The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons
published 1950, sometimes listed as 1949
Faint unearthly light and a deep hush lay over the fields; when a star glided out now and then from behind the scudding brown clouds its bright eye entered the scene as if alive and watching them, and the snow sparkling and crinching underfoot in the torch-rays seemed protesting as if aroused from cold, light sleep. Suddenly bells began to peal, faintly and far away; another tower in the night took up the sound; then Saint Wilfred’s three miles off, and soon the air was filled with it. Strange, wild, rejoicing sound! untamed yet familiar, having nothing to do with any peace except that peace which comes after unimaginable struggle and passeth understanding, clanging and ringing out over the darkened earth to remind it of the unbelievable truth.
The Christmas-y picture is by John Verney, 20thC author and
illustrator who wrote some wonderful
children’s books. At the end of
this post you can find out more about the series of pictures of
which this is one. With thanks again to Sebastian Verney, his son. The magazine
is from 1948, so spot on. I know the picture is full of people and the text isn't, but I still thought they fitted together.
Sylvia has just arrived in a small village in Sussex, ready to join a local farm as a landgirl, and stops off at the local café. It is Christmas Eve.
The place certainly did look
pretty; but corny, of course, like an old-fashioned Christmas card, she
thought, and even the pub’s shut—anyway, I’m not going to try muscling in
there—and I suppose you could die in the street before anyone’d take you in and
give you a cup of tea; gosh, a cup of tea’d be marvellous. Then, on the
opposite side of the street, she caught sight of the Linga-Longa Café. As
usual, its windows were so steamy that it was impossible to see what was that
it was impossible to see what was going on inside, but there were people, and
they were moving about; and there was a notice hanging in the window that said
OPEN. Hardly believing in her luck, she crossed the road and opened the door.
comments: This entry got rushed through the system:
The Matchmaker came
up in the comments on another post. There might have been various reasons for
that – deep interest round here in WW2 Home Front and post-war books, landgirls
and prisoners of war. A number of
Gibbons books have featured in the past, I have enjoyed many of them. Matchmaker
has been described as an updating of Jane
Austen’s Emma – a subject of much discussion on the blog
lately.
Then, I just did posts on Ember
Lane by Sheila Kaye-Smith: she’s one of the authors
said to have inspired Gibbons to write the all-time classic that is Cold
Comfort Farm.
In fact it was Ember Lane, but an unlikely detail:
chicken farming. Twice in recent months we have looked at the trope of men
(mostly) moving to the country to invest their modest savings or army gratuity
in poultry, almost certainly doomed to failure. A particularly dreary way to
lose your money – you wish they had played poker or bought stocks and shares or
a racehorse.
So – here’s part of the conversation
Susanna 3
December 2025 at 10:59
Good to spot another example of the unsuccessful
ex-serviceman poultry farmer - as discussed in your post on Casual Slaughters.
Though that was good fun and this one sounds thoroughly miserable.
Anonymous 3
December 2025 at 15:42
There's a chicken farmer in a book by stella gibbons can't
remember title, just postwar. Lucy
Christine Harding 3
December 2025 at 20:56
That popped into my mind too. I think it might be The
Matchmaker.
Marty
3
December 2025 at 22:15
I think Christine is correct. One character's life
practically revolved around his flock!
Christine Harding4
December 2025 at 13:52
I wouldn’t recommend it. One read is one too many! Started
well, but ended up making me want to hurl it across the room. Usually, when
books are ideologically unsound/politically incorrect, I think you have to
place them in the context of their time. But for some reason this one made me
really furious.
And you would want to slap the Matchmaker....
Anonymous5
December 2025 at 07:25
Adding my voice to the negative chorus - the only book I've
read by Stella Gibbons that I've really disliked. Sovay
1.
Clothes
In Books5
December 2025 at 10:11
This is hilarious - I am absolutely going to have to skim
through it now.
So I did! And Everybody was right – it’s not a nice book at
all, and I did want to hurl it across the room (but it was on Kindle). It is
seriously hard to believe that clever, light, charming Gibbons, good-hearted
and easy-going, wrote this snobbish, horrible, Mary Sue piece of nonsense. (Yet
I mysteriously have a lot to say about it, and there will be another post
later.)
And I remembered more about the book as I read it: I was a
huge fan of CCFarm, and years later
discovered she had written other books (via Arthur Marshall’s column in
the New Statesman back in the day, if you’re interested) and decided to try
one. Unfortunately I hit on The Matchmaker, and as a result did not read
anything else by her for literally years. I cautiously started again, but only
during blog days, and have really enjoyed some of them…Another Christmas
entry here.
So what is so bad about it? (it should be said that of
course some people like the book very much, find it very enjoyable)
Gibbons always had a tendency to snobbishness, but would
save herself with some sweet comments, an eye for the absurdity of it all. In a
post on The
Bachelor, I said the author ‘is a strange mixture of
being sometimes judgemental and sometimes not…she can be excruciatingly snobbish, but also empathetic’,
and I gave an example there that I think very much summed that up.
No such redemption here. It is unchecked.
Alda is the heroine, mother of three girls, husband still
away most of the time, house bombed. She moves into a fairly horrible cottage
in the country while she waits for new accommodation and to get her husband
back. A positive: The book is good on making it clear how many wartime
restrictions carried on for years after the fighting finished – the POWs,
rationing, rules and restrictions, people not released from their wartime
roles.
Alda is a piece of work, who genuinely believes she is
better than everyone else. Gibbons seems to agree: this reader doesn’t. She is
determined to marry off her great friend who comes to stay, and Sylvia, above.
More complaints in another post in the New Year; but I did
like these two festive scenes - the book covers a year with deep attention to
the seasons.
Pen and ink drawing by Edmund Xavier Kapp: it is ‘ready for Christmas at the canteen under St Martin-in-the-Fields’, from the Imperial War Museum.
Oh dear, what a pity! I did like the two extracts and the Linga-Longa cafe can be added to our list of fictional tearooms. (This one does NOT sound genteel). However, I will not be reading this, it might bring on apoplexy. Chrissie PS perhaps we should think of opening a GA style tearoom with willow pattern plates and excellent coffee?
ReplyDeleteYes, there are very annoying aspects.
DeleteI think a tearoom, with a roadhouse on the first floor and a sinister nightclub in the basement.
In Don't Mr. Disraeli, by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, "Spencer Faggot twirled his moustachios. “ Downstairs a billiard saloon, upstairs a brothel—what more can a villain want?”" he says as he brings a potential victim of card-sharping to his apartment.
Delete- Roger
That almost makes me want to read the book... almost... I didn't enjoy when I tried, but who knows, now...
DeleteIf I remember rightly, No Bed for Bacon (which obviously has no connexion to Shakespeare in Love) has detailed descriptions of Queen Elizabeth's clothes, which is probably more appropriate here.
DeletePerhaps fitting with those gorgeous portraits of Queen Eizabeth: there are several with very detailed gowns and embellishments.
DeleteIt’s quite a few years since I read this and I don’t recall much about it, other than great dislike for Alda, though I’m sure I read to the end and the Italian prisoners of war arriving home (did Alda try to set up Sylvia with one of them?).
ReplyDeleteThe immediate post-war must have been as hard to live through as the war in some ways – the urgency and unifying sense of everyone working against a common enemy would be gone, many resentments and divisions arose from the election of a new Labour government, rationing was more stringent, not less, because populations in mainland Europe whose countries had been battlegrounds were now starving …
Sovay
I thought she was awful. Yes she tried to fix up Sylvia with a POW.
DeleteYes hard times - I was just looking at a fascinating social history book by DAvid Kynaston, using all kinds of sources to look at the post-war era. Riveting.
(This may be a SPOILER but it doesn't sound as if anyone will be reading the book.)
DeleteLuckily for her victims, Alda's matchmaking fails miserably. That doesn't seem to affect her complacency in the least!
The whole series of David Kynaston's "Tales of a New Jerusalem" is great, not only 'Austerity Britain'. The range of diaries and newspaper extracts he is using is breathtaking and knowledgeable. Pity he slowed down in the last years with his writing. He once planned to go on to the year 1979 with Margaret Thatcher into No.10 ending the post-war political settlement. Wonder if he will still manange that.
Delete"Austerity Britain" is in one of my non-fiction TBR piles - I really must get to it, though the sheer size makes it a bit daunting - not light bedtime reading in any sense!
DeleteSovay
Marty - yes she is a complete failure, luckily.
DeleteJotell - Yes, I read all of them as they came out. I don't know if there are plans to go further.
Sovay - they are such fascinating books, and although huge, you do find yourself thinking 'just one more chapter, I must just find out about X'. The way he has assembled his sources means they are easier reading than you might expect. I remember when I was reading them, writing to my brother 'we've just been born! It will start to get more familiar and recognizable from now on'.
How interesting that the snobbishness comes out so much in this book, Moira. That alone can make a person want to throw a book across the room. The land girls theme interests me, and I might have wanted to read this just on that score, but perhaps not... At any rate, I can only imagine what it must have been like immediately post-war, and it sounds as though this book gets at that.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are two sides to it - the setting is very interesting, the more so from being written without the benefit of hindsight. But I can't honestly recommend the story.
DeleteOne of the Lady Lupin books is set at a post-war Christmas mini-houseparty and much is made of shortages, but it's not a contemporary account. Thirkell wrote about post-war hardships in the same period but her accounts were humorous (although they had a rather bitter undertone). In the book and film 84 Charing Cross Road, American author Helene is always sending boxes of goodies to the bookstore and the folks there are thrilled to get "luxury" items like chocolate bars--I think it's the 1950's and later!
ReplyDeleteSweets were among the last foods to be rationed (only meat was rationed for longer) so people would certainly have been glad of the presents, though I think all the restrictions had gone by the mid-1950s.
DeleteAngela Thirkell seems to have been one of those who thought that once the war was over, life would essentially return to what it had been before the war. Of course it couldn't - too much had already changed even before the Labour government was elected.
Sovay
You'd think there might be a generation with very good teeth and tastes for savoury foods, but I'm not sure it worked out like that.
DeleteYes, Sovay, good point about Thirkell - she wasn't happy about it all, but it was inevitable.
My mother who was born in the mid-1930s is in pretty good general health (touch wood) and had her first ever dental filling about five years ago; and the set of retirement flats where she lives has quite a few others of the same vintage. She’s convinced that the restricted wartime and post-war diet gave her generation a good start in life and that they’re still feeling the benefits.
DeleteI’m sure you must (probably pre-blog) have read the quintessential middle-class post-war novel, Mollie Panter-Downes’s “One Fine Day”, in which the main character’s husband reflects that before the war it had never occurred to him to think about the apparently inexhaustible supply of working-class girls who kept his household going – they were just there. And now they’re not there, and won’t be coming back, and he has to realise just how much his comfortable lifestyle depended on them.
Sovay
I'm glad it worked for some people - that generation certainly grew up tough, survivors.
DeleteYes I have read One Fine Day - funnily enough I was just looking at an anthology of women writers, and there was passage from it there.
I am not such a fan of that book as many are, nor the Betty Miller books that I always lump in with it. Honestly, I think it is unfairly because my own parents led such different lives, and the problems after the war were not that they didn't have servants any more. Those books don't quite speak to me.
I can have some sympathy for those whose way of life has gone, whilst still believing that the changes that made life better for people whose previous role was to support that way of life without enjoying its benefits had to take priority. This seems to be what Angela Thirkell struggles with – she can’t acknowledge that the Labour government’s primary motivation is NOT to punish the comfortable middle class, but to give opportunities to people who have previously had little or nothing. And of course the more opportunities they have, the less likely they are to devote their lives to taking off Mrs Brandon’s stockings for her …
DeleteSovay
Over here we call our WW2 soldiers the Greatest Generation, and I think that in Britain the civilian population also earned that kind of respect.
DeleteYes indeed. And everyone (or almost everyone) did pitch in, did undergo hardships, did try to think of and help others.
DeleteI had forgotten all about the Christmas scenes, although the Linga-Longa cafe has "lingered" in my memory.
ReplyDeleteWhen the cafe is first mentioned, it's by one of the young children, and I thought 'Linga-Longa' was just her way of saying it! Yes, a memorable cafe
DeleteAlda is a character who truly fits the Amis description "a monster of complacency"!
ReplyDeleteA very good description
DeleteChicken-farming even when relatively successful seems always to involve a great deal of trouble for very little return. In one of Betty Macdonald’s books (logically, it should be “The Egg and I”) I’m sure she comments that one little fluffy chick going ‘Cheep cheep’ is cute, but a whole barnfull is noisy, smelly and demanding even when they don’t all keel over and die from some mysterious and highly contagious lurgy.
ReplyDeleteSomething rose up from the depths of my mind following the recent discussion of Ngaio Marsh’s “Surfeit of Lampreys” – IIRC the oldest of the junior Lampreys, discussing the family’s recurrent financial crises with their friend Roberta, says his parents will probably sink the last of their money in a chicken farm and then lose interest and let it collapse around them. Contrary to the usual Lamprey attitude, I think he shows some awareness that this is nothing to be proud of.
Sovay
Yes it just sounds awful doesn't it? And Betty McD doesn't hold back.
DeleteGreat catch on Sufeit of Lampreys, I'd forgotten that - funny and all too convincing
Doesn't P.G.Wodehouse's Ukridge think of a chicken farm? And I think there's one in a 1970s-ish television series that features one, though annoyingly I can't remember it.
ReplyDeleteI may have mentioned it before, but there's an Evelyn Waugh short story about a pair of brothers who travel the country threatening to start a chicken farm until they are paid not to.
DeleteRoger again
DeleteUkridge’s first appearance is as a married man running a chicken farm very badly (in “Love Among the Chickens” as Susan D says below). Wodehouse then rebooted him, having realised he was a character with a lot of potential but needed to be freed from both wife and poultry to allow him to take the big, broad flexible outlook …
DeleteSovay
it really was such a big feature in those mid 20C books wasn't it, such great stories from you all. Someone should do a PhD thesis on it, it seems over-present in books and under-noticed by everyone except us. Love the idea of the Waugh potential chicken-farmers.
DeleteIt's always kinda weird hearing of a Stella Gibbons book that's not Cold Comfort Farm. For some reason it's like she only wrote that one book and finding out she wrote other titles feels faintly grubby and sordid. I have read the sequel to Cold Comfort Farm but even so, it feels weird to realise Stella Gibbons wrote others. It's a bit like Wide Sargasso Sea, where you're faintly aware that Jean Rhys wrote other books but they just sort of exist on another weird nebulous plane of semi-disconnection
ReplyDeleteYes I know what you mean, and it took me a long time to come round it. And basically you have to forget about her as the author of CCF, because her other books are so different, and so much set in the real world.
DeleteSpeaking of CCF, is Christmas at CCF worth checking out? It seems to be a prequel of sorts, but I'm not sure I want to visit CCF without Flora there!
DeleteIt's a collection of short stories, many not CCF-related, and I remember almost nothing about it, which doesn't bode well. I remember one of the stories, because I blogged on it, but that's it....
DeleteSince the chicken farm trope keeps popping up, I'll add that D. E. Stevenson has several brushes with chicken farming. One meets with success, it seems; another with failure due to running afoul (sorry) of the Post-War Rationing Board; and one is dismissed from the start as a Bad Idea.
ReplyDeleteI believe the PGW book was Love Among the Chickens.
Meanwhile, I'm also attracted to the concept of Throwing a Book Across the Room. Why, yes, I've done so, I now realise, three times in my reading life. Urged on by varying stimuli, but always unexpectedly. We could have fun with a whole post dedicated to which books have been thrown across the room, and why. (Or have I missed it?)
Love the Linga Longa Café. And the John Verney artwork.
The chickens seem to come to the fore, no matter how many other interesting topics are mentioned in a post! Which reminded me of Everard Bone's mother (in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women) who has a number of obsessions, one of which is that birds are plotting to take over the world. She fights back by eating as many chickens as possible.
DeleteSovay
Susan D - this is amazing that there are so many and you all know them! I wouldn't have got the DES ones.
DeleteOh yes, definitely going to have to do Throwing the Book Across the room. I've done it a handful of times, and of course the Kindle limits it. but it's a specfic reaction: plenty of books I read and don't like, or think 'not for me but can see others will enjoy' - Throwing is different.
And now am dying to know what your books were - or are you going to keep me waiting till I do a post? 😀😀😀
Sovay: another Columbo moment for you.
DeleteI recently re-watched (as reported here) the splendid BBC programme Miss Pym's Day Out, which wove together Pym's life, diaries and bits from the books. In it, Barbara in a cafe overhears someone at the next table talking about the birds, exactly that bit. I knew it was one of the books but couldn't quite remember, so thanks for informing me.
Now she (and her heroines) would have loved a cafe called the Linga-Longa.
When I watched Miss Pym's Day Out I wondered about the man visiting the sisters and discovered he was the love of Barbara's life, Henry Harvey. Then I started to read Pym's diary/letters book, and was appalled at the way he treated her. It bothered me so much I didn't finish the book!
DeleteI know what you mean, but she didn't help matters. You wanted to be her friend and take her aside for a good talking-to. I found it particularly excruciating that she pretends that she isn't chasing after him, and that she loves it that he finds a true love, all that saying that his wife is her 'sister'. Oh dear.
DeleteSusan D again
DeleteSorry, Moira, if I got started on identifying the thrown books, I'd get into the why, and, in one case, the long range result... Oh, and I resorted to burning one once (yes, I know) because I simply refused to return it to the world at large.
Part of my disgust with Pym's diary was because she "kept coming back for more" no matter how rotten Harvey acted. I was disappointed with Sayers' devotion to Cournos, but Pym made Sayers look quite clearheaded by contrast. That book was a definite candidate for my thrown-across-the-room list.
DeleteSusan D - you are just intriguing me even more....
DeleteMarty: yes, it's disappointing when writers one admires turn out to have unsatisfactory personal lives.
Speaking of throwing books. I don't go in for this with a few exceptions, but one of the few books I've genuinely reacted to with intense and unadulterated loathing was the first Diana Gabaldon Outlander book. On paper, it's got all the ingredients I ought to like/enjoy. Couldn't even get 100 pages into it. I just remember my reaction to it was so strong and so visceral. I just felt like I didn't want to read anything else by her. I wanted to like it, I went in looking forward to it, but I just got this intense feeling of strong, strong dislike. Interestingly, The Dreamstress had a very similar reaction to it, although I think she actually persevered a lot further than I did.
DeleteMost of the books I've flicked through and thought "wow, this is horrendous", I've just left behind on the shelf. I looked at a couple of novels by a certain ex-Tory politician with a less than stellar reputation for integrity, intelligence and morals, and they don't just lack in those departments, they can't write for mouldy toffee either. But I left those on the shelves so they don't count. I also give a pass to books reflecting their author's unfortunate descent into dementia or similar, so while Agatha had some absolute universally acknowledged stinkers towards the end, I forgive her those for it's clear she knew not what she was doing, bless her.
I went looking for the Dreamstress review. It reminded me of all the bad stuff. https://thedreamstress.com/2016/05/cross-and-outraged-a-cross-stitchoutlander-review/
DeleteVery interesting! I had much the same experience with Outlander, though perhaps not as extreme! I assumed I would like it, and the friend who lent me the first book was convinced I would. When I politely said I didn't want to borrow any further ones she found it so hard to believe that she kept trying to force them on me... And, like you, I'm not sure why I was so ill-disposed to them.
DeleteKind words about Agatha - exactly
I went and read the Dreamstress's review and very much enjoyed it, it was hilarious, I very much liked how extreme she was. I also read all the comments and very much enjoyed the whole experience (a lot more than reading the book....)
DeleteMy sister and I loved the Verney books, although about 75% of the way through we always lost the plot and never caught up. This was especially true of Ismo, where the characters made a weird secret gesture to each other (eyes shut, pinky on chin?), but February's charm made up for not always knowing what was going on! I think the wonderful Gill Bilski found me all five books, not all of which were published in the US but my library definitely had the first three. I think I own a Gillian Avery that Verney illustrated. How fun that his son found the earlier posts!
ReplyDeleteI think children who grew up on Harry Potter have a more pronounced taste for fantasy and less for the sort of adventure or family stories I read growing up (I certainly couldn't get my nephews and nieces to read Nesbit or Trease, alas) but they liked school stories like Jennings and The Naughtiest Girl in the School. They are the wrong age for Verney now and my copies are too precious to lend.
I think Verney says himself there should be a prize for anyone who truly understands the plot of ismo. Is that the Bolting Madonnas? February's Road was my absolute favourite, and the one that I totally understood and remember the plot....
Deleteso lovely to find other fans
Interesting point about fantasy: a good few years ago there was a lot of discussion on whether children's books reflect the real lives of children. I wonder if the fantasy was a way round that, as in not reflecting any child's life?
Yes, I find anyone enjoys the school stories, however niche, and far from lived experience, they were.
There’s a theory – can’t remember where I read it – that the Harry Potter books became so successful not because of the fantasy elements but because they’re boarding school stories, which kids traditionally love but which had been out of fashion with writers for a couple of decades – CLM’s anecdotal evidence seems to support this!
DeleteSovay
We were just discussing this over family lunch following on from these comments! And yes we all thought that the school elements were as important as the fantasy. My daughter remembered that when we lived in America, some children were not clear which bits were invented and which were not: for example having Houses, which is still commonplace in the UK, but certainly wasn't where we lived.
Deletere: Christmas bells. My absolute favorite, from The Nine Tailors. "Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells."
ReplyDeleteI'm partial to Christmas bells in The Dean's Watch (Elizabeth Goudge), also in the fens:'Every year, at half past five on Christmas Eve, Michael lifted his great fist and struck the double quarter, and the Cathedral bells rang out. They pealed for half an hour and all over the city, and in all the villages to which the wind carried the sound of the bells, they knew that Christmas had begun. ... the Cathedral on its hill towered up among the stars, light shining from its windows. Below it the twinkling city lights were like clustering fireflies about its feet. The tremendous bell music that was rocking the tower and pealing through the city was out here as lovely and far away as though it rang out from the stars themselves ...'
DeleteShay: yes one of my favourite passages in all Sayers, and I have said before that I chose it for the memorial service for my father-in-law who was a noted bellringer. I think of that passage every New Year, it means New Year to me
DeleteMegan: thanks, I read that book ages ago, and absolutely loved it, but had forgotten the bells.
I made the mistake of reading The Dean's Watch shortly after my father died, and could not explain to my poor husband why I was sobbing. I don't think he had ever seen me cry and it threw him.
DeleteOh how emotional. It is an intensely moving book, in quite unexpected ways I think. I can see where it would catch you out...
DeleteI’m a bit late to comment: but I did enjoy reading everyone’s thoughts, and admiring the huge range of topics, titles and authors covered. By the way, was Poirot’s landlady’s husband a chicken farmer in Mrs McGinty’s Dead? I seem to remember a bit where hens get into the pantry.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to check that, not sure.
DeleteSomeone on social media commented on Miss Whittaker, surprised no-one had mentioned. I had forgotten her myself, and would have to look up the details in Unnatural Death, but I'm sure the commenter was right.