I was surprised when someone from the British High Commission informed me that this search tool for lonely hearts is a legacy of the Raj. Until early 19th century, it was perfectly acceptable for the Brits posted out to India to take local women as wives and "go native". The "bibis" produced children who comfortably drifted between two cultures and inherited considerable sums of money from their fathers. But the interfering missionaries soon put a stop to that and made such marriages morally reprehensible.
This created a glut of single white men in India, tea planters, soldiers and civil servants. Ladies back in England, who had been left on the shelf for two or three seasons, saw this as a heaven-sent opportunity. They began arriving on our shores and advertised their attributes in the pages of papers like The Tribune and The Pioneer. In the unlikely event of not finding a suitable match, they would head back to London in disgrace as "returned empty".
