The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  1

  ‘Champagne has been known to allay sea sickness when all else failed’

  The Voyage Out

  ‘The smell of the earth soaking up the first rain of the monsoon, of watered Lucerne [alfafa], of roasting gram [chickpea from the servants’ godowns], of tobacco smoked on the roadside in a communal pipe and the tremendous, heady bitter smell of something in the Simla bazaar – you never forgot and you longed to smell it again . . .’. Veronica Bamfield, child of a family that had spent three generations in India, was returning as one of the Fishing Fleet.

  Some of these young women had been born in India, sent home anywhere between five and ten years of age to be educated, and were now sailing out to rejoin their families. ‘Got up very early and went to St Pancras for boat train. Met Lady Steele. Arrived at Tilbury. Got on to boat for India, SS Mongolia, cabin 244,’ wrote the sixteen-year-old Claudine Gratton on 4 September 1936. ‘Said goodbye to Lady Steele.’

  Claudine was one of many single girls for whom travelling out to India was a rite of passage as important as the debutante curtsey many of them had already made. In any autumn during the years of the Raj these groups of young women and girls could be found undertaking the voyage, its route marked by distant and exotic ports. ‘Port Sudan, the Fuzzy Wuzzies – handsome men with amazing hair – and an ability to stand on one leg at a time for hours. Gully gully men at Port Said, naked brown boys diving for pennies thrown over the side of a ship, islands gold, turquoise and amethyst in the misty early sunlight of the harbour of Bombay,’ reminisced Veronica Bamfield in the 1930s.

  Claudine, like other young girls of her age and class, was chaperoned every inch of the way, first by her mother’s friend Lady Steele to Tilbury (it was unthinkable that she should travel alone on the boat train from St Pancras for Tilbury) until she boarded the SS Mongolia for Bombay, on which her mother was also sailing.

  ‘Three awful old hags in my cabin,’ she noted – her mother was in smarter accommodation – but within twenty-four hours was otherwise preoccupied. ‘The boat rolled. Felt very seasick. Slept on deck all day, very cold. Went to bed. Was sick once. Mummy fainted in the bathroom. Had fever, went back to bed. Had to look after her.’ Mercifully, her mother improved the next day.

  Departures were always an event, heightened in many cases by the knowledge that this was the last time one might see a beloved face. ‘Steamed down Southampton Water under the guidance of a pilot. After three hours the pilot and several others left us,’ wrote William Adamson in the 1850s. ‘We gave them a parting cheer which they lustily returned – the last of which many then on board would ever give to England.’

  Until the beginning of the eighteenth century the leisurely sea route round Africa had been quite sufficient for the needs of the expanding Empire – one of the reasons Britain established colonies along the coast of Africa was to protect the shipping that carried her trade.* But now her mills needed India’s raw materials, and fast transport was urgent. The eighteen months or even two years that might elapse before communications from the Company’s executive board in London could reach their employees in India and an answer be returned were no longer acceptable. An alternative to the Cape route had to be found.

  None of this deterred the eager and determined young women bound for Bombay, as a poem written by Thomas Hood in 1842 makes plain:

  By Pa and Ma I’m daily told

  To marry now’s my time,

  For though I’m very far from old,

  I’m rather in my prime.

  They say while we have any sun

  We ought to make our hay—

  And India has so hot an one,

  I’m going to Bombay!

  . . . . . . . . . . . .

  My heart is full—my trunks as well;

  My mind and caps made up,

  My corsets, shap’d by Mrs Bell,

  Are promised ere I sup;

  With boots and shoes, Rivarta’s best,

  And dresses by Ducé,

  And a special licence in my chest—

  I’m going to Bombay!

  By the time of the Raj, sail had given way almost entirely to steam, although troops were still sometimes carried in sailing ships, which took the Cape route. To judge by the letters sent home by Minnie Blane, the bride of Archie Wood, a handsome captain in the army of the soon-to-be-disbanded East India Company, it could be a nightmare journey.

  Minnie travelled on the newly built sailing ship Southampton in one of its eighteen passenger cabins. In these early journeys round the Cape all the cabins had to be furnished by the passengers themselves – what they bought was simply an empty space, to be filled at their expense and according to their means. This involved, at the least, a bed or sofa on which to sleep; sheets, looking glass, washstand, chair, candles and a chest for clothes.

  The Southampton was cramped: there was a dining room but nowhere else to sit except parts of the deck. The ship also carried hens, pigs, a cow, several horses and a pack of foxhounds (which gave tongue just as everyone was falling asleep) that the captain intended to sell when they reached India. The shortage of water meant cleanliness was a problem and during the four months the voyage took much of the food went bad – perhaps the reason Minnie’s husband got dysentery.

  Sometimes the ship bounced along under a brisk wind with half the passengers prostrate with seasickness; when there was no breeze she inched her way forward under a hot sun. With the insanitary conditions, the endless bouts of seasickness, the effluvia from animals and passengers, one can only imagine the stench, let alone the discomfort. ‘Tell Cissy [her sister] never to undertake such a thing,’ wrote Minnie. ‘It is horrible!’

  Three months into the voyage she reported that ‘all the lump sugar is gone and the eggs all went bad and had to be thrown overboard weeks ago, and though there is dessert on the table every day I cannot touch a thing, as biscuits, figs and ratafia are alive. I cannot tell you how sick it made me on cutting open a fig to see three or four large white maggots lying comfortably inside!’ After intense heat (‘I am melting’) they rounded the Cape through a terrible storm, waves like mountains and snow falling.

  It was so cold when she wrote this that Minnie, normally a bright, cheerful, lively girl, never left the cabin, while her husband wore three or four overcoats at once. A few days later she had retched and vomited so much that one of her eyes was entirely red from burst blood vessels and the doctor had kindly popped in to warn them against the mutton. ‘It has all gone bad.’ When they finally arrived, the voyage had lasted sixteen weeks and three days. Nor did Minnie know if they would ever return to England.

  In those early, smaller ships, seasickness was almost unavoidable, and of a virulence and duration unknown in the passenger liners of today. William Adamson, travelling out in the 1850s on the newly launched Himalaya, at 3,438 tons* the largest ship of the infant P&O line, succumbed the moment they left Southampton Water. ‘I did not sleep much the first night, my berth being a top one I felt the motion of the ship very much, added to which the night was very boisterous and the noise overhead as well as that of the engines was anything but pleasant. We dined at five o’clock but few were able to sit until the dessert came as they had already begun to feel squeamish.’

  When the little Himalaya entered the notorious Bay of Biscay she was tossed about like a cork.

  ‘Sometimes a large hill [of water] seemed to bar her progress, at other times we saw one behind looking as if it would engulf us – the pitching and rolling of the vessel did not allow of us walking about so we sat or stood and held on,’ wrote Adamson, adding feelingly, ‘The Bay of Biscay certainly comes up to my expectation and I can convey no idea of the emotion with which I looked upon it.’

  One night the storm and turbulence was so bad that many passengers sat up all night in the saloon, afraid to go to bed in case they drowned in their cabins. Others remained there because they were immobilised with nausea.

  In contrast to the cabin furnishings, meals we
re lavish.

  ‘The bugle sounds at half past eight o’clock, when most of us rise and dress,’ wrote Adamson to his father. ‘At 9 we breakfast, on hot tea or coffee, hot rolls and hot and cold meat, fowls or anything we may fancy, at 12 we have luncheon of bread and cheese and butter washed down with wine, spirits or ale, at 4 we dine, when we have soup, various kinds of roasts, fowls, pastry, puddings, cheese and celery, dessert of apples, oranges dried fruits etc. During dinner we are allowed an unlimited supply of wine, beer and porter with champagne twice a week. Tea at 8 and Toddy at 9.’

  For entertainment Adamson and his fellow passengers had a brass band for an hour in the morning and a string ensemble for an hour in the evening. Otherwise they wrote letters, or played chess or draughts.

  In 1830 the East India Company pioneered the Red Sea route with a small steamer, built in India, called the Hugh Lindsay. As sail gave way to steam – though the early steamships were often sail-assisted in suitable conditions – and with it the end of the perilous journey round the Cape of Good Hope, the journey time shortened dramatically.

  Small steamers began to run across the Indian Ocean between Suez and Bombay. Passengers would leave their ship at Alexandria and, after changing to a Nile boat – even smaller – travel to Cairo via a canal forty-eight miles long that had been built a few years earlier by the Pasha of Egypt, using 200,000 slaves. From Cairo those hardy early travellers were sent off in parties of six in wagons, each with two wooden wheels of the immense strength needed to survive the lumps of stone and small boulders on some parts of the road. Each wagon was pulled by four or six horses (drawn from a stud of 400) that were changed every ten miles or so, when there would be a meal for the passengers; halfway, there was a hotel with bedrooms where the passengers could catch up on sleep for a few hours, for the start of the eighty-four-mile land journey to Port Suez.

  ‘The canal boats are small and dirty,’ wrote Adamson to his father, of one of the long, narrow covered boats from Alexandria to Atfe. ‘You sleep where you can – sofa, floor or chair. My bed was under the table with my bag as a pillow and my coat as mattress and blanket.’ The ladies were allowed to sleep on deck, presumably with wraps and shawls to act as pillows and covering.

  At Suez they would catch the steamer that would take them on the last leg of their journey, to Bombay. The coal for this had to come out from England; and was humped across the desert by a herd of 3,000 camels kept for the purpose. By now ships’ cabins were furnished, although the minimum wardrobe recommended seems enormous. ‘Take with you only six dozen shirts. . . two dozen pairs of white pantaloons, three dozen pairs of long drawers, a forage cap, a straw hat . . .’. Women were advised to take no less than six dozen chemises, four dozen night chemises, four dozen each of drawers, thin cotton stockings, towels and three pairs of stays.

  These ships also transported the mail, letters and newspapers packed in boxes about 18 inches by 12, colour-coded in red, blue and black according to destination – enough, said one observer, to fill two large luggage vans. (The mail itself started its journey by going over the Channel and France to Marseilles, from Marseilles to Port Said, then over the desert to Suez and thence by paddle steamer to India.)

  When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 passengers were able to remain on the same vessel they had boarded in England, doing away with the dirt and discomfort of the desert route and heralding the luxury of the later ocean-going liners.

  By the early 1900s travel was more comfortable, but for some severely regimented. Florence Evans, travelling out to India a few years before the 1914 war, described arriving at Southampton dock and boarding the SS Nubia, ‘a splendid-looking steamer of great capacity’. In fact, the 5,914-ton Nubia,* built in 1894, was a mere 430 feet long – yet, according to Florence, carried ‘well over a thousand troops beside women and children, crew, officers etc. [She was] like a small town – one easily lost one’s way in her.’

  As Florence was not one of the ninety first- or sixty-two second-class passengers the Nubia was entitled to carry, routine started early. So rapidly could disease sweep round a crowded ship that she and her companions had to be medically examined and passed as fit before being allowed on board, where they were allotted their beds in the Women’s Quarters.

  ‘These Quarters,’ she recorded, ‘are like a large dormitory with rows of comfortable beds and under each bed is room for the deck box containing clothing for the journey. At the end are the bath rooms (hot and cold water always on) wash house and lavatories also two small hospitals for the sick.

  ‘We steamed out of dock on the Friday morning with our band playing Auld Lang Syne and Where is now the merry party? These rather saddened us and many both men and women wiped away a few tears as they wished Goodbye to their native land for a few years: then we were cheered by Soldiers of the Queen a most lively and inspiring tune which put us all in good humour again.’

  She forbore from describing the seasickness that raged after the first day (‘I will draw a veil over our sufferings any one who has gone through it understands the horrors of sea sickness’), concentrating instead on the daily timetable: ‘We rise at 5.30, breakfast 7.30, doctor’s inspection 9, dinner at 12, tea at 4, bed at 8.0’ – and sleepy or not, to their dormitory they had to go at eight sharp.

  Despite the daily medical inspection, a few days before they arrived at Port Said a rumour swept round that scarlatina had broken out among the children. ‘Certainly one child was taken seriously ill, an infant a few months old,’ wrote Florence, adding sadly that the child had died before the day was out. ‘Poor woman,’ she wrote of the mother, ‘she had buried three before and this was the last. The little one was buried in the evening, all engines were stopped and the service was read the parents standing by when the corpse was lowered into the deep, it is a most solemn ceremony done that I hope never to see again. Poor mother she was insensible for hours after. She attempted to follow the child at the burial and was held back by force.’

  The Bay of Biscay was still so dreaded in the twentieth century that those who could afford it often travelled overland to join their ship at Marseilles in order to avoid it.

  One such traveller was the Hon. Lilah Wingfield, daughter of Lord Powerscourt, invited out to India to see the 1911 ‘Coronation’ Durbar, held to recognise King George V and Queen Mary as Emperor and Empress of India. Lilah’s fellow passengers were an exceptionally smart crowd, travelling out on the Maloja for the durbar as special guests, the married couples all accompanied by their respective lady’s maids and valets (travelling second class, naturally). ‘As well as the boy Maharaja of Jodhpur with his English army officer companion, Lord and Lady Bute sit at the next table to ours and the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, he is quite lame,’ noted Lilah. ‘Lord Leigh and his sister, both elderly, are our next neighbours.’

  At first all was excitement and pleasure. Even during the lengthy process of coaling, Lilah could enjoy the warmth and beauty of the night, with its black-velvet sky studded with brilliant stars, listening to Scottish tunes floating upwards. ‘Lord Bute’s piper played the pipes on the second class passenger deck after dinner and all the maids and valets danced Scotch reels!’

  Although Lilah was travelling on the newly launched Maloja, one of P&O’s larger ships* at nearly 12,500 tons, all too soon the disadvantages of a late-autumn sailing became apparent; and on 17 November 1911 she too was writing: ‘A horrid rough night succeeded by a horrid rough choppy sea today and it is no longer warm and sunny either and it rains half the time. I lay in my chair on deck all day feeling very miserable and wretched and too giddy to go downstairs to meals or to do anything . . . we had dinner on deck and afterwards there was a dance – a queer night to choose for this entertainment as the ship was rolling and pitching like anything.’

  But Lilah’s natural high spirits and readiness to enjoy herself soon surfaced. ‘Lord Bute’s piper played reels, Lord and Lady Bute, Lord Mar and Kellie, Lord and Lady Cassilis and the Duchess of Hamilton all took part, a
nd it was a very funny sight as they were all lurching against the side of the ship and slipping about in the most comic way.’

  Small in size and without stabilisers, ships had little protection from a rough sea – there were even arguments over which was worse: pitching and tossing or rolling from side to side. Sometimes, bags dripping oil were slung over the side in an effort to smooth out the crests of waves so that they did not slap too thunderously on the ship’s sides, but the effect was negligible. One ship’s bulletin referred to this in its ‘Overheard’ column. ‘Hallo, old man, going to Port Said?’ ‘Whichever side’s nearest. Quick, out of the way!’

  ‘At Marseilles the posh people came aboard,’ wrote Maisie Wright. ‘There were five maharajas with their wives, children and retinues, and British Provincial Governors returning from home leave, and a bishop.’

  By the beginning of the twentieth century nothing halted the relentless gaiety on these voyages. Corseted ladies in flowing Edwardian skirts, holding long-handled spoons in front of them, ran as fast as they were able along heaving decks in the egg and spoon race and, as the Marmora Gazette reported (in February 1912): ‘in the tie and cigarette race [seeing which lady could tie a tie or light a cigarette fastest, both things which no ‘lady’ would normally do] the mere men were much impressed by the countless opportunities of displaying genius, even in tying bows, while several ladies were clearly practised hands in lighting cigarettes. After the tea interval with its lively auction most of the time was devoted to spar fighting. How graceful one looks balanced on a thin pole! That amusing event cock-fighting brought the proceedings to a close.’

  Invariably, there was a fancy dress ball; Lilah went as an Irish peasant, with a skirt of crimson muslin instead of red flannel because of the heat, her red hair in two long plaits and a scarlet handkerchief round her head. Another girl, rather than be overwhelmed by the elaborate fancy dresses some of the passengers had brought out from England, borrowed one of the young stewards’ uniforms and accompanied him serving drinks to guests. She acted the part so well that no one spotted her – and she won a prize.