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‘Kisses on the boat deck’
Love at Sea
‘This evening Judy told me that the Comte de Madre had informed Lady Strefford that he had come simply and solely on this voyage for the purpose of finding an English wife!’ wrote Lilah Wingfield, travelling to India on the P&O vessel Maloja for the Coronation Durbar of December 1911.
‘She said that he was very anxious to marry and that he considered there were more opportunities on board ship for getting to know a girl well than in any other place, and he particularly wished for an English wife and did not want a very young girl – no Miss of eighteen – so he had set his selection on me! But I would ten times rather marry the black boy who prepares my bath!’
For Lilah and her friends, ‘spooning’ couples or those engaged in a purely shipboard romance were a common sight – and a bit of a joke. ‘We all stalked around the deck to watch a ship flirtation which was going on at the far end of the bows, a very affectionate couple who held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes, oblivious of all of us who walked by.’ Sometimes their little group did more than stalk. ‘We all nag Colonel Mitford over his infatuation for a pretty little Miss Gauntlett, it is a regular ship-flirtation. We composed a letter and had it given him by the deck steward, supposedly to be from “Mamma” Gauntlett, asking him his intentions! But he found out we had done it, so the joke fell flat.’
Lilah travelled out at a time when a strict and rather ridiculous apartheid existed between the P&O’s officers and its passengers. ‘There is a rather fascinating ship’s doctor aboard but unluckily none of the ship’s company is allowed to dance, which seems an absurd rule,’ she wrote sadly. ‘They looked longingly on at the rest of us.’ As one Commodore of the line, Captain D.G.H.O. Baillie, recalled: ‘We were never allowed to appear on passenger decks in the day time before half past four in the afternoon, and we had to be off them by half-past nine. Drinking with passengers, either in one of the public rooms or a cabin, was rigidly forbidden and officially we were not permitted to dance.’
The reason was that earlier the P&O ship China had run aground on the island of Socotra at the southern entrance of the Red Sea – no one was hurt but it was considered a disgrace to the line. When it was found that some of the officers had been dancing with passengers during a party on board, the Company concluded that this was a contributory cause of the error in navigation and decided to ban all officers from on-board gaieties.* This, said Commodore Baillie, fomented a real grievance, especially in the Australian mail ships, ‘where rows of pretty and partnerless young girls would be sitting or standing round the edge of the dance space’.
Even more verboten was any hint of romance. But determination often found a way. As Captain Gordon Steele pointed out, although Company regulations forbade him from speaking to passengers, happily there was no rule against passengers addressing him – when, of course, politeness demanded an answer.
Apart from the attraction of a uniform, the officers of a liner in the P&O fleet had an aura of importance and dignity. When Steele – then younger and more junior – performed the simple operation of marking the ship’s noon position on the track chart by means of a small circle, it was quite a ceremony. He had a quartermaster to assist him. ‘He opened the frame and held the dividers for me, and walked discreetly behind me as we wended our way to the First and Second Saloons.’
One day, said Steele, he found a pretty woman waiting by the First Saloon track chart. The following day she was there again. The third day she murmured to herself, sufficiently loud for Steele to hear: ‘How beautifully he does it!’ The embarrassed Steele not only dropped the dividers but also wrote down the latitude a whole degree out. The next day she asked if he would correct her wrist watch for longitude. He lingered so long over this operation that two elderly ladies thought they were holding hands, one whispering to the other, ‘A boy and girl attachment – how sweet!’ Every day Steele corrected the young woman’s watch. By now he had altered the routine so that the quartermaster went straight to the Second Saloon while he, alone, attended to the First – and to Jean, as the girl was called.
But they could not hope to escape notice for ever and Steele, while longing to see more of Jean, could not afford to jeopardise his chances with a reprimand – or worse. He happened to be the officer supervising the lifeboats on the ship’s port side, so had Jean transferred from the starboard lifeboat list to the number 2 port lifeboat, of which he was directly in charge – while leaving her mother on the starboard list. He then ordered extra lifeboat drill for his port passengers . . . which meant helping Jean to put her lifebelt on, tying it round her, and assisting her to climb into the boat. But he was too steeped in the Company’s traditions to make any further move.
Finally came the moment when the passenger tender arrived alongside the ship in Bombay and the passengers prepared to disembark. The queue was filing past the hatch where Steele was making up accounts; Jean, noticing this, left her mother at the head of the queue and herself rejoined at the very end. With everyone else ahead of them, Steele managed to give Jean a long and tender farewell kiss – their first.
For the next week, he recalled, ‘I was miserable.’
For others, these late-autumn sailings held a storehouse of possibilities.
As most men took their leave during the English summer, largely to avoid the heat of the plains and also often to take advantage of the London Season, ships going out in the autumn usually carried not only Fishing Fleet girls but also returning soldiers and administrators, most of whom would be single.
Some might have taken their furlough with the specific aim of finding a wife, but failed (‘If she doesn’t respond within a week, I move on,’ said one ICS man) and were happy to meet a willing girl on the ship. Others made a mental note of a ‘possible’ girl, keeping her in mind for future encounters in India – or found that a meeting on board ship led to love in the future.
One of the latter was Jim Acheson, going out in 1913 to join the ICS. Curiously, it was also an ocean liner that nearly destroyed his chance of happiness – by sinking with his proposal of marriage on board. Jim was a young Ulsterman from County Armagh, who had done outstandingly well as both scholar and sportsman at Trinity College, Dublin, before passing into the ICS as a ‘griffin’ (as newly joined members of the Service were called).
In the tender taking passengers from the Tilbury quayside to their ship, the P&O Arcadia, Jim had noticed a Mrs Field, ‘whom I mentally described as a typical memsahib,’* and her daughter Violet, then aged almost twenty, who at the time made little impression on him. He also saw a number of girls going out to join their parents in India – called, as he knew, the Fishing Fleet. ‘It was perhaps ill-natured of the old hands in the services to refer to the P&O and other liners sailing east [in the late autumn] as the “Fishing Fleet”. We had our full quota of these maidens on the Arcadia.’ For them, as he also knew, he would be considered a desirable target. But at twenty-four and only at the start of his career Jim was well aware that any thoughts of marriage were out of the question.
By the end of the voyage Jim had had enough conversations with Mrs Field and Violet – ‘whom I admired at a distance’ – for Mrs Field to give him their Indian address and for him to promise to send them his when he knew where he would be posted. The Fields were bound for Meerut, a big cantonment in the United Provinces where Violet’s father, Colonel Charles Field, was stationed as Cantonment Magistrate.
That first Christmas Jim exchanged Christmas cards with some of his shipboard friends, including Violet. The following summer, on 4 August 1914, war was declared between Great Britain and Germany. Jim, like most young men, wanted to fight for his country and applied for permission to join the Indian Army Reserve of Officers (IARO). He was flatly turned down by the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces (to which he had been assigned) on the grounds that he could not be spared, although he did receive a promise that, should circumstances change, the position would
be reconsidered.
The next time he sent a Christmas card to the Fields, Jim, now stationed at Lucknow, happened to mention he was recovering from a cold. He was immediately invited to stay with them for Christmas and recuperate (in Indian terms Lucknow, less than 300 miles away, was quite close to Meerut). Feeling very run down and delighted at the idea, he accepted gladly.
He was met at the station by Violet, a memory he always cherished. ‘I was greeted by a pretty, strange young woman, with what I can only describe as a gallant bearing, neatly gloved and neatly shod and with the brightest eyes I had ever seen and one of the sweetest voices I have ever heard.’ Later he noticed that she had thick, glossy hair, with a reddish-gold glint. ‘I have a crow to pluck with you, Mr Acheson,’ she began, going on to point out that he had got the day of his arrival wrong. She led him out of the station to a smart English trap, with her mare Bunty between the shafts (there were only one or two cars to be seen), handling the reins efficiently through the crowds outside the station and in the bazaar.
It was a happy week. Jim rode, played tennis at the famous Wheler Club, met an old friend from on board ship, took part in his first large-scale snipe shoot and attended a New Year’s Eve ball. The time slipped past all too quickly in those crisp sunny days of perfect weather – but not too quickly for Jim to become increasingly close to Violet.
They remained in touch and, by the time Violet was sent home early in 1915, along with other wives and daughters of Army officers ordered to the UK or elsewhere on active service, they were exchanging weekly letters, albeit on a firmly comradely basis. Jim, however, who had now been promoted to the two important positions of City Magistrate of Agra and Superintendent of the two Agra prisons (Agra Central Prison and the District Jail), had already decided that he was going to ask Violet to marry him.
What caused him to hesitate about proposing to her was not only the fact that Violet was doing war work but – much more of a consideration – ships were being sunk daily by German U-boats* in the Mediterranean, which was inevitably traversed by any passenger to India. And if Violet agreed to marry him, she would in all likelihood feel bound to come out to join him in India – with the possibility of terrible danger en route, for which he would feel himself responsible.
The impasse was resolved when Violet wrote to him to say that she had decided to accept an invitation from a friend, the wife of a Hussar officer stationed in Meerut, to come out and stay with her. Jim resolved to act: if she was coming out anyway, why should she not come out as his fiancée – that is, if she accepted his proposal …
He wrote a letter asking her to marry him and it was duly despatched. Showing the forethought and intelligence that would later enable him to become one of the most distinguished members of the ICS, he then set himself to discover on which P&O mail boat the precious missive, so laboriously worked over, would travel. This turned out to be the SS Arabia, a single-screw liner built in 1898.
The bad news he had been fearing came about. Three hundred miles off the coast of Malta the Arabia, a passenger liner, was torpedoed without warning on 6 November 1916 by the German submarine UB-43. Jim read the news in the Civil and Military Gazette, the Lahore newspaper that included the daily list of sinkings. Providentially, few lives were lost but all the home-bound mail went down including, of course, Jim’s proposal of marriage.
Swift action was needed. Jim rushed to the Agra Central Telegraph Office, where he composed a cablegram that was in effect a shortened version of his letter. He sent it off and waited anxiously for Violet’s answer, hardly able to concentrate on the cases appearing before him in the stuffy, crowded Lucknow court room.
When her cable came the answer was ‘Yes’ followed by a letter saying she would be sailing a fortnight later in P&O’s Khyber. This time, his anxiety during the three or four days the Khyber was in the Mediterranean was of a different order of intensity – with consequent relief when Violet’s ship reached the safety of Port Said.
Then, just before Violet was due to arrive in Bombay, Jim received a telegram from the Lieutenant-Governor’s secretariat. ‘Be prepared to leave at shortest notice for Mesopotamia, Persian Gulf or NWF [North West Frontier],’ it read. The telegram was followed by a letter saying that although the Lieutenant-Governor still adamantly forbade Jim from joining the IARO – which meant, effectively, from any kind of the active service he had wanted – all Indian provinces had been asked to send in the names of those officers who could be spared on loan to fill a single temporary gap in the Foreign and Political Department cadre. Jim’s was one of the names put forward. ‘At least,’ ended the letter drily, ‘You will be closer to the firing line.’
With his bride-to-be nearer every minute, Jim was at a loss. The only thing to do was to appeal to a higher authority. He went to see the Viceroy’s Private Secretary – the Viceroy was on tour at Agra at the time – laid his dilemma before him and was advised to put it to the Deputy Foreign Secretary in Simla. It was back to the Telegraph Office again, this time to send a cable including the words: ‘Am just about to get married stop please allow decent interval and post to Quetta* stop Acheson.’
Jim’s request was granted and he and Violet were married on 1 March 1917 at Meerut. Shortly afterwards, they were posted to Quetta.*
For those in love the sea in peacetime – when calm – was a perfect setting. ‘There was the excitement of sleeping on deck which we did if the nights were excessively hot as the tiny cabins were like ovens after the day’s heat,’ wrote Violet Hanson in 1920. ‘It was a lovely experience to lie under those brilliant stars and watch the tall mast gently swaying against the marvellously clear dark sky. The pleasure of the little wafts of air after the heat was wonderful.’
Romances that had been tentative bloomed in the perfect temperature and tranquillity of the Indian Ocean. ‘Here, the water looked like brilliant sapphire blue jelly,’ wrote Violet, ‘and the flying fish skimmed in flocks over the scarcely moving sea. At night phosphorescence glowed over the ocean, it was cool again and there was the excitement of nearing the end of the voyage. Shipboard romances were coming to an end with a great exchange of names and addresses and promises to meet.’ These, she wrote with a touch of cynicism, were seldom to be fulfilled.
But for the sophisticated Edwina Ashley, one of the Fishing Fleet of late 1921, the dances and fancy dress balls were just so many humdrum episodes in a boring three weeks. In love with Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was accompanying his cousin David, the Prince of Wales, on a royal tour of India and Japan in 1921, she had decided to cut short their separation by securing an invitation to visit the Viceroy.
As a young unmarried girl, socially prominent, Edwina could not travel alone without giving rise to scandal: a chaperone was essential. She found one by the simple method of going to Thomas Cook’s office and asking to look at the passenger list. The name she landed on was Olwen Carey Evans, Lloyd George’s daughter, eight years older than Edwina and, as was essential, married. Edwina scarcely knew Olwen but Olwen’s husband, Thomas Carey Evans, of the Indian Medical Service, was personal physician to the Viceroy, Lord Reading, with whom Edwina was going to stay.
Whatever her feelings, Mrs Carey Evans was not likely to refuse a girl who was going out to stay with the Viceroy during the visit of the Prince of Wales; in practice, she found Edwina difficult and self-willed, and was constantly worried that there would be some troubling episode on board the ship that would cause scandal. For most, though – in the words of Joan Henry, an eighteen-year-old Fishing Fleet girl returning to India after years of boarding school – ‘kisses on the boat deck with the moon making a silver path over a smooth sea was as far as it went or was even expected [to go]’.
When Kathleen Wilkes travelled out in 1922 to take up a post as a governess, warm weather and romance arrived together. ‘In a few days under a full moon on the Red Sea we became engaged, much to the delight and interest of many people on board ship.’ Her fiancé was a returning ICS man; as the older, rather snobbi
sh woman with whom Kathleen was sharing a cabin remarked: ‘You’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you? He’s one of the heaven-born.’
One girl who found romance on the voyage not once but twice was Enid Shillingford, the daughter of a planter in Purnea (near Darjeeling). When she was seven her parents divorced and Enid returned with her mother to England, where she was educated, spending the years of the 1914–18 war at home. Her father came from an old family of indigo planters, but because of the decline in the indigo market when aniline dyes were invented in the early part of the twentieth century, he turned to tea planting, at which he became extremely successful.
Purnea was an area where there were a lot of Eurasian families, who tended to group together as – among the British in India at that time – those with Eurasian blood were stigmatised. Enid was a quarter Indian, very good-looking, pale-skinned with medium brown hair, a agile dancer and keen tennis player with a lithe, athletic figure. She had no idea that her heritage could ever cause her problems, especially as her cousins, with the same proportion of Indian blood, had been happily accepted into the Life Guards, where they were contentedly serving.
When the war, with its terrible slaughter, ended she was twenty-one. Her father, who shared the prevailing belief that a woman’s life would be nothing if she did not marry, and knowing that many of the men she could have married had been killed, became increasingly worried as the years ticked by that his beautiful daughter would not find a husband in England. So in 1921, when Enid was twenty-four, he paid for her passage to come out to India and stay with him. ‘She told me several times that that was the specific reason she was sent out,’ said her son Charles Greig.
The Fishing Fleet Page 6
