MARRIAGE BOOM

Opunake Times, 30 January 1934, Page 3

MARRIAGE BOOM

FIGURES IN ENGLAND 35,000 MORE BRIDES I Once again—for the first time pi a depressing number of years—there isi a general epidemic of getting married. This concrete evidence of the turning of the tide of national prosperity is found hi the Registrar-General s return for the quarter ended September 30 (now published) which reports an astonishing increase in marriages for England and Wales.

The newly married couples of tills quarter exceed those of the preceding quarter by more than 35,000, and there are 10,000 more of them than there were in the same quarter of last year. Churches and register offices are busier than they have been for years, and all the trades that thrive on setting up young love under a new roof are rubbing their hands and smiling. Effect on Trade.

It is a startling reflection that in the months of July, August and September there were 35,000 more young men who found themselves in a position to marry than there were in April, May and June, when there is seasonal tendency towards matrimony to be taken into account.

This tender state of affairs has an excellent and practical effect on trade in general. When 35.000 extra couples get married it provides the trade that yields the money that perhaps another 35,000 will get married on.

The hu Iding trade, as the Minister of Health declared a few weeks ago, has been leaping up its business charts in i n anwr never before known. Tl icre have been more houses built iu Britain hv private enterprise in the last 12 months than in any single year since we stopped running up our own mud huts and put the matter into the hands of building companies.

Fillip to Building. There is a neat (but perhaps artificial) relation to the 35,000 extra married collides in the fact that in the last 12 months there have been 36,000 more houses built by private enterprise than in the previous record year. Also 8000 more municipal houses have been built by local authorities than even their amtious schedules have allowed for. Arid there are precisely 77,218 fewer unemployed in the building trade at this moment than there were this time last year. As the supply of new houses increases, so the rents fall, and the high cost of getting married and settling up for yourself gets steadily less and less. Better Than for Years.

These same three last months have been red-letter months for the furnishing trade. “We have had better business than we have had for years over these last three months,” an official of a well known firm said recently. “There is no doubt of the effect of the rising marriage rate.

“People are still spending carefully ; but they are suddenly spending more. Now we have seen the registrar’s returns, of course we know why.” Even the most conservative furnishing returns admit there is a “distinctly better feeling,” aim when furnishing firms say there is a better feeling they mean that people are buying new chairs and sofas and being cheerful about it, Before the war a high marriage rate would have made no sensation—living was cheap, then, and unemployment a thing nobody talked about. But in these last five years, at least, so many young people have felt that marriage was financially beyond-them that a sudden glut in the registrar’s market is news indeed.