The Sunday Gentleman (39 page)

For detectives and criminals alike, the agony column has, indeed, always been instructive. In 1916, Anna Maria Lesser, the beautiful Fräulein Doktor of the German Secret Service, invaded England during World War I posing as an Irishwoman, brogue and all. Following up a rumor that the English had invented an Ironclad machine to break the trench deadlock on the Western Front, Fräulein Doktor moved into a little village near Hatfield Park. Here she got rid of the local scoutmaster, volunteered to take his place, and used her innocent boy scouts to spy on secret experiments being held before King George V and Lord Kitchener. One of her scouts watched an entire experiment from a tree, and described in detail the first invented tank to Fräulein Doktor, who, in turn, transmitted the intelligence to Germany. When things got hot, the Fräulein used the agony column at least twice to communicate her findings to other spies bound for the Continent. It is a known fact that several German graduates of Elzbeth Schragmuller’s infamous Antwerp spy school kept in constant touch with one another and with their leaders through the agony column, where strange ads, no matter how cryptic or curious, excited no suspicion.

In World War II, Nazi agents in England tried to repeat the successful use of the agony column by their World War I predecessors. British Intelligence admits such attempts were made, and quickly adds that every means was employed to block such use of the agony column by enemy spies. Odd or suspicious advertisements, as recently as two years ago, were submitted by the London
Times
to the official government censor. Cryptic messages, from persons who had not advertised in the agony column before, were often rejected. In many cases, either
The Times
or British Intelligence quietly investigated the background of advertisers.

Today, Scotland Yard uses the column as an unconventional arm of the law when hunting for murderers, thieves, blackmailers, and adventurers. While
The Times
does not permit a Personal advertisement to appear in a foreign language, curiously it allows ads to appear in code or cipher. Several times, Scotland Yard has secretly solved code messages in the ads and thus learned what criminals were communicating with one another. In one case, Scotland Yard detectives, after breaking a blackmailer’s code, composed a dummy ad in the same code and planted it in the agony column. The trick worked. The blackmailer was trapped, and arrested.

Scotland Yard, however, is not the only code breaker. Often ordinary readers, who regard the column as a diversion superior to crossword puzzles, will try to find the key to a cipher. This game proves as stimulating as opening someone else’s mail. Occasionally, a prankster among these will write and insert a false ad in the same cipher, and shatter a budding romance. One such case occurred as far back as ninety-four years ago, and with sad consequences.

Two lovers were holding fervent clandestine meetings in the agony column. Their notes to one another were in cipher. On February 11, 1853, one contacted the other in the agony column as follows:

CENERENTOLA. Jsyng rd mifwy nx Xnhp mfaj ywnji yt kwfrj fs jcugfitynts Kwt dtz gzy hfssty Xngjshj nx xfsjxy nk ymf ywzj hfzxj nx sty zxzujhyji; nk ny nx tgg xytwnjx bngg gj xnkyji yt ymj gtyytr. It dtz wjrjrgiw tzw htzn’x knwxy uwtutznynts: ymnsp tk ny.

The villain in the piece, apparently the girl’s father, noticed the ad, suspected his daughter and her lover, and decided to teach them a lesson. He set to work studying ciphers, and found that this one was quite elementary. It was based on a primitive code used by Julius Caesar. With solution in hand, the girl’s father, determined to show the errant pair that he knew what was up, translated the ciphered ad and openly published it in the agony column. It read:

CENERENTOLA. Until my heart is sick have I tried to frame an explanation for you, but cannot. Silence is safest if the true cause is not suspected. If it is, all stories will be sifted to the bottom. Do you remember our cousin’s first proposition? Think of it. N pstb Dtz.

Except for correcting some atrocious typographical errors, the father made only one addition. He added the three last words, written in the very code he had broken—“N pstb Dtz”—meaning “I know you.”

But the irate parent wasn’t through. Having solved the coded ad, and published his solution, he now answered it with vigor in an ad of his own. On February 19, the father addressed the lovers in the agony column as follows:

CENERENTOLA. What nonsense! Your cousin’s proposition is absurd. I have given an explanation, the true one, which has perfectly satisfied both parties, a thing which silence never could have effected. So no more absurdity.

This was the last word. No more cryptograms were exchanged between the couple. Obviously, Irate Parent had won, and the Constant Reader was obliged to return sadly to the more pedestrian Personal ads that begged prodigal sons to return home or suggested “tonight, same hour, same place.”

Today, though an established English institution, the agony column is by no means confined to the British Isles. The agony column has imitators in the newspapers of every civilized nation on earth and in every state of the United States. The American who, for his armchair adventure, picks up his New York
Daily News
or Chicago
Tribune
or San Francisco
Chronicle
, to turn with relish to the classified ads and run through the Personals, is reading only variations on an idea started by
The Times
of London as long ago as 1785. One American, the short-story writer O. Henry, acknowledged that he derived many of his ideas for fiction from his habit of reading these paid notices.

The Personal column, as a form of inexpensive amusement and a springboard for glamorous daydreams, is now as much a part of the American scene (and with about as much promise of escape) as the activities in print of Mr. Dick Tracy and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover.
The New York Times
alone receives as many as 2,500,000 classified ads a year, and a goodly number of these are in the best agony-column tradition. Recent ads included a request for “a haunted house” in Manhattan, and for buyers interested in 60,000 clean chicken wishbones. A typical
New York Times
ad, not long ago, requested that “Anyone knowing whereabouts of Robert Charlton, last heard of in New York 1900, or his descendants, communicate with Gilbert Charlton (brother), address 15 Brighton Street, Petersham, New South Wales, Australia.” A month later,
The New York Times
learned that the brothers, separated almost a half century and by thousands of miles, had incredibly been reunited through this Personal notice.

At the other end of the country, the Los Angeles
Times
, in its Personal column, carries numerous provocative ads beginning, “Lonely? Plain sealed details free.” Other ads hold out a variety of rare promises. For those who want money, “Cash for diamonds.” For those who want their loved ones, “Missing persons traced.” For those who demand less, “Good home desired for good boy 12.”

Because of its reader-amusement value, as well as its revenue potentialities, the Personal column has spread from newspapers to popular magazines and even trade journals. One American weekly, the
Saturday Review
, features some of the best agony ads in the business. Here, in an average issue, we find an “unusually stupid, utterly untalented charmless harmless male” eager to meet “similarly endowed female.” Here we find a “woman, weary of city’s drabness, invites correspondence from green hills far away.” Here, too, we find a Hawkshaw prepared to ferret out “information discreetly” on “any matter, person, problem, anywhere.”

But these American versions of the agony column, while good, are not the best. The best is still the original Personal column of
The Times
of London. Because it outranks all its imitators for sheer entertainment, drama, and eccentricity, the agony column of
The Times
has become the center of a growing legend. Earl Derr Biggers, before inventing Charlie Chan, used the agony column as the subject and title of a murder mystery. Both Edgar Wallace and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle drew upon it regularly for their fiction. Researchers into curiosities of human nature referred to the agony column. Only a few years ago, two American psychologists excerpted ads from the column to help illustrate character differences for their weighty tome. Plots and Personalities.

Today, the agony column appears daily on the front page of the staid London
Times
. This front page, with its seven columns of small type, is the only front page in London, and one of the very few in the world, devoted entirely to classified advertisements. The third column from the left, the one nicknamed the agony column, is headed with its formal name—“Personal.” Beneath this heading is a brief passage from the Bible (the
Times
personnel call it the Text), and a different quotation submitted by readers is used each day. A typical Text, which appeared in a recent edition, read, “‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise’—St. Luke vi, 31.”

The ads themselves occupy the rest of the column. Many persons submit ads thirty and forty lines long, but these are returned, since an ad needs an exceptional reason to be allowed more than five lines or thirty words. A five-line ad costs ten dollars and must be written in prose. Ads containing poetry are rejected. Display ads, ditto. The taboo against display ads was broken only once—“in the interests of justice”—and that was back in 1845. A wealthy gentleman had received three threatening letters, each in a different handwriting. He wanted to publish facsimiles of these letters, along with an offer of a $100 reward to anyone identifying their sources, in the agony column. The police thought that it was a good idea, and so
The Times
relaxed its policy and ran the display ad.

The man in charge of the agony column is a small, gray-haired, reticent advertising veteran named Mr. L. Canna. He looks like an elderly Bob Cratchit. He has been handling classified ads for
The Times
for over thirty years, and two years ago, was made the head of the agony column. His domain consists of a somewhat ventilated room (it was damaged by a hundred-pound Luftwaffe bomb during the Blitz) in
The Times
building off Printing House Square in London. The room has a counter and post-office-style grilles, before which most advertisers appear in person with their insertions. A small percentage of ads are submitted by mail, and some of these come from the United States. Americans like to send ads offering to sell Englishmen their old clothes, but Mr. Canna cannot accept these ads because of British currency control.

Mr. Canna’s main problem is postwar censorship. “The agony column does not advertise adoptions,” he says. “It does not advertise political grumbles, and it does not accept lonely-hearts or matrimonial advertisements.” During the war, according to Mr. Canna, the agony column was swamped with matrimonial ads sent in by American GI’s stationed in England. “The American boys usually described the English girls they wanted to marry. They wrote out the color of eyes preferred, the height and weight preferred, and in several cases suggested that if the female applicant had a little capital it would go a long way in her favor. The majority of GI’s also sent in photographs of themselves to go with the ads. We returned all, explaining that
The Times
does not handle this sort of advertisement.”

Mr. Canna is constantly on the alert for other transgressions. If a man wishes to repudiate his wife’s debts in the agony column, the ad must be submitted through an attorney. If a housewife wishes to advertise the sale of her furniture, she must prove her identity and give her address, since
The Times
does not like to have retail dealers use the column. If, after a robbery, the victim submits an ad stating that anyone returning the stolen goods “will be rewarded” and “no questions asked,” Mr. Canna must reject the ad since its publication would put
The Times
in the position of aiding and abetting a crime.

Many source books have vainly attempted to analyze the character of those ads that finally appear in the agony column. The august
Encyclopaedia Britannica
describes the agony column as one devoted to “announcements of losses or bequests…a medium also for matrimonial advertisements.” Mr. Canna shakes his head over this. “Entirely inadequate and entirely incorrect,” he says. Mr. Canna likes to read from a brochure on the agony column, issued by
The Times
, which defines the column more dramatically. “The largest human reading is found in our Personal column. Here, speaking in accents uncouth, is found the Average Man himself.”

Most members of
The Times
feel that the essence of the column was best caught by Constant Reader Peter Fleming. “The world of the Agony Column is a world of romance,” wrote Fleming, “across which sundered lovers are for ever hurrying to a familiar rendezvous (‘same time, same place’): a world in which jewellery is constantly being left in taxi-cabs with destinations which must surely be compromising: a world of faded and rather desperate gentility, peopled largely by Old Etonians and ladies of title…a world in which every object has a sentimental value, every young man a good appearance, and only the highest references are exchanged: an anxious, urgent, cryptic world: a world in which anything may happen.”

Indeed, a world in which anything may happen. A world in which the following advertisement (which was permitted to exceed
The Times
’ length restrictions), a novel in itself, a motion picture scenario certainly, recently appeared:

Middle-aged peer and peeress, energetic, capable, former with military and business experience, good linguist (French, German); latter good organizer, two and one-half years general nursing experience (London and military); desire suitable employment together with accommodations; no salary. London or near south or southwest England preferred.

The stream of dramatic and curious ads, in recent years, has been endless. Mr. Canna’s favorites include the ad offering to sell a tiny island off the Spanish Main, and another offering an isle in the Bahamas at a reduced price. Mr. Canna also remembers the man who advertised in the agony column for a parrot—offering to pay four dollars for every word the parrot could speak. Mr. Canna often clips his favorite ads, and one of these reads: “Wanted to hire. A full-grown forest-bred Bengal Tiger. Very active.”