Joan Ball

Joan Ball was a computer dating pioneer who started the first computer dating service in England, in 1964. Ball's computer dating service also pre-dated the earliest American computer dating services, like Operation Match at Harvard.

Joan Ball was born in 1934 and was the 6th child in her family. She was an unwanted child born to a poor, working-class family. She was briefly abandoned by her mother when she was very young. World War II started when she was only five years old, resulting in her being evacuated from London to the countryside to escape the aerial bombardments of London three times during the war. Although this may have saved her life, each foster family differed greatly and she was sexually harassed by one of the foster families that she lived with. When the war was over she was able to go home to her family in London again.

Joan Ball was dyslexic and struggled in school. She went through most of her life suffering from dyslexia, before it was known as such. She was not officially diagnosed until 1973, at the age of 39. As a coping mechanism she became the class clown when she was in school, so that she could make sure people "laughed with [her]" and not at her. During her school years she had a difficult home life: her mother often called her "a pig-headed bitch", and blamed Joan for her failing marriage. In 1949, Ball finished her last year of school and got a job as a shop assistant at The London Co-Operative society. Because of her dyslexia she had problems with writing and counting money.

In 1953, Ball was hospitalized after a suicide attempt and when she got out she went to live with her aunt Maud and uncle Ted. The same year, at the age of 19, she got hired at Bourne & Hollingsworth. In 1954, she left and started working in a store's dress department. She found this string of jobs unfulfilling and difficult: at the time, the most interesting parts of the fashion industry--in Ball's view--were still a man's world and she could not do the kind of work she was interested in, like design. Shortly thereafter, however, she was able to start working for Berkertex, a leading fashion house in London.

In 1961, when she was 27, she decided to leave Berkertex. Though she had intended to manage a shop in Cambridge she found herself out of a job until the shop was ready to open. Needing to pay rent, she took a job at a marriage bureau. It was here that she decided to start her own marriage bureau. She founded the Eros Friendship Bureau Ltd in 1962 and discovered she had a knack for helping people make connections. Though her company would go on to be successful for a decade, she had trouble advertising her service early on because of the fact marriage bureaus were seen as slightly suspect at the time: There was a widespread belief that marriage bureaus were actually fronts for prostitution. Because she could not advertise in print easily Ball relied on placing radio ads with the "Pop Pirates"—the pirate radio stations that operated just off the coast of Britain in the 1960s playing rock and roll music that the BBC had banned. Ball's company focused on long term match-ups and relationships—primarily trying to achieve marriages for clients—and catered to an older crowd who were looking to settle down or who had been previously divorced.

...
Wikipedia