The thinking behind these earlier laws was rammed home with a vengeance when, in 1800, Lord Wellesley (the successor to Cornwallis), banned Indians, and Britons born in India, from all Government social functions in Calcutta, a practice that spread steadily to the other parts of India under British domination. The machinery for separation, and the creation of an Anglo-Indian society that could fill only the lower and less lucrative posts in India, was now in place.
As these laws hit home, Indian wives and mistresses began to disappear. No man wanted to see his children penalised because their mother was the wrong colour or to see his wife viewed as a social outcast. At the same time, despite the difficulties, more British women began to travel to India.
To the general public, as to Queen Victoria herself, India had always been a land of compelling fascination. Its silks and muslins, its spices, jewels, ivory and tiger skins breathed an exotic glamour with overtones of romance and danger that must have been irresistible to an adventurous young woman. These early members of the Fishing Fleet were put off by neither the discomforts and dangers of the journey nor the high mortality rate among Britons working in India. What lay ahead was the Holy Grail of the Victorian miss: a pool of eligible, financially secure bachelors.
By the time the Raj was installed in 1858 the ‘us and them’ attitude was part of the British mindset, as was an unquestioning acceptance of the need to maintain purity of blood and links with the motherland.
So home – as England was always called, even by fifth-generation Anglo-Indian families – went the small boys and girls born to the servants of the Raj, sometimes as young as five, sometimes to see parents only once or twice during those years. Some were lucky enough to stay with loving aunts, cousins or grandparents, others could find themselves lodged somewhere that lacked all love, warmth and laughter; yet others had to remain at school during the holidays while everyone else left to join their families, enduring years of separation and misery.
Iris James, born in 1922 and brought to England as a small child by her parents, only saw her father twice during her childhood after he had returned to India. He was ‘a stranger for whom my feelings were neutral’. During the holidays she stayed at the vicarage at Potten End, then run as a home for children of the Raj, where she was half-starved. When her mother returned home two years later she removed Iris at once; thenceforth holidays – Iris became a boarder at eight – were spent with aunts or her grandmother. The experience of the six-year-old Iris was all too common.
Nor, as she grew up, did the idea of going back to India appeal. She had a withered right leg, due to early polio, undiagnosed, untreated and never spoken of. ‘My nickname in the family was Jane, short for Plain Jane,’ she wrote. ‘So by the time I was educated and ready to be taken to India to find a husband, my chances were considered to be poor, especially by me.
‘Another, crippling disadvantage was a good brain. Men hated clever women, my mother never ceased to point out, adding that even quite old very clever men in the Indian Civil Service would prefer not to have the silence in their remote outposts disturbed by intelligent conversation.’
Negating as far as possible the effects of intelligence was something Iris’s mother could, and did, do something about. In undeviating pursuit of the goal of marriage, she practised a cruel deception on her hapless daughter, concealing from Iris, who longed for an education, that her school had been confident she would get a scholarship to Oxford. Instead, she was whisked away from school at the end of summer 1938 and brought out to India and the marriage market.
Unsurprisingly, Iris dreaded the idea of tea dances and tennis playing and although her withered leg was never mentioned in the family, her teenage life became dedicated to trying to disguise it. ‘To cross a room became an exercise in camouflage. Even in the hottest summers, and the summers of the thirties were very hot, I carried a coat over my right arm, to drape itself down my side and conceal my leg. Neither my mother nor my aunts thought of giving me slacks to wear. I dreamed and schemed of buying myself a pair, but in the days before dress allowances this was impossible. Why did I never ask? I don’t know, the young were so tongue-tied then, the adults so crushingly in control.’
Marjorie (‘Billy’) Gladys Fremlin was another of the returning young women who had been sent home to be educated. Marjorie, who returned to India aged seventeen in the Fishing Fleet of 1924, had been born in Bangalore; she was the second of the three daughters of a coffee planter, Ralph Fremlin, whose wife, Maud, came from the next-door plantation, about four miles away. The Fremlins’ early married life had been full of the tragedies that so often happened to Anglo-Indian families: four sons had died, two at birth, two at a year old. Marjorie, always known as Billy, was treated as a boy by her father.
The three little girls were sent home when Billy was five, to stay with their aunt and uncle, a Norfolk parson, during the holidays. Like many of the children sent back like this, the shock and narrowness of English life after the warmth, sights, smells and teeming human and animal life of India was profoundly depressing. Billy’s first impression was of the chill of England after India. ‘We struggled through those years, they were cold and unexciting,’ she says in her spoken memoir. ‘Most of my memories were not very happy.’
When war was declared in August 1914 her parents came home, her father to fight, her mother to take them to a rented house in Lowestoft, where sometimes they saw drowned sailors washed up on the beach. One night a zeppelin came over, later a sea bombardment destroyed the railway, and their mother removed the small family, along with their Indian ayah, in a horse-drawn cab. Finally, in 1924, Billy, a skinny, beautiful, blue-eyed blonde, returned to India like a prisoner released to rejoin her father, now back on his coffee plantation. Even a Bay of Biscay storm during the voyage out on P&O’s Khyber did not depress her. ‘I was so happy and it was so exciting I could hardly believe it.’
Ten years later Beatrice Baker was openly calling herself ‘a member of the fishing fleet’, which she described as ‘the daughters of British families stationed in India, who went out to join their parents, uncles, aunts and friends with the idea of finding a husband. In my case finding a husband was not a specific idea as my family were a long-established family in India. My great-grandfather, Henry Baker, had gone out to India in 1819 as a Church Missionary Society missionary, one of the first in South India. It was always presumed that on leaving school, Malvern Girls’ College, I would return to India, where I was born, to enjoy the wonderful life on our family estate Kumakarom.’*
In January 1934 she sailed from Tilbury in the SS Orsova for Colombo. As the only unattached girl on board – there were two other young women, sailing to meet and marry their fiancés in Colombo – Beatrice came in for a lot of attention from the ship’s officers. Her father was waiting for them on the quayside in Colombo, magnificent in a tussore silk suit, highly polished brogues and rakishly angled topi. Then came a journey by ferry and train to mainland India and down canals to their estate.
Another who expected to return to India was Iris Butler,* the daughter of Montagu Butler, later Governor of the Central Provinces of India.
For Iris, her childhood in Rajasthan meant that ‘pictures and talk about England were fairy stories. India was real.’ The Butler children would listen to stories of Indian gods and heroes and, as a family, would attend festivals like Diwali, passing shrines built into mud-banks between the fields, ‘each with its tiny offering of marigolds, a handful of cardamoms, a saucer of ghi’.*
In 1911, when Iris was six, she, her mother and her siblings sailed for England from Bombay and settled in a furnished house in Hove to be near the preparatory school of her brother Austen (thenceforward to be known as Rab, the nickname he was given at this school). ‘The house was on a steep street going down to the sea front, windswept, cold and seemingly always grey,’ she wrote. Another terror for this small child, used only to the ‘thunderboxes’* of India, was the pulling of the lavatory plug, followed by ‘an overwh
elming rush of water. Where, oh where, was the kind, efficient sweeper?’ The contrast with India could not have been more acute.
While many of the Fishing Fleet had been schoolgirls only months previously (‘In the afternoon unpacked, wrote to Mummy. Have moved up a form,’ wrote Claudine Gratton, adding gloomily, ‘Exams. Fail.’ a few weeks later), others were going to India with a definite purpose. For Ruby Madden this was, quite simply, to enjoy herself, to see – and be seen. Ruby’s letters and diary focus to a large extent on what she was wearing, or what someone she admired was wearing, and the effect on spectators. Even her trousseau for the ship was huge. ‘I get unmercifully chaffed about my clothes because I have a new thing on every day and a handkerchief to match,’ she wrote on 27 November 1902. ‘They all watch with interest to see what I have on when I go upstairs.’ For the shipboard Sunday service she wore ‘my white muslin dress with blue sash and ribbons and hat with blue veil,’ noting that she ‘got quite a cheer when I came on deck and old de Passeb reeled off compliments about looking like Dresden china etc till I had to escape from him . . .’.
A number of the Fishing Fleet were travelling to India to stay with married relations or friends, sometimes just for fun but often because the wife was having a baby. In 1900, one such girl was Lucy Elinor Hardy. ‘My brother Willie, serving in a British Mountain Battery at Umballa, asked me to stay for the winter – his wife Jessie was expecting a baby and he had to be out in camp a great deal of the time.’
It was a chance not to be missed. She came of an Army family – her father, Major-General Frederick Hardy, of the York and Lancaster Regiment, had fought in the uprising of 1857, at the second relief of Lucknow – and her parents must have known what an enjoyable time their daughter would have, as they bought her a return ticket that would only expire after a year. She sailed on 9 October on the P&O Arabia* with two other girls, also going to brothers, the three considered responsible enough to chaperone each other – ‘one, Mary, being a daughter of Austen Dobson the poet,’ wrote Lucy.
Occasionally girls were shipped out because their parents or guardians wanted them out of the way – perhaps relations at home were strained, perhaps some bad behaviour had to be lived down and a change of scene might give them a fresh start or provide a breathing space or perhaps because the last hope of finding a husband was more likely in the Raj.
Dulcie Hughes was the daughter of the Mayor of Marylebone, London, and the eldest of three sisters. She was extremely attractive, dark and slim with come-hither eyes. She was also very difficult, with a jealous, vindictive nature that erupted to cause problems within the family (‘probably due to pre-menstrual tension,’ said one of her relations. ‘But that wasn’t a subject discussed then . . .’).
Dulcie despised bluestockings, was bored by academic achievement but, at a time when marriage was everything, knew how to get men interested – in her eyes, the only talent a woman needed. ‘The only thing that is worth having in this world is sex appeal,’ she would say. ‘If you don’t have sex appeal you might as well give up. Without it, it’s pointless being alive.’
But the years passed and there was no sign of a marriage. By the time she was twenty-eight her parents had become disenchanted and frustrated, so when in 1934 the chance came to send her off to stay with friends in India they leapt at it. ‘You can go off to India and try and find a husband,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the only thing to do. And I think it would be nice if you took Dorothy [her younger sister] as a chaperone and companion.’ Off went Dulcie and Dorothy, aged twenty, for a year’s visit, during which they had a wonderful time and Dulcie received thirteen proposals. But alas, she became, in the dreaded phrase, ‘a returned empty’, as she turned all her suitors down; back in England, she gave as the reason that ‘they were either after my money or my body’.*
Another despatched for behavioural reasons was Marguerite Lucie Chouillet de Jassey, always known as Bébé. She was one of six children of a Huguenot family, brought up in France. Her father, a pastor, spent a lot of his time in Paris and the Hague, where at one point he was personal priest to the Queen of Holland. With their mother, the family spent every summer in Brittany, renting the same house each year. Here Bébé and her sisters and brothers ran wild.
Bébé’s two elder brothers were killed at the end of the 1914–18 war, but the four girls and their mother continued their long summer visits to the Brittany coast – in Bébé’s case for another seven years until she was twenty-five, an enchantingly pretty young woman with red-gold hair and brown, flirtatious eyes that attracted a string of admirers.
She had also imbibed the new freedoms that had come with the war. With whichever sister was around, she would swim naked. ‘This was much to the fascination of the local male population, who would pursue them into the sand dunes behind the beach,’ said Bébé’s son. ‘Eventually, my grandmother got a bit fed up with this and said: “Look here, enough is enough – I’m not having all these men chasing you over the beach.” My mother – Bébé – was about twenty-five when Granny shot her off to India. I think she got fed up with the chasing over the sand dunes. So she sent her off to stay with her eldest, married sister, who lived in Delhi and Simla. Basically, she wanted my mother out of the way.’
That most of these girls did marry was unsurprising. Until the Second World War, the whole emphasis of their upbringing was on becoming wives and mothers;* any thought of a career was usually discouraged, with arguments ranging from ‘Don’t be silly, your husband will support you,’ to ‘You will be taking the bread out of the mouth of someone who really needs it.’ Thus whether or not they actively planned to look for a husband, the subliminal quest for a mate was necessarily there from an early age.
As far as the Army was concerned, girls from Army families often regarded a spell in India as the equivalent of a debutante Season. They ‘sailed joyfully away by P&O liner to join the “Fishing Fleet”, see the Rock, the Grand Harbour, the Taj by moonlight and find a husband,’ wrote Veronica Bamfield, herself the daughter and granddaughter of soldiers who had served in India. ‘This practice was well established long before it became part of army ritual and had been a fruitful source of supply of wives for the Honourable East India Company.’
Not all of the Fishing Fleet were successful, as this sad little verse written in 1936* shows:
Now sail the chagrined fishing fleet
Yo ho, my girls yo ho! Back to Putney and Byfleet
Poor girls, you were too slow!
Your Bond Street beauty sadly worn
Through drinking cocktails night and morn
With moonlight picnics until dawn
What ho! My girls, what ho!
Violet Hanson, aged twenty-one and with an unfortunate marriage behind her, was one of those sent out to India by her mother to find a husband of the ‘right’ social and financial standing. She was the daughter of Sir Francis Hanson and his wife Pearl and brought up like most children of her age – the Edwardian era – and class largely by her nanny, seeing her parents for an hour after tea dressed in her best frock and on her best behaviour. Occasionally, perhaps for her birthday, they would come and say goodnight to her.
Towards the end of the 1914–18 war, when she was seventeen, she fell in love with her brother’s tutor, an attractive young man of good family, with a private income, who for medical reasons had not been conscripted. Her mother, keen that her daughter should marry well and pleased to have such a presentable, eligible young man to hand when so many others were losing their lives in battle, decided that he would be a suitable husband for Violet, and went into action. ‘Somehow or other,’ Violet wrote in her memoir, ‘Billy was persuaded to propose to me’; they became engaged and, when she was eighteen, they married.
Like almost every girl of her time and age, in similar families, Violet was sexually ignorant: it was an era when sex was never spoken of and certainly not to a young and innocent girl. Numerous mothers could not even bring themselves to enlighten daughters on the eve o
f their marriage. This was the case with Violet.
‘After the wedding Billy and I went off for our honeymoon to a suite in the Savoy Hotel, London,’ she recalled. ‘I don’t know what I really expected would take place between us, but I suppose subconsciously I must have realised that this relationship of ours was not usual – after dinner the first night I retired to my room, Billy to his, and no more was seen of him until the next day.’
She had, in fact, married a man who was homosexual – another unknown area in the dark and dangerous field of sex. For the teenage Violet, homosexuality was not merely a closed book – it was a word she would not even have recognised. Later she was to write: ‘I shall never understand how my mother, and indeed everyone else, allowed me to marry Billy. Even in those days it must have been apparent to intelligent adults that he was a homosexual. Naturally I had no idea, for I didn’t know what homosexuality meant.’
She was fond of Billy and he had an interesting circle of friends – writers, painters and actors; and at eighteen she enjoyed being surrounded by these personable, amusing young men who were always ready to take her to theatres and parties. Life was pleasant, full of affection and, as she had no real knowledge of what marriage should be, any misgivings were pushed away. It was only when she got to know the local doctor that enlightenment came. Experienced with human nature, and able to question her gently, he quickly realised what was wrong. ‘I don’t know that I was really surprised,’ wrote Violet, ‘as I subconsciously knew that there was something very odd about our marriage.’ Her doctor friend explained that, as she was still a virgin, she could get the marriage annulled and this she did.
In her mother’s eyes, remarriage would be the quickest way out of the delicate and faintly scandalous situation of a daughter returned home because her marriage had gone wrong. At twenty-one, the veteran of a marriage blanc, Violet was persuaded by her family to accompany her Aunt Mabs to India – Aunt Mabs’s son Geoffrey Byron was an officer in the very smart 4th/5th Dragoon Guards, then stationed at Secunderabad, in the Deccan. It must have seemed highly likely that in the exotic surroundings and social whirl of regimental India, and surrounded by fit and attractive young men, a romance leading to marriage would develop and the unfortunate early marriage could be quietly airbrushed away. Violet herself certainly believed that her aunt had been given instructions to get her suitably married off. She would be successful – but not in the way her mother had hoped.
The Fishing Fleet Page 5
