Marriages Are Made in Bond Street: True Stories from a 1940S Marriage Bureau

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 match-making. Drawing on the bureau's extensive archives, Penrose Halson - who, many years ago, found herself the proprietor of the bureau - tells both its story, and those of its clients. We meet a remarkable cross-section of British society in the 1940s: gents with a 'merry twinkle', potential fifth-columnists, nervous spinsters, sailors seeking 'a nice quiet affekshunate girl', and young women resembling Greta Garbo or Vivien Leigh, all desperately longing to find The One. And, thanks to Heather and Mary, they almost always did just that.