Love
is in the air
East Anglian Daily Times Stella Groschel can look back on a lifetime of love and marriage. Still running her marriage bureau from her Suffolk home, the country's longest-serving matchmaker talks to Lynne Mortimer. |
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Love is…
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… not always easy to find. But if anyone can help people find their soul mate, Stella Groschel can. With half a century of experience she has never ceased her quest to find love for lonely hearts. Her technique, perfected over the years, is to interview every single person on her books. Tried, tested and successful, it is a method that has proved itself over and over again.
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Stella is an interviewer without parallel. Within 10 minutes of our meeting - and remember, I'm supposed to be the reporter here - her expert questioning has elicited all the main details of my life, upbringing, education and interests.
Fiercely intelligent, approachable, friendly and wise with a consuming and enduring interest in people, you just know Stella Groschel misses nothing.
In recent months she has been a guest on radio talk shows and featured in national newspapers because she has been running a marriage bureau since 1962 and, remarkably, she continues to run her successful marriage bureau today, at the age of 83.
Having enjoyed a lifetime of romance - albeit mainly other people's - does she regard herself as a romantic?
Stella thinks a moment. “I suppose so, yes. It's nice to see it working for people. People can be quite starry-eyed when they meet one another.”
Her earliest encounter with the idea of seeking professional help to find a life partner was in the Forties when a friend revealed she was thinking of going to a marriage bureau.
“It was such a novel thing. I got a bit of a shock when she told me. We both left school at 18. She went to London to do a secretarial course and I went to Colchester where my mother lived but we kept in touch. She was working for an orchestra and, one day, I was helping her send out some leaflets in the boardroom and she suddenly came out with this pearl about how lonely it was in London and she was going to something about it.”
Stella thought about it and said: “Why not?”
The very first introduction agency was Heather Jenner's, which started up in 1939 but no-one has been in the business longer than Stella. “Not many people, to my knowledge have stuck by it for all that length of time… in fact I know they haven't.”
Born in Kent in 1924, Stella initially trained as a nurse before beginning a career as a journalist in Lincoln in the Fifties, working first on the local Echo and then on the Sheffield Telegraph and Star.
She was married to Ernest Groschel, a Czech engineer who came to England to escape the war and while he remained based in Lincoln, Stella commuted to Sheffield. It was there she became friendly with a woman who ran a marriage bureau and the germ of an idea was sown.
Pregnant with her daughter, Emma, Stella started up the Kathleen Kent Marriage Bureau, which she ran from home. With a keen eye for marketing, she fastened upon this catchy, alliterative name which was, in fact, her middle name paired with the county of her birth.
Britain was on the verge of a sexual revolution in 1962. But while young people were at the vanguard of change, older people still ran the country and marriage bureaux were considered by some to be operating in a slightly indelicate area. “It was looked on as something not quite nice,” smiles Stella.
At first, Stella found it hard going to get her advertisements published in newspapers but she was undeterred. Her eventual move south from Lincoln to Polstead, in Suffolk in 1972, was in part prompted by being able to get her ads into a Colchester newspaper. The name also changed. Stella is now the KK Bureau, having sold the Kathleen Kent name.
Ironically, having found long-lasting love for so many, Stella's own marriage ended after 14 years and she has never remarried. “I don't make much of an issue about it but, fortunately for other people, it's a very good thing it didn't last because I couldn't have thrown myself heart and soul into what I have done. No husband really would put up with it. I've been my own boss. I've done what I wanted to do, business-wise and got on and did it,” she says pragmatically.
Her first clients paid 15 guineas (that's £15.75) for a year's membership and Stella carefully interviewed each one, noting down their age, hobbies and preferences into a notebook.
She admits she didn't really have the foggiest idea what she was doing but just got on with it, deciding she would deal with problems as they arose. One small problem was quickly overcome.
“At the beginning I had two separate registers - I was so naïve.
“There were those who said 'I want to get married' (on one register) and there were those who said 'I don't really want to get married I want to make some friends' (on the other) and, after six months, it was quite haywire so I put the registers together and I thought, that's not my brief. The brief really is to give as good an introduction as I can and then it's up to them. As soon as the right person comes along, they'll get married - so who's to say?”
The business grew “like Topsy” even though Stella still couldn't persuade some papers to take her ads.
As a respected local journalist she was able to obtain character references from the Bishop of Lincoln and her local MP which helped, but as well as the softly-softly mode, Stella recalls a more direct assault on the establishment.
“There was a lot of opposition to taking the advertisements when I first started - a great deal of opposition.”
She ponders briefly: “I still really can't find out why” before continuing: “Anyway, because newspapers wouldn't carry it, we got reduced to putting pictures and ads in shop windows and it wasn't the right kind of image.
“A friend's husband made some sandwich boards and we took them down to Fleet Street and we had on them 'Are we too hot to handle?' A posse of reporters dashed up to get the story.”
The protest petered out when the police apprehended them. “We were told we weren't allowed to walk in Fleet Street with sandwich boards without a licence, so we didn't get very far with that one but I can't tell you the courage it took.”
Today, dating agencies, lonely hearts ads and marriage bureaux are part of our social fabric and Stella has matched television personalities, members of the aristocracy and even, she tantalises, “one of the hierarchy at the East Anglian Daily Times got married through me”. But she won't be drawn as client confidentiality is absolute and for ever.
“It's been very hard work but it's been worthwhile,” says Stella, reflecting on all the happiness her endeavours have brought.
“Looking back on it, if I had realised the opposition to running a marriage bureau I would encounter from the beginning, I doubt very much I would have done it. It was really tough going.”
She recalls battling to get her ads into the Eastern Daily Press, at Norwich. Her persistence paid off and she was, for some time, the only bureau whose ads were accepted by the newspaper. A lesser person might have given up, I suggest.
“Once I got my teeth into it that was that. Some people thrive on opposition. I suppose I did, really.”
Today, in 2007, she operates very much as she always has.
“We talk about the kind of person they'd like to meet and I tell them the various criteria I use to match, like age, background etc, then I give them a choice. If the first one doesn't work we move on to others. I don't say look, here is this person for you and that's it. All I do is shorten the time of their search a great deal and then it's up to them.
“I now have a computer and a database but I still match up manually.”
You can't beat the personal touch. She recalls an occasion when she was in interviewing in an upstairs room at The Great White Horse hotel, in Ipswich, and the fire alarm sounded.
“I didn't take any notice because I was used to going to hotels when the fire alarms are being tested.”
When the next appointment failed to turn up, Stella peered out of the window where firefighters were preparing to tackle a small blaze in the kitchen.
“I should have put my coat on and done a runner but I didn't,” acknowledges Stella.
On another occasion, Stella was being driven to a hotel in Great Yarmouth for a round of interviews when her beagle Blossom needed to spend a penny. Taking advantage of a traffic jam, Stella nipped out of the car with the dog but by the time Blossom had identified a suitable spot, the traffic had moved on.
“Blossom and I were tearing after the car and just when it stopped, the traffic moved on again. We went all the way into Great Yarmouth running.”
The interviews are clearly a vital element of the service Stella offers. So does she weed out unsuitable people?
“Well, yes, you can't take everybody that comes along. There are some people that you can't help, and some people are, perhaps, not as presentable as they might be, which is a bit of a difficult thing but … you've got to keep the standards up.
“Occasionally I've had people that, when I've asked questions - what I call conversation stoppers - all you get back is a yes or no. You don't get any elaboration and you think, yes, what have they got to hide?”
One drawback to the marriage business for older people is demographics because, Stella says, there are more women than men in the older age group. As a result, she doesn't encourage people over 50 to come along. “But if they do, I tell them exactly what the situation is. I just say, 'Look, it's going to be a limited service. I won't waste your time - you won't get people that I don't think are compatible'. It only needs one to be successful.
“Some older women come along and they're so delightful and you think, if only it was the other way around if only there were too many men and not enough women.”
Stella has had her share of wedding invitations from happy couples she has introduced and, indeed has also had two invitations to silver wedding celebrations. Another mark of her long service to lasting relationships is that Stella now looks after the second generation of clients - the children of past successes.
Does Stella approve of the way the industry - the dating game - has changed over the years?
“I don't really… I feel if you run a bureau in the best possible way there's a great deal more sensitivity attached to it. People think, 'Oh, I'll go on the net' and they clearly don't know who they're meeting and they don't know the safeguards. I'm in the position that not only do I meet the female and the male but other clients tell me about them. They might say well 'so and so turned up late' or whatever and I'm able to build a pattern up which is quite useful additional information that you wouldn't get in an ordinary relationship.
“People are not quite so interested in forming solid, reliable relationships. There more really for something now: 'in the moment'. From what I hear from people about the internet there are a great many untruths going on. They lie about their age, whether they're married - they don't seem to be very honest when they put their details on the net.”
Even as I say it, it sounds like a silly question, but I ask anyway. Has Stella any plans to retire?
Her response is immediate. “It's too late, isn't it?
“My friends have been getting on to me to retire for about the last
25 years but they've given up now. Really there's no point. I should miss
it terribly.”
Copyright © 2007 Archant Regional
Ltd. All rights reserved.