From The Times
The Link: the first paper for lonely hearts dating ads
In 1915, a publication was founded for personal ads.
The Link: the first paper for lonely hearts dating ads
In 1915, a publication was founded for personal ads.
These days, friendship, sex or even love is seemingly only a click away. With the internet, it’s never been easier or more convenient to meet those who share your interests, however bizarre or mundane, and even to find the man or woman of your dreams. From Facebook and MySpace to Match.com and Dating Direct, we, at least in the industrialised West, and increasingly elsewhere, are all advertisers now.
At one time, all ads were in the form of short, pithy paragraphs of text, the first of which – a statement of ecclesiastical rules governing the Easter festival – was printed in 1477 by William Caxton. However, ads like these only began to be used to find husbands and wives in the 1690s, around 50 years after the invention of the modern newspaper – the first reference is in the agony column of a periodical called The Athenian Mercury in 1692. By the early 18th century, however, matrimonial advertising was booming.
At first glance, the early advertisements do not seem so different from those that became common in the 20th century. Men looked for wives, women for husbands, and some even looked for unspecified “arrangements”. Such was the popularity of these columns that one young lady in 1777 could even complain that “the mode of advertising is become too general” – although that did not prevent her from placing her own ad, seeking “a man of fashion, honour, and sentiment, blended with good nature, and a noble spirit, such a one she would chuse for her guardian and protector”.
As they have done ever since, these advertisements catered for those slightly at odds with traditional forms of courtship and morality, sometimes women just beyond the customary age of marriage or those distanced from the usual connections of family.
Yet although there were thousands of devotees, the anonymity involved – not to mention the necessity of giving chapter and verse on income and prospects in each ad – lent a mercenary air to the whole enterprise and ensured that it was not quite the done thing in polite society.
At the end of the 19th century, however, the matrimonial ad gained a new prominence and respectability. With much of Britain’s population living in cities by the 1890s, social commentators were becoming concerned that traditional courtship was increasingly outdated. Modern workers, they feared, were spending all their time at the office or in distant suburban lodgings and were finding it hard to meet suitable partners, with the result that some were resorting to the social life of the street and all its illicit temptations. Some respectable journalists, philanthropists and thinkers therefore began to argue that the small ad might be a solution to the difficulties of marriage and the anonymity of modern life.
By the First World War, things had progressed a step further. One journalist, Alfred Barrett, realised that small ads need not serve only those who wanted to marry but also those who were simply looking for companionship. In 1915 he founded The Link, which sought to make this sort of “companionship” advertising stylish and lighthearted rather than earnest, solemn and intellectual. Inevitably, his lonely hearts ads attracted criticism from those worried they were a threat to conventional morality and in a landmark case Barrett’s paper was suppressed in 1921 for “corrupting public morals”.
Looking for a manly Hercules
Alfred Barrett naturally argued that his paper, whose masthead proclaimed it to be “helpful, clean, and straight”, was nothing but honest and safe. But R.A. Bennett, editor of the muck-raking newspaper Truth, and his moralising ilk clearly thought otherwise. He studiously went through The Link’s ten pages with a green pencil and marked what he thought were the most dangerous advertisements, underlining the key words and phrases for the benefit of the police.
The section devoted to women was, he wrote, “frank enough”, as it seemed to promise adventure with all sorts of “sporty” or “jolly” girls, such as the one from “Bohemian Girl, 24”, who was “interested in most things”, and wanted a “man pal”. Ads such as this, Bennett said, looked foolish, but were probably harmless, unlike a number of those placed by men that seemed to be of rather dubious morality and legality. There was, for example, one from “Iolaus?24”, who described himself as “intensely musical” and of a “peculiar temperament”. He had, he said, been “looking for many years for [a] tall, manly Hercules”. Another came from an “Oxonian?26”, also seeking a man pal, who was “brilliant, courteous, humorous, [a] poet, future novelist, in love with beauty despite cosmic insignificance, [and] masculine”.
These coded words, Bennett argued, “speak for themselves as plainly as such an advertisement could”. As he hardly needed to point out, these advertisers were breaking the law, since not only was sex between men illegal at this time, but so too were any attempts to arrange it. Indeed Bennett had felt prompted to send the paper to the police after hearing about a youth who had made, he said, “various acquaintances of which his mother strongly disapproves”.
The court case
In spite of these objections, The Link might have continued and even prospered if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate coincidence. Shortly after the police received Bennett’s highlighted copy of The Link in September 1920, a self-styled bohemian named Walter Birks was arrested in Carlisle on a charge of fraud, and was found to be carrying love letters from one William Ernest Smyth, a 22-year-old clerk living in Belfast. When a police officer visited Smyth’s rooms, he discovered evidence of a passionate and lengthy correspondence between the two men, and hundreds of letters from other people. It soon emerged that the correspondence between Smyth and Birks, as well as their subsequent love affair, had been initially arranged via the pages of The Link.
Some of Smyth’s letters were from another clerk – an ex-serviceman named Geoffrey Smith, from Enfield, near London. All three advertisers were arrested and charged with conspiring to commit “gross indecency”. As for Barrett, he was charged with aiding and abetting his advertisers, conspiring to enable the commission of such unnatural acts, and also with the offence of “corrupting public morals by introducing men to women for fornication”.
If that was not enough to persuade a jury of what was going on behind the pages of The Link, evidence could be produced of a Major Lombard (“artistic, musical and literary”), who had asked for introductions to 12 men, and had also sent in a photo of himself dressed as a woman. The connection between The Link and homosexuality seemed clear enough. But was it, as the prosecution argued, also an “advertisement pimp” which encouraged heterosexual “fornication” and the prostitution of women?
The evidence for that was much thinner. Most of the advertisements placed by women were, on the face of it, tame to say the least. To modern eyes, it would seem that few could have had any objections to the “Gentlewoman (London, S. W), young widow, very good standing?[who] would like to meet cultured man, 30–40”. Still less could moral panic be inspired by the “Catholic lady (Abroad)”, who “would appreciate letters from gentlemen anywhere in England or Rhine Army”.
However, the prosecution argued that amid the sea of notices placed by innocuous widows, there were definitely ads that were pernicious, some of which even seemed to have been placed by married women. One ad introduced at the trial was placed by a “Young Grass Widow”, who frankly admitted that she wished “to meet [a] straightforward man” in what seemed to be an adulterous quest.
Some of the more obvious heterosexual advertisements were placed by men, such as the “Lothario, London West, 30”, who wanted “cuddlesome girls”, and who was “fond river, dancing, pleasure”. But other ads were apparently connected to much more serious matters than straightforward seduction, and the prosecution used them to insinuate that women had been put in harm’s way and the public’s morals corrupted by the promiscuous mixing of the sexes. One ad from 1921 placed by a “Widow, (London W), greatly interested in discipline”, and who wanted to “hear from others, both sexes”, was linked to a woman named Alice Vezey with two convictions for brothel keeping dating back to 1912.
Epidemic of loneliness
In court, Barrett admitted that he had been careless with some of the ads, but hadn’t realised their “true character” at the time. The fact was, though, that the very nature of Barrett’s business itself put him in an awkward position. Matrimonial advertising, The Link’s close relation, had never had a good reputation. Ever since its earliest days, it had been seen as the last resort of the old, sad and ugly, who were, it was assumed, all vulnerable to the depredations of dishonest marriage brokers.
To some observers, Barrett was even worse than his predecessors because his major innovation was to make The Link strictly non-matrimonial. Accordingly, The Link masthead proudly announced it to be “Social – Not Matrimonial”. It was emphatically not a vehicle for husband-hunting, but was instead “A Monthly Social Medium for Lonely People”. According to its editor, the purpose of the paper was not necessarily to facilitate marriage, but “to provide a medium by which lonely people can escape from their loneliness, and those in want of friends can be brought in communication with other friendless beings”. That, then, was the essence of his defence: The Link was a wholly respectable enterprise founded as a solution to the epidemic of loneliness which had engulfed modern society.
In his own account, Barrett had founded The Link because he had heard of a friend who was returning to Britain after 20 years spent on an Australian ranch. This man’s difficulty in meeting members of the opposite sex prompted Barrett to help him out, and led to the thought that “there must be? thousands of such in London alone, to say nothing of the feminine portion of humanity”. The Link was therefore not an opportunistic response to the lax wartime moral climate, but was instead fulfilling a long-felt want throughout society.
As his barristers pointed out, apart
from the disciplinarian Alice Vezey and the innuendoes of the press, the police had failed to provide any evidence of The Link’s alleged connection to white slavery. Barrett himself was presented by his defence team as the very essence of a respectable editor and novelist. This was, ostensibly at least, what he was. He seemed an unlikely whiteslaver.
By the time of the trial he was 51 years old and had had a long career as a comic novelist and editor of magazines as respectable as The Christian World, Family Circle, the comic journal Scraps, and the women’s paper Mary Bull, which he had left to set up The Link. On the surface, he lived a blameless suburban life in Balham, from where he took the train every day to his office in Fleet Street. In dedicating a book to his wife, “whose comfortable and encouraging appreciation has made me alive to the unsuspected advantages of having a critic on the hearth”, he conjured up the very image of companionable domesticity, but when the police raided his house in the spring of 1921, they discovered an interesting cache.
Under Barrett’s bed lay not only about 100 indecent photographs, but also a collection of French pornography relating to “abominable practices”, a ponderous Victorian euphemism for homosexual acts. Mr Justice Darling had no doubt that Barrett had more than a professional interest in his paper, and conjured up a lurid vision of the depraved corrupter of public morals poring over his private collection, lost in homosexual reverie.
In spite of all the evidence testifying to the popularity of the lonely hearts ad, the laws punishing male homosexuality were emphatically against them. On June 8, 1921, Barrett was found guilty of corrupting public morals, and of aiding and abetting his advertisers in a conspiracy to procure acts of gross indecency. The other men were found guilty of conspiring to commit the acts of gross indecency. There could be no greater attack on the morals of the country, Mr Justice Darling told Barrett, than to “establish a paper as you did for the purpose of allowing men and women to commit immorality”.
Regretting bitterly that he could not dispatch the defendants to penal servitude, Darling settled for the scarcely less onerous maximum sentence: two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Barrett, who had done so much to make the lonely hearts ad a feature of modern life, was lost to history. His hour in the limelight was over, but the personal ad (and its modern cousin, the internet profile) would go on to become one of the defining features of modern social life and contemporary romance.
Breaking the code: the language of classifieds
All personals have their own codes, and those in The Link were no different. The first clear indicator of sexual preference was to establish that you wanted to “meet chum own sex”, as ‘Bachelor, 39?affectionate disposition, fond of things in general”, put it in 1921. Further, if you described yourself as “affectionate”, “amiable”, “sincere” or even “beautiful without vanity”, you would certainly catch the eye. You could even, like “Otherwise Normal”, say that you were seeking “young friends who do not chase girls”. Some of the code words employed were practically clichés. As the police had learnt, “artistic”, “musical”, and “unconventional” all acted as glaring indications of homosexual interest. If the penny still hadn’t dropped, a list of authors, playwrights and composers who belonged to a sort of queer artistic canon could be cited in the ads to act as clear statements of intent. Writers such as the Edwardian socialist Edward Carpenter, who had written a number of books about what he called “the intermediate sex”, the American poet of manly comradeship Walt Whitman, and above all Oscar Wilde were consistently mentioned in The Link’s pages in order to remove any doubt as to one’s interests.
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by H.G. Cocks, published by Random House Books on February 5, is available from BooksFirst priced £13.49 (rrp £14.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstnyone,
At one time, all ads were in the form of short, pithy paragraphs of text, the first of which – a statement of ecclesiastical rules governing the Easter festival – was printed in 1477 by William Caxton. However, ads like these only began to be used to find husbands and wives in the 1690s, around 50 years after the invention of the modern newspaper – the first reference is in the agony column of a periodical called The Athenian Mercury in 1692. By the early 18th century, however, matrimonial advertising was booming.
At first glance, the early advertisements do not seem so different from those that became common in the 20th century. Men looked for wives, women for husbands, and some even looked for unspecified “arrangements”. Such was the popularity of these columns that one young lady in 1777 could even complain that “the mode of advertising is become too general” – although that did not prevent her from placing her own ad, seeking “a man of fashion, honour, and sentiment, blended with good nature, and a noble spirit, such a one she would chuse for her guardian and protector”.
As they have done ever since, these advertisements catered for those slightly at odds with traditional forms of courtship and morality, sometimes women just beyond the customary age of marriage or those distanced from the usual connections of family.
Yet although there were thousands of devotees, the anonymity involved – not to mention the necessity of giving chapter and verse on income and prospects in each ad – lent a mercenary air to the whole enterprise and ensured that it was not quite the done thing in polite society.
At the end of the 19th century, however, the matrimonial ad gained a new prominence and respectability. With much of Britain’s population living in cities by the 1890s, social commentators were becoming concerned that traditional courtship was increasingly outdated. Modern workers, they feared, were spending all their time at the office or in distant suburban lodgings and were finding it hard to meet suitable partners, with the result that some were resorting to the social life of the street and all its illicit temptations. Some respectable journalists, philanthropists and thinkers therefore began to argue that the small ad might be a solution to the difficulties of marriage and the anonymity of modern life.
By the First World War, things had progressed a step further. One journalist, Alfred Barrett, realised that small ads need not serve only those who wanted to marry but also those who were simply looking for companionship. In 1915 he founded The Link, which sought to make this sort of “companionship” advertising stylish and lighthearted rather than earnest, solemn and intellectual. Inevitably, his lonely hearts ads attracted criticism from those worried they were a threat to conventional morality and in a landmark case Barrett’s paper was suppressed in 1921 for “corrupting public morals”.
Looking for a manly Hercules
Alfred Barrett naturally argued that his paper, whose masthead proclaimed it to be “helpful, clean, and straight”, was nothing but honest and safe. But R.A. Bennett, editor of the muck-raking newspaper Truth, and his moralising ilk clearly thought otherwise. He studiously went through The Link’s ten pages with a green pencil and marked what he thought were the most dangerous advertisements, underlining the key words and phrases for the benefit of the police.
The section devoted to women was, he wrote, “frank enough”, as it seemed to promise adventure with all sorts of “sporty” or “jolly” girls, such as the one from “Bohemian Girl, 24”, who was “interested in most things”, and wanted a “man pal”. Ads such as this, Bennett said, looked foolish, but were probably harmless, unlike a number of those placed by men that seemed to be of rather dubious morality and legality. There was, for example, one from “Iolaus?24”, who described himself as “intensely musical” and of a “peculiar temperament”. He had, he said, been “looking for many years for [a] tall, manly Hercules”. Another came from an “Oxonian?26”, also seeking a man pal, who was “brilliant, courteous, humorous, [a] poet, future novelist, in love with beauty despite cosmic insignificance, [and] masculine”.
These coded words, Bennett argued, “speak for themselves as plainly as such an advertisement could”. As he hardly needed to point out, these advertisers were breaking the law, since not only was sex between men illegal at this time, but so too were any attempts to arrange it. Indeed Bennett had felt prompted to send the paper to the police after hearing about a youth who had made, he said, “various acquaintances of which his mother strongly disapproves”.
The court case
In spite of these objections, The Link might have continued and even prospered if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate coincidence. Shortly after the police received Bennett’s highlighted copy of The Link in September 1920, a self-styled bohemian named Walter Birks was arrested in Carlisle on a charge of fraud, and was found to be carrying love letters from one William Ernest Smyth, a 22-year-old clerk living in Belfast. When a police officer visited Smyth’s rooms, he discovered evidence of a passionate and lengthy correspondence between the two men, and hundreds of letters from other people. It soon emerged that the correspondence between Smyth and Birks, as well as their subsequent love affair, had been initially arranged via the pages of The Link.
Some of Smyth’s letters were from another clerk – an ex-serviceman named Geoffrey Smith, from Enfield, near London. All three advertisers were arrested and charged with conspiring to commit “gross indecency”. As for Barrett, he was charged with aiding and abetting his advertisers, conspiring to enable the commission of such unnatural acts, and also with the offence of “corrupting public morals by introducing men to women for fornication”.
If that was not enough to persuade a jury of what was going on behind the pages of The Link, evidence could be produced of a Major Lombard (“artistic, musical and literary”), who had asked for introductions to 12 men, and had also sent in a photo of himself dressed as a woman. The connection between The Link and homosexuality seemed clear enough. But was it, as the prosecution argued, also an “advertisement pimp” which encouraged heterosexual “fornication” and the prostitution of women?
The evidence for that was much thinner. Most of the advertisements placed by women were, on the face of it, tame to say the least. To modern eyes, it would seem that few could have had any objections to the “Gentlewoman (London, S. W), young widow, very good standing?[who] would like to meet cultured man, 30–40”. Still less could moral panic be inspired by the “Catholic lady (Abroad)”, who “would appreciate letters from gentlemen anywhere in England or Rhine Army”.
However, the prosecution argued that amid the sea of notices placed by innocuous widows, there were definitely ads that were pernicious, some of which even seemed to have been placed by married women. One ad introduced at the trial was placed by a “Young Grass Widow”, who frankly admitted that she wished “to meet [a] straightforward man” in what seemed to be an adulterous quest.
Some of the more obvious heterosexual advertisements were placed by men, such as the “Lothario, London West, 30”, who wanted “cuddlesome girls”, and who was “fond river, dancing, pleasure”. But other ads were apparently connected to much more serious matters than straightforward seduction, and the prosecution used them to insinuate that women had been put in harm’s way and the public’s morals corrupted by the promiscuous mixing of the sexes. One ad from 1921 placed by a “Widow, (London W), greatly interested in discipline”, and who wanted to “hear from others, both sexes”, was linked to a woman named Alice Vezey with two convictions for brothel keeping dating back to 1912.
Epidemic of loneliness
In court, Barrett admitted that he had been careless with some of the ads, but hadn’t realised their “true character” at the time. The fact was, though, that the very nature of Barrett’s business itself put him in an awkward position. Matrimonial advertising, The Link’s close relation, had never had a good reputation. Ever since its earliest days, it had been seen as the last resort of the old, sad and ugly, who were, it was assumed, all vulnerable to the depredations of dishonest marriage brokers.
To some observers, Barrett was even worse than his predecessors because his major innovation was to make The Link strictly non-matrimonial. Accordingly, The Link masthead proudly announced it to be “Social – Not Matrimonial”. It was emphatically not a vehicle for husband-hunting, but was instead “A Monthly Social Medium for Lonely People”. According to its editor, the purpose of the paper was not necessarily to facilitate marriage, but “to provide a medium by which lonely people can escape from their loneliness, and those in want of friends can be brought in communication with other friendless beings”. That, then, was the essence of his defence: The Link was a wholly respectable enterprise founded as a solution to the epidemic of loneliness which had engulfed modern society.
In his own account, Barrett had founded The Link because he had heard of a friend who was returning to Britain after 20 years spent on an Australian ranch. This man’s difficulty in meeting members of the opposite sex prompted Barrett to help him out, and led to the thought that “there must be? thousands of such in London alone, to say nothing of the feminine portion of humanity”. The Link was therefore not an opportunistic response to the lax wartime moral climate, but was instead fulfilling a long-felt want throughout society.
As his barristers pointed out, apart
from the disciplinarian Alice Vezey and the innuendoes of the press, the police had failed to provide any evidence of The Link’s alleged connection to white slavery. Barrett himself was presented by his defence team as the very essence of a respectable editor and novelist. This was, ostensibly at least, what he was. He seemed an unlikely whiteslaver.
By the time of the trial he was 51 years old and had had a long career as a comic novelist and editor of magazines as respectable as The Christian World, Family Circle, the comic journal Scraps, and the women’s paper Mary Bull, which he had left to set up The Link. On the surface, he lived a blameless suburban life in Balham, from where he took the train every day to his office in Fleet Street. In dedicating a book to his wife, “whose comfortable and encouraging appreciation has made me alive to the unsuspected advantages of having a critic on the hearth”, he conjured up the very image of companionable domesticity, but when the police raided his house in the spring of 1921, they discovered an interesting cache.
Under Barrett’s bed lay not only about 100 indecent photographs, but also a collection of French pornography relating to “abominable practices”, a ponderous Victorian euphemism for homosexual acts. Mr Justice Darling had no doubt that Barrett had more than a professional interest in his paper, and conjured up a lurid vision of the depraved corrupter of public morals poring over his private collection, lost in homosexual reverie.
In spite of all the evidence testifying to the popularity of the lonely hearts ad, the laws punishing male homosexuality were emphatically against them. On June 8, 1921, Barrett was found guilty of corrupting public morals, and of aiding and abetting his advertisers in a conspiracy to procure acts of gross indecency. The other men were found guilty of conspiring to commit the acts of gross indecency. There could be no greater attack on the morals of the country, Mr Justice Darling told Barrett, than to “establish a paper as you did for the purpose of allowing men and women to commit immorality”.
Regretting bitterly that he could not dispatch the defendants to penal servitude, Darling settled for the scarcely less onerous maximum sentence: two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Barrett, who had done so much to make the lonely hearts ad a feature of modern life, was lost to history. His hour in the limelight was over, but the personal ad (and its modern cousin, the internet profile) would go on to become one of the defining features of modern social life and contemporary romance.
Breaking the code: the language of classifieds
All personals have their own codes, and those in The Link were no different. The first clear indicator of sexual preference was to establish that you wanted to “meet chum own sex”, as ‘Bachelor, 39?affectionate disposition, fond of things in general”, put it in 1921. Further, if you described yourself as “affectionate”, “amiable”, “sincere” or even “beautiful without vanity”, you would certainly catch the eye. You could even, like “Otherwise Normal”, say that you were seeking “young friends who do not chase girls”. Some of the code words employed were practically clichés. As the police had learnt, “artistic”, “musical”, and “unconventional” all acted as glaring indications of homosexual interest. If the penny still hadn’t dropped, a list of authors, playwrights and composers who belonged to a sort of queer artistic canon could be cited in the ads to act as clear statements of intent. Writers such as the Edwardian socialist Edward Carpenter, who had written a number of books about what he called “the intermediate sex”, the American poet of manly comradeship Walt Whitman, and above all Oscar Wilde were consistently mentioned in The Link’s pages in order to remove any doubt as to one’s interests.
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by H.G. Cocks, published by Random House Books on February 5, is available from BooksFirst priced £13.49 (rrp £14.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstnyone,
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