Joan Ball

East London

Ball was born in 1934, the fourth surviving child of a family in East London, and was evacuated to the countryside during the war, where one of her foster families sexually harassed her. Home was worse than the evacuation. Her mother beat her, and when Ball finally refused to take any more, had her involuntarily committed.

The hospital was of its period, a place where young women were held for behaviour rather than illness, and Ball’s one ambition inside it was to get out. Her time there was bound up with a suicide attempt; she left in 1953, at nineteen, not welcome at her parents’ house; an aunt and uncle, Maud and Ted, took her in, and a work placement run by the hospital got her a job. She had already been working since 1949, as a shop assistant at the London Co-operative Society, where counting money in front of customers was a daily hazard because the letters and numbers would not hold still. She was severely dyslexic at a time when the word was not in common use, so the available explanation was that she was stupid. Her defence was to play the clown and never ask for help. She moved on to Bourne & Hollingsworth, then a dress department, then the London fashion house Berkertex.

The Marriage Bureau

In 1961, at 27, Ball took a job at a marriage bureau and discovered she was good at it. The insight that came out of that year is the one her whole business later rested on: do not ask clients what they want in a partner, because the answers are aspirational and useless. Ask what they will not accept. Everything else is negotiable.

In 1962 she set up her own agency, the Eros Friendship Bureau Ltd. Her clientele was not the young and adventurous but divorcees, widowers and older single people looking to marry, which suited a service that took matching seriously.

Advertising was the immediate problem. Respectable British newspapers assumed a firm that introduced men to women for a fee was a front for prostitution and would not take the copy. Ball’s answer was to buy time on the offshore pirate radio stations, which were broadcasting pop music into Britain from ships in international waters in defiance of the BBC’s monopoly and needed advertisers who could not go anywhere else. The illegality was mutual and so was the audience: people already inclined to ignore what was respectable.

The First Match Run

By 1964 the bureau had more clients than Ball could pair by hand, which is the specific reason she went to a computer. The questionnaire was rewritten so the answers could be quantified, the responses were punched onto cards by hired staff, and the matching was run on a machine she did not own and could not have afforded, bought by the hour like any other service. The logic was hers. The name of whoever wrote the code has been lost, exactly as it has for Operation Match.

The run worked and the business grew on it, so she renamed the firm the St. James Computer Dating Service, putting the machine in the name at a point when that was still a commercial risk rather than a selling point.

Com-Pat

In 1965 Ball merged with another marriage bureau to form Com-Pat (Computer Dating Services Ltd), short for computerised compatibility, then bought out her co-owner and ran it alone. She advertised in the Sunday Express, the Evening Standard and The Observer, ran Eros alongside Com-Pat for a while, and eventually sold Eros to concentrate on the computer side. The second version of the system, Com-Pat Two, launched in 1970 with a larger pool and returned each client a list of four best matches.

What the service would not do is also part of the record. Ball’s program did not match across race or religion, a restriction she shared with the rest of the industry and with the customers who were paying. The technology of the 1960s reproduced the social rules of the 1960s, at speed and in bulk (see The History of Online Dating).

Dateline

John Patterson, a mechanical engineering graduate of the University of London, heard about computer dating while visiting friends at Harvard and founded Dateline in 1966 with £50 borrowed from his parents. He sold it differently. Where Com-Pat promised a true match, Dateline sold an adventure, and its questionnaires asked about sexual experience and preference in detail that the Times of London called Big Brother’s dream. In 1969 Patterson was convicted of fraud and conspiracy for selling men a list of women he described as available, some of whom had never heard of his service. He carried on regardless and outgrew everyone.

Ball’s shorter, more conservative questionnaire produced better matches, which was not the thing the market was buying.

Dead End: Why Com-Pat Died

Three things happened close together. In 1971 a Post Office strike stopped the mail for nearly eight weeks, and a business conducted entirely by post simply stopped with it. Com-Pat’s telephone number was misprinted in the directory, so the clients who did not write could not ring either. Then the Daily Telegraph, her most productive advertising outlet, changed its policy and refused to carry the ads. The British economy of the early 1970s offered no cushion, and Ball, working-class and self-financed, had no one to call for money.

By 1974 she was in debt and wanted out. She telephoned Patterson, her only real competitor, and offered him the company on the condition that he take on the £2,000 it owed. He crossed London by taxi and signed. Dateline went on to become the longest-running computer dating service in the English-speaking world; Patterson was found dead in his bath by an ex-wife in January 1997, aged 51, after years of alcoholism, a wealthy man.

Just Me

Ball was diagnosed with dyslexia and with depression in 1973, at 39, which she described as a relief, because it meant her inability to read and count was not a defect of character. She never married, despite long relationships, including an eight-year partnership with a man she calls Kenneth in her memoir, who was also her business partner. She later converted to Buddhism. Her account of her life, Just Me, was published in 2012 and is the only place most of this is recorded; she wrote it, with dyslexia, at 78.

The standard history of computer dating still starts at Harvard in 1965 with three undergraduates who wanted dates and could not recall, when asked years later, the name of the programmer they hired (see Women in Computing and Stephanie “Steve” Shirley, who was building a software company of home-working women in London in the same years).

📚 Sources

• Mar Hicks — “The Mother of All Swipes,” Logic Magazine issue 2 (“Sex”), 2017 (Ball’s childhood, the 1953 hospital discharge and Aunt Maud and Uncle Ted, dyslexia and hiding it, the marriage-bureau insight about what clients do not want, advertising on the pirate radio stations, the 1964 match run on bought machine time and the lost programmer, the renaming to St. James and then Com-Pat, Com-Pat I and II, the misprinted telephone number and the withdrawn newspaper advertising, the 1974 sale to Patterson for the £2,000 of debt, Patterson’s 1969 fraud conviction and Dateline’s positioning, the Times’s “Big Brother’s dream”, the racial and religious restrictions in both services, and Patterson’s death in 1997)
• Mar Hicks — “Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 10, November 2016 (the scholarly version of the same research)
• Joan Ball — Wikipedia (born 1934, fourth surviving child, wartime evacuation, the 1949 job at the London Co-operative Society, Bourne & Hollingsworth in 1953, Berkertex; the marriage bureau in 1961 and Eros Friendship Bureau Ltd in 1962; the 1964 renaming and first computer match-ups; the 1965 merger into Com-Pat and the buy-out of her co-owner; advertising in the Sunday Express, Evening Standard and The Observer; Com-Pat Two in 1970 with four matches per client; the 1971 Post Office strike and the Daily Telegraph’s policy change; the 1974 sale; Kenneth; the 1973 diagnoses and her conversion to Buddhism)
• Joan Ball, Just Me (Lulu.com, 2012), ISBN 978-1312560147: her own account, and the source behind most of the biographical detail recorded about her.
• John Richard Patterson — Wikipedia (17 May 1945 to 29 January 1997; the Harvard visit; Dateline founded in 1966 with £50 borrowed from his parents; the scale of the business and his death)
• Operation Match — Wikipedia (the 1965 Harvard service and the precedence of Ball’s)