Comments 1939-circa 1949 18

Reading Group Questions 22

Editorial Reviews

[This book is] rather like a box of chocolates — to be savored and enjoyed at one’s leisure.” — Huffington Post

“A breezy social history for readers interested in tales of a bygone age.” — Library Journal

From the Publisher

[This book is] rather like a box of chocolates — to be savored and enjoyed at one’s leisure.

Huffington Post

05/15/2017
Debut author Halson presents a highly readable story of a matchmaking bureau on London's Bond Street created by two pioneering women in the months before World War II. In 1992, Halson took over this historic business, operating it until 2000. Here she utilizes the bureau's extensive archives of letters, advertisements, newspaper accounts, registration forms, and photographs to open a window into the lives of men and women, rich and poor, between 1939 and 1949. From a historical standpoint, this book is valuable for what it reveals about how the gloom of wartime society. Men were eager to marry before they were sent to the front while women, remembering the gender imbalances of the years after the Great War, were anxious to secure a husband. The class consciousness of the age is also apparent, as each client was assigned a "category" and socially typecast by the astute matchmakers, who came to be seen as reliable observers of social life and mores. The appendix offers a detailed listing of what clients were seeking in a spouse, which should interest historians. VERDICT A breezy social history for readers interested in tales of a bygone age.—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Library Journal