Slough, like every other town in Britain in the late 1940s, was attempting to deal with the aftermath of war: relationships reduced to rubble by affairs forged in haste, eroded by poverty and often prematurely cemented into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy. In April 1949, in an attempt to restore some health to matrimony, the Marriage Guidance Council (MGC) – which had been formed in 1938 – opened its first local branch.

Mr J H Wallis, apparently unshockable and astute, became one of a rare species at the time, the male marriage-guidance counsellor. One of his first cases involved a husband and wife, both 34, with three children. She said her husband had been unfaithful and had “changed since demobilisation”.

“He was quite open and honest about the affair and said he regretted the whole thing,” Mr Wallis reports. “The incident had not meant much to him.” The man said of his wife: “I think the world of her.” Wallis concluded: “In spite of what has been going on, I think he is right.”

Although the prevailing belief was that the onus lay on the wife to ensure “a home sweet home”, Mr Wallis appears remarkably even-handed. He reports, for instance, on a not very satisfactory talk with a young man who had abandoned his 19-year-old wife and returned to his mother after only six weeks. Mr Wallis writes: “The husband’s attitude is simply, ‘I don’t love her any more and nothing can make me.’ He struck me as something of a spoilt child with not much idea of the kind of co-operation on which any marriages must be founded.”

All that is known about Mr Wallis, an unpaid “marriage mender”, is that he was a Slough factory owner who spent Mondays as a voluntary counsellor. A defender of fidelity, again and again he finds himself chronicling adultery. Over a two-year period, he records the tragedies, banalities (in one case the family cat eats a husband’s hamster, causing further friction) and frustrations taking place under the eiderdowns and behind the net curtains of post-war suburban Britain, plagued by a chronic housing shortage and sexual ignorance (“Poor old mum told us nothing”).

It’s unclear why these preliminary interviews escaped the routine cull that, under MGC rules, required clients’ files to be destroyed every seven years, but the notes make desperately poignant reading. They flag up the casual acceptance of domestic violence, the tyranny of the mother-in-law, and the perhaps surprising tolerance of some husbands towards wives who had acquired a taste for extramarital freedom during the war.

Mr Wallis reports, for instance, in case No 67, on a young artist of 26, with two children, whose wife has had an illegitimate child that he fully accepts by a naval officer who was the lodger: “The husband does not in the least resent what has happened, likes the other man and is very attached to his wife.” Mr Wallis adds that the husband has suffered from “a sexual perversion” that stopped intercourse.

“I was able to help both of them take an objective view of this serious difficulty. I think it is better for psychiatric treatment to go ahead first and then we will tackle the problem of the baby, more complicated and difficult than the couple realise,” Mr Wallis writes. He mostly refrains from moralising. In case No 7, a 32-year-old driver, married for eight years and with two children, said he had been wounded and in hospital for six months. His wife had visited only three times, “which he feels rather sore about”. Wallis says: “He had anonymous letters about her relationships with other men, some of them German prisoners. He said, ‘She only drinks beer, can’t dance and doesn’t like the pictures. Then what does she go out for?’ ”

Mr Wallis continues: “He admits that he… formed a liaison with an old flame and they were discovered in her room together… The husband’s attitude is rather self-righteous and dogmatic towards his wife, as though she were a dog who would not behave properly. There is no doubt that the husband’s attitude will have to change if the marriage is to be successful.”

The majority of counsellors recruited to the MGC were middle-class females, “lumpy women in tweeds” with time on their hands, since, once married, they were expected to give up paid work. Like Mr Wallis, they attended 48 lectures spread across 24 “winter’s evenings”. (Marjorie Hume, a founder member of the MGC, writing 30 years later, said of the lectures: “The marriage customs of the Trobriand Islanders had very little bearing on the actual troubles of Mrs Jones in her interview next day, but it was all very interesting.”)

Mr Wallis’s cases were overwhelmingly working-class. His anger at the conditions some families were expected to survive in leap off the page, as does his urge to give practical help. Case No 86, for instance, involves a wife of 35, married for four years to a husband of 34. She has a girl of 15 and a boy of 11 from her first marriage. She is referred by a welfare officer because her husband has “hit her and broken her jaw”.

“The family are living in appalling conditions,” Mr Wallis writes. “They have one room with no heating and no electric [sic] or gas. The girl of 15 and the couple sleep there and the room serves as a passageway to another bedroom used by a young man of 25. The boy of 11 sleeps downstairs, sharing a bedroom with the landlord… The place is little better than a slum dwelling. I have seen [the couple] together and separately several times and referred the wife to the Married Women’s Advisory Clinic, as obviously a pregnancy would be disastrous.”

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