In January 1971, an old-fashioned legal claim, breach of promise to marry, was abolished in England and Wales. An often racy claim, which had supplied many vicarious thrills in the weekly newspapers, had outstayed its welcome.

Almost 50 years later, traces of it are hard to find. It may still linger in the memory of an elderly man who was once threatened with a court hearing by his former fiancée. It forms the plot of the music hall song ‘Waiting at the Church’ and survives in a few Victorian literary gems, the most famous being The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Otherwise it disappeared around the same time as railway lines axed by Dr Beeching. Unlike those lines, whose loss is sometimes regretted, there are no calls to reinstate a law which permitted a jilted woman or man to win damages from the person who had refused to fulfil their promise to marry.

Broken engagements are probably as old as the human race and in Britain, medieval courts occasionally approved demands for redress when someone had spent money or transferred property as preliminaries to a marriage that did not take place. The law changed in 1672, when feisty Mary Holcroft added £100 to her claim against a Mr Dickenson to compensate for the loss of the status of being his wife. When the judge upheld this, it acknowledged that breach of promise related to more than tangible property. A jilted person could obtain damages for hurt feelings, loss of the married status or insult to reputation.

Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754 abolished the right of the church to compel couples to wed. This meant that breach of promise became a way for poor women who had been seduced under a promise of marriage, and given birth to an illegitimate child, to get some recompense. Higher up the social scale, jilted ladies, or their parent or guardian, seem to have shown little reluctance in pursuing lucrative cash settlements from a wealthy man, under the guise of avenging a public insult to their reputation.

Breach of promise became a social and cultural phenomenon in the mid-19th century.

There were several reasons. One was that if a woman could prove a broken engagement, it was almost impossible to lose a case. This made it much easier for poor women to obtain a court hearing than with other types of injury. Some solicitors offered what are now called no win, no fee deals, knowing that the defendant would be ordered to pay the woman’s legal fees, as well as damages. Jurors who heard breach of promise cases could be extraordinarily liberal with the defendant’s assets, regularly awarding damages that bore little relationship to the woman’s actual loss, or the defendant’s ability to pay. The likelihood of high damages was a strong incentive for women to bring a claim until the last decades of the 19th century, and the reason why several defendants found themselves filing for bankruptcy.

Although the courts heard some clearly fraudulent claims and several that were brought for no reason other than to heap public humiliation on a man, the majority of women who sought damages in court had suffered financially through the defendant’s thoughtless or selfish behaviour. Most were from the lower classes and had no option but to state their loss in public, hoping to obtain some form of financial redress. This could be recovering hard-earned savings that had been wasted on abortive wedding preparations, giving up a good job or selling a business in anticipation of a marriage that never took place, or being deserted by a man who had been their cohabitee for many years. In 1869, Mary Lamb won £200 damages from John Marsh. At his request she had resigned from her post as a school teacher, giving up an annual salary of £30, and was dependent on her labourer father when Marsh married someone else.

Also outrageous was the conduct of a Mr Dunkerley who tried to take advantage of Deborah Travis, the widowed landlady of the Crown and Cushion Inn at Failsworth near Oldham in 1884. Deborah was making £25 a week from the business when her fiancé, a retired businessman, suggested that she gave up the lease and that he would take it on instead. After this, Dunkerley’s affections cooled dramatically. He moved into the Crown and Cushion and treated Deborah as a servant. He then told her to leave, allowing her to take a bed and some bedding and two chairs, to which he added £10 in cash. In court, Dunkerley strenuously denied any engagement until Deborah produced a letter confirming his proposal. She won £500 damages to compensate her for being left homeless and without her business to support her, while Dunkerley now had a new source of income and the choice of two places to live.

Although lawyers regularly argued in court that a jilted woman would never marry, it was not unusual for a woman who had received substantial damages to attract another suitor. A year after winning her breach of promise case, Deborah became the wife of a cotton weaver.

By the time Deborah Travis won her case, damages of several hundred pounds were much rarer than they had been even 15 years previously, and the number of cases was declining. One reason was the growing middle-class disquiet about the many high awards that they considered were given undeserving women, combined with several fraudulent cases that plagued the courts in the 1870s. Another was that some women had begun to think about a woman’s place in society and disliked the principle of money being given to compensate for a broken engagement. They thought that it promoted marriage as a woman’s role in life.

Any hope that breach of promise would simply fade away as the level of damages began to fall was short-lived. In 1890 one of the most sensational cases ever was heard, and 21-year-old Gladys Knowles won £10,000, the highest award to date. A shocked jury decided to punish the elderly defendant, Leslie Duncan, who had tried to seduce Gladys after she unwisely agreed to spend an unchaperoned night at a hotel with him. Duncan did not have this amount of money and Gladys negotiated a reduced, but still lucrative £6,500 with him, and her case reignited the popularity breach of promise.

In the 1890s a procession of poor but aggrieved women went to court, and plenty of them would have been disappointed with the outcome. Winning £100 damages from a poor man was useless if he had no money to pay them. By now £100 was a considered a large sum and in Edwardian times, unless a jilted woman had been treated very badly and suffered identifiable harm, damages could be so paltry that some women must have wondered why they had put themselves through the ordeal of going to court and seeing their story emblazoned in newspapers. These women may not have queued outside a theatre to see one of the many comedies that took breach of promise as its plot.

Following World War One, the argument that a broken engagement damaged a woman’s reputation cut no ice. The combination of low awards and more opportunities for a woman to earn her own living turned many women against the claim. Many now preferred a broken engagement to marriage with an incompatible man.

Surprisingly, breach of promise then found a new role. The law was slow to reflect the changes in society, leaving some women with no redress in unjust situations. Knowing cohabitees and unwitting victims of bigamous marriages had no inheritance or property rights when their relationship ended. It was especially harsh if the woman had transferred her money to the man, or worked unpaid in his business. Judges allowed such women to be compensated by breach of promise damages, which was a practical, though indirect, solution.

By the 1960s public opinion had turned decisively. Marriage was seen as something to be willingly undertaken, rather than under coercion. The notion that the blame for a failed engagement lay with just one party was also out of tune with the times. Recognising that alternative ways of dealing with property and maintenance disputes could be developed, many of men and plenty of women let out a collective sigh of relief when the ‘gold diggers’ charter’, as breach of promise had come to be known, was ended.

The speed with which it was forgotten shows just how irrelevant claiming compensation for a broken engagement had become by 1971. On an individual level, men did not want to be reminded of having to pay damages and many women also wanted to forget. For a woman, losing a case was humiliating. Even for those who won damages it could be a skeleton in the cupboard rather than a story to be passed down. Newspaper coverage was rarely flattering, and women who told their story in court made private, and possibly discreditable, information public.

But to forget anything in history can be dangerous. Breach of promise reveals some enriching insights into past society and social attitudes. It was a law that did try to help women in situations where they had no legal rights. It was perhaps the only time where women had the upper hand over men and some cases reveal just how well both parties knew the woman’s rights.