Matchmaking from 1984 to 2009 (part 1)

Mum modelling in Ibiza, aged 27

My Mum is amazing - well of course I am biased but honestly I don’t know many women of her age who have achieved so much or had such an interesting life.

Mum was a model in the 60’s / 70’s in London - what a glamorous time to be in the city! Then she moved to Ibiza to lead a hippy lifestyle on what was then considered an exotic and far flung place to go - where she set up her own boutique clothing store (making all the clothes herself) called Boutique Azul in Sta Eulalia.  In the mid 80’s we moved to the UK and she started her own matchmaking agency - one of the first.

This is where her words are better than mine - she has recently taken the time to write down what it was like setting up a dating agency in those times - here’s an extract from the article:

“I started my introduction agency in 1984 and quite frankly I didn’t have a clue as to what I was taking on, I had no qualifications and not an ounce of business acumen, but I did have a lot of enthusiasm and energy to invest. It all started off with a throw away remark when someone said to me ‘Heather why don’t you start an introduction agency for lonely farmers’! I decided to do just that, simply because I had young children at home and I wanted to earn extra money. Looking back it was an incredibly naïve thing to do and could have turned out to be extremely risky, since my back room became the agency and that was where we interviewed the people who came forward in response to some initially rather tacky advertising. Attitudes towards introduction agencies during the 1980’s was to say the least, skeptical and derisive and somehow I had to overcome the prejudices of middle class England in the heart of the Shropshire countryside.

Together with a close friend called Geraldine, who still works with me today, we put a brochure together and started advertising in the Farmers Weekly. Within a few weeks farmers were calling us and requesting brochures, but strangely, after having sent the brochure out, we would hear no more, which was extremely worrying. We decided to call some of the farmers who had requested brochures to try and find out why they were not interested, only to reveal that most of them had been looking for a call girl agency and were under the impression that that’s what we were offering, until they received the brochure! We quickly changed our advertising to reflect the seriousness of our intentions and eventually received a more sensible response. The BBC decided to do a documentary on us and the Farming Programme invited us on to their programme to talk about lonely farmers.”

Mum’s not the only one in the family in the press - here’s my sister, Zara being quoted in the Guardian