She read market trends brilliantly, keeping up the pretence of an ideal marriage with Proopsie, as she affectionately called her husband, Sidney, when it suited her. But in Marje, the authorised autobiography written by Angela Patmore – published three years before Marje Proops died, when society’s mood had changed – she allowed it to be revealed that she and Proopsie had had virtually no sex at all, and that all the time she had been conducting a passionate affair with Mirror lawyer Philip Levy. It appeared to make little difference to her readers. To them, Marje was more than a journalist – she was an icon, a legend, and indeed she maintained her air of mystery by making only very rare television appearances. Would we ever see her likes again, as they say?

I rather think not. True, Claire Rayner, another agony aunt legend, still thrives, but doesn’t have an agony column in a national paper any more. Katie Boyle now writes an agony column only for pets in Dogs Today. Angela Willans, who spent much of her life hiding under the compulsory pseudonym of Mary Grant at Woman magazine, has retired, as has Peggy Makins, the real live agony aunt behind “Evelyn Home”. Anna Raeburn, who emerged briefly in the 1970s and 80s as an up-and-coming agony icon, has given it up to host a talk show.

Desire for anonymity

But has the problem page suffered the same demise as us aunts? Perhaps we should start at the beginning. According to Robin Kent, in her book Aunt Agony Advises (now out of print), the problem page was invented by a young printer called John Dunton, who was conducting an affair with a married woman. Kent wrote: “His wish to unburden himself and his need to seek advice continued to be over-ridden by a desire for anonymity – ‘how to conceal myself and the wretch was the difficulty’. While he was wandering round St George’s Fields, Lambeth, the Speakers’ Corner of 17th century dissent, he suddenly realised that he couldn’t be alone in his dilemma. He stopped and announced to his startled companions with a characteristic mixture of emotional relief and financial acumen: ‘Well, Sirs, I have a thought that I will not exchange for fifty guineas.’”

The consequence of this revelation was the birth, in 1691, of the Athenian Gazette, the first such device for audience participation in the history of publishing. True, many of the queries were about the mysteries of creation and the rights and wrongs of the slave trade, but emotional ones crept in as well. By 1910 aunts had established themselves alongside the uncles. The aunts’ role was, really, to re-enforce social codes of the day. Battered wives were told that it would be best to stay with their abusive husbands, depressed women were told to turn to God. The agony aunt of the Ladies’ Home Paper replied to a girl who signed herself “Misery”: “Self-knowledge is half the battle, so cheer up, little Misery. Make up your mind that the next time you write, your nom-de-plume will be ‘Joy’. The way to clear a garden of weeds is to uproot them with a firm hand. And so my dear girl must you do with your faults. Pull them out at once not by degrees but with a good hearty tug. Remember, also that there is One who is always ready to help you. Try to lean on Him a little more and when you are in doubt about anything, just whisper to yourself: ‘What would He do?’”

And when a woman wrote to Mary Holmes of Lucky Star in 1948 complaining that her husband was ratty when he returned home from work, she was told: “Perhaps he really is very tired. He can easily be worried. Have you thought of sharing the gardening? Are you bright and welcoming and understanding? I know that this sounds as if I was putting everything on to you but men are rather like children in a way – they have to be fed and amused.”

Until Anna Raeburn’s arrival at Woman in the late 1960s, hot from the sex magazine Forum, where she was allowed to use words like “penis” and “orgasm”, much of the problem-page postbag still consisted of etiquette problems – whether to wear gloves at a funeral, how to manage rows of cutlery at posh dinners and the like. In her autobiography, Peggy Makins revealed that when she was on Woman in the 50s the word “bottom” was verboten on any page in the magazine, even if it referred to “bottom of the garden” or “bottom of the saucepan”. Any sexual problems received by the aunts were answered by means of information put into plain brown envelopes, which were then sent to the writer’s private address.

“I am glad you have realised the foolishness of what you contemplated,” wrote Marion Dark of Glamour magazine – not the Glamour of today – way back in 1939 to a reader whose letter had not been published. “Stick to the principles you know are right. I can send you a booklet called Why Sex Relations Before Marriage Are Wrong. The price is four and a half pence.”

The agony column was still in fine fettle when I started editing the problem page of Woman in the early 1970s, and it was partly because there was absolutely no information on personal problems around for anyone. It was a time pre-internet and a time when most doctors still treated their patients with disdain – and certainly would not dream of pointing them in the direction of the many self-help groups that were beginning to spring up. If you went to your doctor with arthritis, would he or she suggest you contacted Arthritis Care? No. If you’d had a stillborn baby, would they mention the Stillbirth Association? No. And although it’s true not all doctors do so even now, there is a far greater willingness to point patients in the direction of all the further outside help there is available.

The queen keepers of secrets

Back then, agony aunts – at least the responsible ones who answered every letter that came in, not just those on the page – were one-woman search engines, with leaflets, lists of addresses of helpful organisations and self-help groups, telephone lines, lists of useful books on the subject and even, occasionally, the names and addresses of speciality doctors. When I arrived at Woman the only leaflet available was one entitled “How to Eat an Avocado Pear”. When I left I had written nearly 100 leaflets ranging in subjects from sex (about six leaflets in this category alone) and blushing, to anxiety and pet bereavement. We photocopied till we were blue in the face, and we got information out to people absolutely starved of any facts concerning their problems. Nowadays information about suffering and where to get help for it is everywhere. Indeed, it is odd that the agony column survives at all. But it does. Why? One reason is that a new kind of agony column has developed, a more democratic one. The Guardian sets out problems but gets them answered not by a lone aunt, but also by the readers themselves. This idea was taken up successfully by the Daily Mail a few years ago, although it didn’t last, and for more than 10 years I have edited The Independent’s problem page, in which each week a problem is put out to readers. Many of them write back with their advice, to which I add mine. It seems to me that this perfectly reflects society’s attitudes to problems now. Okay, we may go along to the professionals for advice, but it doesn’t stop us accepting the guidance of family and friends as well. Or perhaps going to a health food shop for extra supplements to cure whatever physical ailment we have, or visiting some kind of therapist on top of that. People don’t look to my page as advice just from me. They read other people’s answers as well, which of course weakens, and quite rightly so, the authority I might have had in the old days.

Secondly, agony columns thrive in a climate of emotion. It appears there is no one without “feelings” these days, and it’s essential therefore for even the snootiest broadsheets to have agony columns. (I remember trying to get Peter Stoddart at The Times to hire me about 10 years ago: he looked at me as if I was mad.) Despite a few disastrous forays – hiring Anne Widdecombe to do an agony column in The Guardian, for instance, and Margaret Cook to edit one in The Times after her very public split from the then Foreign Secretary – they seem finally to be getting it right, with The Daily Telegraph employing Lesley Garner and The Times using Bel Mooney.

Finally, while it’s true that those with problems can and do use the internet now, and arguably don’t need to use agony aunts for sources of information, there are still, apparently, thousands and thousands of people who, although they have computers, are not adept at finding out information using them. They can, however, use email. Which means that while Deirdre Sanders gets only 100 letters a week at The Sun, she receives between 600 and 700 emails – clocking up a total of about 40,000 a year, almost double what she had in the past. Indeed, when the column was posted on The Sun’s website, it became so popular that it was taken off to protect circulation of the paper – the editor didn’t want people to be able to read the column without buying a copy. Deirdre’s column is always among the top three most-read pieces in the paper and now, since she’s including texting as a way readers can communicate with her, she expects her work load will increase dramatically yet again. No, there never will be another Marje. But agony doesn’t go away, and nor does the need for newspapers to provide succour and information for thousands of wretched and unhappy people. And if the columns give a few people a laugh along the way, frankly, who cares?