Singled Out (18 page)

boat to New Zealand, the failure to get husbands at home propelled them

overseas. In  the number of British emigrants (male and female) to all

countries peaked at nearly ,. In Census year the figure dropped

again, but by  the numbers were back up to over ,. Despite

attempts by the overstretched Women’s Migration Societies to play down



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the matrimonial opportunities of the Colonies, and to make it very clear

just how hard a life women were letting themselves in for, applications for

passage soared in the early s.

And sometimes it worked. The description of her life by a young woman

who wrote home from Vancouver Island in the s might well have

sounded enticing to a grimy, exhausted kitchen-maid waiting for Cupid’s

bow and arrow to penetrate her Birmingham basement:

I am now a companion help to Mrs O.; though I work hard I have never had such a time in my life. I have been to hundreds of dances and dinners and tennis teas and out for picnics on the lake. In the Autumn we got snowed up and I put on breeches and worked shoulder to shoulder with the Colonel and another man . . .

Mrs O. said I dropped from heaven. I got up early, got breakfast, dressed the children, skipped round the rooms and then went out sawing till about . am.

Then, knocked up a savoury mess for lunch, washed up and went in the Wagon

with the Colonel to the meadow and there stacked logs, great big ones, into the wagon till it was piled high . . .

Mrs O. had supper ready when we came in and I put the baby to bed, then

bathed and went out to dances and anything that was going, in anything that could move in the snow. It was Life . . .

And now for
the
news. I’m engaged to be married to—. He is  years old and is just like one of Vachell’s* heroes, only nicer.

For one happy young woman, the risk had paid off.

But the hope that once you set foot on foreign soil, the male–female

ratio would be miraculously reversed – that suddenly any half-presentable

female would find herself besieged by glamorous colonial officials hell-bent on leading a wee wifie to the altar – was not solidly founded. W. A.

Carrothers, author of
Emigration from the British Isles
(), pointed out that in most of the Dominions the excess of males was restricted to the outlying rural districts. ‘In the towns of the Dominions the surplus male population is negligible, and in some cases there is an actual surplus of females . . .’ he said. Lumberjacks and ranchers might be there for the taking, but in his view most ordinary women of marriageable age would be unlikely to

choose the hardship of life in the bush or the jungle. Moreover, once you

settled for a posting on one of the remote farms, distances were prohibitive, and you were perhaps even lonelier than back in the old country. A children’s nurse who took a job in Nyasaland in the late s described

* Horace Annesley Vachell, –, author of
A Woman in Exile
().

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her life in a cottage on the Zomba mountain looking after two small

children with five native house-servants:

It was dreadfully lonely at night when the boys went to their kraals . . . I always slept with a six-chambered revolver under my pillow, since leopards abound here.

Marriage prospects were nil, but there was a different kind of romance

about living in such a wild spot:

It’s a wonderful feeling being out in the blue alone. Last night the hyenas made a fearful noise and occasionally we see lions, plenty of baboons too . . . It really makes me sad when I think of the girls in England who spend their lives going to Town in the mornings with a little Bridge or Tennis in the afternoons, why
don’t
they get out and come out to these wide open spaces?

*

Settled in to her new life in Christchurch, New Zealand, Winifred Haward

too began to discover the glories of the natural world, and to pit herself

against them. Every vacation she had, she spent in the mountains. She took

up climbing and hiking, and with a group of her students set out on the

challenging cross-country route to Milford Sound. Trekking, ice-picking,

skiing and on horseback, they tackled extremes of terrain, from glaciers to

fjords, and semi-tropical bush. ‘I enjoyed myself immensely [and] discovered what I had not realised before, that I was uncommonly tough.’ If only she could meet a man whose vigour and guts matched hers, but for some reason

the only men in New Zealand who seemed to be attracted to her were

puny little things to whom she just couldn’t respond. ‘The right man hadn’t

appeared. It looked as if he never would.’

Winifred now began to realise that New Zealand was far from fulfilling

the promise that she had half-hoped for. In  she returned to England

and her old job as history lecturer at Bedford College, but couldn’t settle.

The PhD wasn’t getting finished, and the cautious approach didn’t seem to

be getting her anywhere. She returned to New Zealand in , not to

resume her lectureship but to look for a job; ‘I was sure I could find other work.’

This hit-and-miss attitude immediately landed her in difficulties. New

Zealand society had a long way to go in its attitude to women. If you

weren’t a wife you were nobody: ‘. . . the highest praise was for a woman

to be singled out as ‘‘the best housewife in the location’’ ’. In , with the slump hitting worldwide, it was impossible for an educated woman like 

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Winifred to compete in the career field. Thus for the next three years she

was forced to stick it out in low-status jobs: home help, shop assistant,

live-in nanny. Back in Christchurch she took a job helping an old lady to

write a dubious book proving the truth of astrology; later she managed to

scrape by on bits of journalism. And still there was no romance on the

horizon – unless you can describe her unobtrusive relationship with an

elderly widowed Englishman as love. It held out no prospects for Winifred,

but it gave modest and undemanding pleasure to both.

Finally she caved in and accepted employment in the one area where she

had sworn never to work – teaching. For a year she taught English, history

and scripture at a girls’ boarding school, hating it. At the end of the year she had saved enough for a tourist-class ticket home.

I had gone all out for adventure, and failed . . . I hadn’t failed in anything that called for my own kind of ability but in mean little jobs that no one else wanted . . .

I think that, thereafter, I was instinctively on the side of the underdog.

In , when she returned to England, Winifred Haward was thirty-five

years old.

*

Winifred’s wilderness years lasted until . In her memoir she is characteristically stoical about her single state, while never disguising the fact that she would have liked to be married. For respectable educated middle-class women it was hard. What could she do, where could she go?

Winifred had pride; perhaps she was not desperate enough, perhaps she

was too romantic, or simply too poor. Although there were men willing

to hire themselves out as ‘taxi-dancers’ in the dance halls, she didn’t take advantage of their services. These were the original ‘gigolos’; they cost sixpence a dance, and were available from a corral at the end of the dance— floor. Women who had less to lose – divorceés or rich widows – were

content to buy the ‘Super-Lizards’ in return for flattery, company and

sometimes sex. Black gigolos had a particular cachet – like ‘Chokey’, Mrs

Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘irreproachably-dressed’ companion in Evelyn Waugh’s

Decline and Fall
. A gossip column in
Woman’s Life
() complained bitterly about the way these suave studs were skewing the market: No Men for the Girls!

Fearful complaints from the ‘debs’ this season that the few young men the war has spared us are monopolised by middle-aged women, mostly those with private
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incomes; if it’s a true complaint – well, it’s not
entirely
a new one. Only – well, one does sympathise with the poor forsaken ‘buds’.

Even supposing she did spot a respectable man she liked the look of, for

the woman to approach the man was taboo. Dorothy Marshall, a Cambridge

contemporary of Winifred Haward’s, lost the chance of romance with a

fellow student because they were never introduced. She would see him in

her history lectures; no beauty, he had a red face and walked with two

sticks as both his knees had been shot away. ‘He rejoiced in the name of

Smellie; I lost my heart to him completely.’ For three whole years the pair

eyed each other across lecture theatres, but there was no socially acceptable way of bridging the gap. Later they were close friends and colleagues at the London School of Economics, but Dorothy’s career took her to South Africa before anything could materialise ‘. . . and somebody else had married him by the time I came back.’ Dorothy never married. ‘If I had married anyone, it should have been Smellie.’

Social taboos also prevailed against women hoping for a second chance

with a divorce´. Irene Angell’s office boss would have liked her to become

his second wife but, brought up in a strictly conventional lower-middle-class family, Irene preferred to remain single rather than marry a man whose ‘scandalous’ past would have stigmatised her for life as a home-breaker.

Thus the cruel conventions of the day condemned her to spinsterhood.

Looking back nearly seventy years later, Miss Angell clung gratefully to the meagre morsel of true love she felt to have been briefly hers: ‘You can always tell a person who has loved – the way they approach things is quite

different. I feel sorry for the women who never really loved somebody,

because at least I’ve got that. And there are a lot of women who have never

loved . . . I’m very romantic – stupid aren’t I? Being romantic ends you up

like me with two cats and a house.’

When the dance halls failed, when the agony aunts were sympathetic

but inadequate, and when New Zealand fell short of its promise, where did

you turn? The sex psychologist Walter Gallichan urged single women to

check the local population statistics when deciding where to go husband-hunting: Sussex, Bournemouth and Leicester, he pointed out unhelpfully, were particularly unpromising areas to look for spare men, as they already

had a disproportion of married men or Surplus Women, so don’t go there.

Bad luck if that was where you happened to live.

But when geography, good intentions and advice fell short, lonely hearts

had recourse to a final alternative. Vera Brittain was extremely struck by an advertisement that she had seen placed in the press during the war: 

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Lady,
fiance´
killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.

There were no preconditions, like ‘Good Sense of Humour’ or ‘Fun—

loving’. This lady was not proud; she had lost the one person she loved, so

rather than die an old maid, she might as well marry someone who needed

her. By  the editor of the monthly
Matrimonial Times
(founded in ) was claiming to bring about twenty weddings a week, , every year.

Based in Holborn, this magazine set out to be a ‘bona fide medium for

introductions’, business-like and confidential. Along with its predecessor

the
Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser
(founded ) these papers published the sparingly worded advertisements of spinsters, widows and bachelors who no longer knew where else to turn.

Today, leafing through their pages, it is tempting to imagine

‘BUSINESS WOMAN, ’ pairing up with ‘WIDOWER, ’ – but

presumably nothing came of it, since the Business Woman’s advertisement,

along with many others like it, was still running in the paper six months

later . . . An issue from  makes revealing reading:

MATRIMONY – Spinster, , loving disposition, fond of children, entertaining and country life, is anxious to correspond with a wounded officer of cultured tastes, with view to a matrimonial alliance; one with some means.

LADY, aged , spinster, cultured, bright temperament, small capital . . . would like to meet officer or civilian age – and good position . . . could be very happy with disabled officer needing a cheerful companion and pal.

SPINSTER, well-educated and of good family, aged , is desirous of marrying either bachelor or widower, aged about . Wounded officer for preference, receiving an income of about £ a year.

The above, well past the usual age for marriage, seem no longer to have

rated their chances of marriage with the fit and healthy males now in such

short supply and, like the lady whose case had so struck Vera Brittain, were prepared to settle for cripples and invalids. Such realism may have worked in their favour, though one wonders whether ‘Spinster,  . . . not painfully plain’ was well-advised to be quite so brutally honest about her looks.

These women’s stark neediness is often pitiably transparent: ‘Dressmaker,

 ft  in’ was only twenty-one, ‘but so lonely . . .’ A Lady aged forty didn’t want to damage any chances she might have of marrying a ‘good-tempered sailor’; she spelled out that she was ‘gay and cheerful . . . and [had] no

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new-woman ideas’. In the majority of cases the advertisers give their real

age, but are at pains to point out that they look younger: ‘Tailoress . . . 

years old, and told I do not look ’; ‘Spinster, , looks ’; ‘, but pass as ’. And it must have taken real courage for a thirty-seven-year-old spinster, hoping to meet a bachelor or widower aged thirty-seven to sixty,