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Mr Wallis and his colleagues place the 15-year-old in a youth club and endeavour to secure better accommodation for the family. “The couple feel much encouraged by our combined efforts,” Mr Wallis concludes.

If the original purpose of the MGC was to prepare engaged couples for married life, “save” matrimony and promote premarital celibacy, it has failed dismally. The latest figures show that marriage is at its lowest level for over 140 years. In England and Wales, in 2006, there were 236,980 marriages; 66% were civil ceremonies. In 1940, in the midst of war, marriages had peaked at almost double that figure: 470,549.

In 1947, the year before Mr Wallis was recruited, there had been another peak, this time in divorces: 47,041, which dropped to 28,767 in 1951. Over the next 13 years, for every 1,000 marriages there were approximately 2.4 divorces. By 1993, that rate had increased sixfold to over 14 divorces per 1,000 marriages – a high of more than 180,000 divorces. In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number had declined to 132,562 divorces (a drop of 7% on the previous year, reflecting the decrease in marriage).

In the 1940s, a birth out of wedlock was often disguised by a “shotgun marriage”. Now, 43% of children are born to mothers who are unwed and 2.2m people cohabit. The British Social Attitudes survey published in January reported that 70% of people thought there was nothing wrong in sex before marriage.

The traditional chronology of relationships – courtship, marriage, sex, children – has been turned upside down. Marriage was once a young person’s route out of the parental home, a rite of passage that happened, on average, in their early twenties. Now, men marry, on average, at 31, women at 29. Yet, according to survey after survey, inside or outside matrimony, the majority of people still desire a successful long-term relationship. Self-help books, agony aunts and magazines overflow with advice as awareness has grown that, without help, love – fragile and delusional – may not be sufficiently robust to weather parenthood, an individual’s “right” to happiness and all the difficulties involved in trying to live as a couple, “happily ever after”.

In the 1930s, similar anxieties about the fragility of unions, even when supported by the prop of Christianity, were being expressed by a group of vicars, doctors and lawyers. In 1938 the MGC was born from the British Social Hygiene Council, aimed at tackling venereal disease and promoting sex education. The council’s marriage committee was also in favour of contraception, but since this did not appeal to the Roman Catholic community that helped fund it, the committee broke away and became the MGC (changing to the National Marriage Guidance Council in the late 1940s).

One of the MGC’s founders, Dr E F Griffith, a leading sexologist and author of the bestseller Modern Marriage, held radical beliefs that included giving a woman a medical before marriage during which the hymen was stretched to make sex less painful – a practice critics believed would provoke premarital intercourse.

Interrupted by war, the MGC opened for business again in 1943, led by David Mace, a former Methodist minister who found himself “in the centre of a stage, dazzled and confused by the limelight”. The MGC’s championing of monogamy and chastity, while never outrightly condemning divorce, endured for the next 40 years in spite of profound social changes taking place outside the counsellor’s room.

Mace and his wife established themselves in London above a chemist’s and below a “dubious maisonette” that housed a busy “working girl”. Over the next two years, they acted as counsellors to 800 people, proving, Mace said, that there was a need for a new “social and personal service”. “If the divorce court is the mortuary for dead marriages,” he wrote, “the guidance centre is the hospital for sick ones.”

The National Marriage Guidance Council, renamed Relate, celebrates its 70th birthday this year. It now deals annually with over 150,000 clients in 600 locations, including Relate Centres, schools, children’s centres, Connexions, Sure Start and GP clinics. It offers counselling, family therapy and sex therapy and teaches children social skills so they are better equipped to forge successful relationships as adults. Once, it would accept only married couples. Now, individuals, families and young people, gay and straight, are counselled via face-to-face meetings, telephone, e-mails and webcams. Help is given not just to improve relationships but also to make divorce or separation a less wounding process.

Today, Relate’s counsellors (more than 80% female and the majority paid) are drawn from all classes and ethnic groups and may spend several years training. The do-gooding bored housewife is no more. In the 1990s, when the world’s most famous divorcee, Diana, Princess of Wales, became Relate’s much-photographed patron, the charity signalled its public acceptance of a life beyond marriage.

Ironically, given its Christian roots, atheists now figure strongly among its clients. “Initially, it was twinset and pearls, something worthy and sixpence in the saucer for tea,” says Nick Turner, 52, a Relate counsellor since 1991, who now heads the Relate Institute, responsible for training and research. “Today, it’s about robust professional training and a paid career.”

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