Enid found romance almost the moment she boarded the ship. She and an attractive young man fell in love with each other, he proposed, was accepted and they agreed to marry when the ship reached Colombo. Two days before the wedding she was informed – correctly – that he already had a wife, in Calcutta. Enid was devastated. She returned immediately to England, catching the next ship home from Colombo; she refused even to go on to Calcutta, where her father would have met her.
Five years later, in 1927, when Enid was twenty-nine, her father, still determined that she should find a husband, again paid for her passage out to India. Again she fell in love on the voyage – this time with a happy ending. Thomas Stock, born in 1891, was in the Forestry and Agriculture Department of the ICS. He had just been appointed to a post up-country in Mogok,* Burma, and was returning from leave in England. This time there was no impediment and they were married within three weeks of landing in Rangoon.
The ‘shipboard effect’ was well summed up by the youthful Cecile Stanley Clarke, travelling with her mother in 1928 to stay with her sister and brother-in-law Hubert Gough, tutor to the son of the Nizam of Hyderabad. ‘One old man, who must have been quite forty, had kissed me on the boat deck, but I had dismissed this lightly, having been told that the boat deck and the phosphorus on the water had funny effects on the most sober of men, especially as the aforesaid man had gone to great lengths to tell me how much he loved his wife. This was my first insight into the curious make up of the masculine sex; they can love one Woman with their Whole heart and at the same time get quite a lot of enjoyment from kissing another, and it is no good getting on one’s high horse about it, it is just something to do with masculine hormones.’
For Ruth Barton, writing in the spring of 1931, a voyage was a magic time. ‘The Mediterranean was calm and balmy and from the Red Sea onwards the nights were very hot, the stars brilliant and there was a waxing moon. At night we danced on deck and then went down to the Promenade Deck – invariably deserted at that hour – and leant on the rails, looking over the stern of the ship. The ceaseless silken swish of the double wave below us, creaming away across the moonlit sea and leaving an endless green track in the wake of the speeding ship, soothed and fascinated us. It needed an effort to break away and go down to a scruffy cabin – no air conditioning then.’
So dazzling was the romantic potential of sea travel that it could spill over into ordinary life – in one case, it even acted as a subliminal advertising medium. In the 1939 film Love Affair – the story of two strangers who meet aboard an ocean liner and fall deeply in love despite the fact that they are engaged to marry other people – there is a scene where Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne gaze into each other’s eyes while sipping pink champagne. Immediately, sales of the then little-known drink rocketed.
Unsurprisingly, many of the Fishing Fleet found husbands even before arriving at Bombay, Calcutta, Colombo or Rangoon. There was a pretty good chance on the ship itself, filled as it was with a number of bachelors, some of whom had tried unsuccessfully to find a bride during their months of leave and were delighted to be offered another chance. Thus many romances started on the voyage out, as warm starlit nights succeeded the fogs of a British November, waltzes from the ship’s band echoing faintly in the air as the couple gazed dreamily at the glimmering phosphorescence in the ship’s wake.
Sometimes the engagement lasted only a matter of days, with a wedding the moment they arrived. Bombay, Calcutta and Rangoon were full of churches to facilitate this: the authorities very much disliked the idea of unattached European women in India; they had to be there as someone’s wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt or niece and the man to whom they were related or who was their host was responsible for them (women teachers, governesses, missionaries or doctors were the responsibility of their employers). But for a member of the Fishing Fleet and the bachelor who had struck lucky on his return voyage this plethora of churches was often an answer to prayer – if only because both sides were anxious that the other should not change his or her mind.
4
‘£300-a year man – dead or alive’
The Men They Met
In the days of the East India Company, a favourite after-dinner toast was a pun on the mournful phrase ‘alas and alack-a-day’; aspiring Company men would drink to ‘a lass and a lakh a day’ – the acquisition of 100,000 rupees and an Indian mistress.
The ethos behind the Raj could not have been more different. The bribes that piled up East India Company fortunes were a thing of the past and miscegenation was discouraged. Give or take a few bad apples, the men who governed India throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century up to independence in 1947 came from another mould altogether. They were not motivated by pure self-interest, rather by a sense of mission. Trade, of course, was still a main concern but they believed equally that the world would be a better place if ruled by Britain – as much of it was. They also believed in their responsibilities to those they ruled.
It was a time when horizons seemed to be expanding in all directions. New inventions were proliferating, new peoples, in barely mapped parts of the globe, were being added to the Empire almost daily. For two and a half centuries India – so far away, so mythic in the tales, the exotic silks and spices brought back by travellers – had been a fabled land. With the Raj, the 1876 incorporation into the Empire and the greatly shortened journey time, the great subcontinent exercised a gravitational pull on the popular imagination. More than any other tribe, province or country, India embodied the idea of Empire. To rule it required almost a new breed of men: tough, hardy, able to withstand frequent loneliness, adaptable yet capable of maintaining standards, just, impartial and not afraid of responsibility.
Their nurseries were the public schools, with certain of these almost wholly dedicated to producing the desired result, a custom started by the East India Company with its East India College. With the disbandment of the Company in 1857 the College was closed down and in 1862 a new school, Haileybury, took over its former grounds and buildings – and its eastward-looking attitude, with the result that many of the old boys of the former College sent their own sons there. ‘To the student at Haileybury the abiding subject of interest was the expansion and maintenance of British rule in India . . . Many a Haileyburian had been dandled as a child in arms which had help to bind a province together or bring savage tribes into subjection.’*
India demanded so much of its servants that some families lived there for several generations, sending offspring home for the obligatory English education. Although over half of India’s viceroys had been educated at Eton, not many of the families involved in the day-to-day running of the country earned enough to send their sons to the ‘great’ English public schools, so that several schools were founded to provide an education acceptable, in those class-conscious days, for the children of gentlefolk but at a lower fee. Thus the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon was founded in 1874; it, too, looked outward towards the Empire, indeed recruiting its first headmaster and initial group of pupils from Haileybury (with which it later amalgamated). Bedford School was another; endowed by the Harpur Trust, which kept fees low, so was the choice of many of the poorer Anglo-Indian families.
Cheltenham College, founded in 1841, also attracted the sons of Anglo-Indians – Cheltenham was a place to which many of them retired – gradually becoming one of the two leading schools for boys who wanted to join the Army (virtually all regiments served a tour of duty in India). The other was Wellington College, founded in 1859 to commemorate the great military Duke. It, too, kept its fees low: in 1912 it charged between £84 and £103 for boarders (Eton and Harrow charged £166 and £153 respectively).
All these schools based their curricula on the needs of a future career in the Empire. For the future ICS man this meant the classical education necessary to achieve the essential good degree at university as well as equipping him for a society that became steadily more sophisticated and steeped in the nuances of protoc
ol and etiquette as he climbed the ladder. On the ‘Army’ side, boys were tutored for the entrance examination to military academies.
Permeating everything these institutions taught was an ethos that came to be known as the public school spirit. As the influence of the great Dr Arnold (headmaster of Rugby 1828–41) trickled out through boys, masters and parents, so did his belief that the primary aim of education was not purely to instil learning but to form ‘character’ – the character of a Victorian gentleman. So from the schools that produced the soldiers and administrators who ran India emerged young men with a belief in team spirit, the prefectorial system, the importance of both moral responsibility and games (read ‘sport’ in later life), the health-giving virtue of cold baths and the need to maintain a stiff upper lip at all times. Today the latter is often mocked; then, it was essential – for a young man sent out at twenty-five to run a district the size of an English county any display of emotion would instantly weaken both his authority and his dignity in the eyes of those he was governing.
The Indian Civil Service – the 1,000-odd* Government officials, administrators, judges, collectors and commissioners who ran that vast country – were the cream of Oxbridge graduates. In an average year about 200 candidates competed for around forty places in the ICS; by 1900 the ratio was about four to one. They took the same entrance examination as that for the Home Civil Service; if they were successful they then had to spend a year on probation, during which they had to pass a riding test – much of their time as juniors would be spent on a horse – learn about Indian history and law, and receive a grounding in the language of the province to which they had been assigned. Much was expected of them and standards were high, hence their nickname ‘the Incorruptibles’. As there was no home leave for eight years, young men often left in the knowledge that they would never see someone dear to them again.
There were three presidencies: Madras, Bengal and Bombay, and seven provinces;* and while governors of presidencies were sent out from England, the provinces were governed by senior members of the ICS. Many were classical scholars, the mark for decades of an educated man. Their knowledge of these ancient worlds often spilt into the routine work of their departments, from the days when Major-General Charles Napier despatched his one-word report ‘Peccavi’* to denote his capture of the province of Sindh to junior ICS man Edward Wakefield’s agricultural notes written in flowing Virgilian hexameters.
Wakefield, who had been sent on a three-week course of instruction at an agricultural college, found that the lectures on wheat cultivation reminded him of the advice given to farmers by Virgil and, feeling bored, decided he would write up his notes in the same way. His jeu d’espirit had a sequel: the instructor, sensing something was wrong, reported him to the Punjab Government. When sent for by the Chief Secretary he was told that his notes had been found unsatisfactory. He sat there apprehensively only to hear the Secretary remark: ‘I am sorry to say that they contain at least one false quantity. Nevertheless, they are in other respects admirable.’ They were placed on record in the archives.
ICS members served in three main departments: judicial, executive or political. The political service was an elite corps, drawn from both the Army and the ICS, which represented the British Raj in the more important native states such as Kashmir. Members of the judicial department served as judges in the districts with some in the High Courts, while most Executive officers remained in the districts.
The key man in all this was the District Officer whose job, described by one of them, L.S.S. O’Malley, was all-embracing in his district, where he was responsible for the maintenance of law and order, for the prevention of disorder as well as its suppression and, for the collection of taxes over hundreds of square miles. He also, as O’Malley put it: ‘has to be able to deal with anything from riots to flood, famine and cyclones.’ Of Rupert Barkeley-Smith his Fishing Fleet bride, Honor Penrose, wrote: ‘Most of my husband’s days were spent keeping a balance between the Hindus and the Mahommedans and preventing them from scratching each other’s eyes out.’
Edward Wakefield spent much of 1931 trying to eradicate locusts from Ajmer, in the heart of Rajputana. His success illustrates the kind of lateral thinking expected of these men. Against what might be thought heavy odds he succeeded through an ingenious campaign based on knowledge of locust habits. When the insects settle to lay their eggs the females deposit 300–400 eggs each a few inches below the surface of the ground and die within a week of doing so. A fortnight later the eggs hatch out into tiny ant-like hoppers. These hoppers move slowly across the countryside, devouring wholesale everything in their path. After a month they are as large and active as grasshoppers; six or seven weeks from the date of hatching they fly in a cloud, bringing ruin to every farmer on whose crops they may choose to settle.
Edward Wakefield began by flooding the fields where eggs were known to have been laid. When the hoppers emerged, he organised the digging of deep trenches in front of the direction in which they were moving while setting up canvas screens alongside the hurrying army to funnel them towards these trenches. Then, when each trench was full of hoppers, his men instantly buried them under mounds of earth, stamping it down hard. It was work that went on for several weeks but in the end all were destroyed.
At the top of the ICS were nine posts of Resident, First Class, all of whom had started in the lowest rank, that of Assistant Magistrate, during which they learned their trade from a senior or seniors. The experience of William Saumarez Smith is typical. After successfully passing both the entrance exam and that at the end of a year’s probation, on riding, Indian law and the history and language of the province to which he had been assigned, he was sent out to his first job.
This was as Subdivisional Officer, or Assistant Magistrate, of Madaripur, a district roughly the size of Herefordshire in the Ganges delta, East Bengal. The population of the subdivision was more than a million – he was under twenty-five. The annual rainfall was seventy-three inches and the rivers changed course constantly, flooding some fields and leaving other riverbeds suddenly dry, so that many disputes were about who had the right to harvest the crops of rice and jute. There were no real roads, a horse was no use, the nearest railway station was over fifty miles away and all communication was by water. Several ICS men had been murdered during the terrorist campaign that raged in Bengal during the 1930s.
The young Subdivisional Officer’s work varied from a report on an unsatisfactory headmaster, making a speech in Bengali or cross-examining witnesses in an abduction case to inquiring into a petition by villagers who claimed their land had been washed away by floods but that they were still being forced to pay rent on it. There were no real office hours, months were spent under canvas and the only leave was local.
Marriage was not on the cards. It was an iron rule of the Service that no one married before the age of thirty: the young ICS man had to be mobile and undergo any necessary hardship. In 1859 one of them, John Beames, described the ideal of a District Officer as laid down by John Lawrence, the man who subdued and reformed the Punjab,* as ‘a hard, active man in boots and breeches, who almost lived in the saddle, worked all day and nearly all night, ate and drank when and where he could, had no family ties, no wife or children to hamper him and whose whole establishment consisted of a camp bed, an odd table and chair or so; and a small box of clothes such as could be slung on a camel.’
The cross most of them had to bear was extreme loneliness coupled with sexual deprivation, as evinced in the case of Charles Maurice Ormerod, born in 1904 in Brighouse, Yorkshire. Charles Ormerod, born to a wealthy father who owned silk mills and retired to a large place in Westmorland, was one of four clever children – his eldest sister became a doctor (then extremely unusual for a woman), his brother a barrister. Charles, the brightest of the lot, got a Double First at King’s College, Cambridge, after which he was attracted by the idea of the ICS. With his classical education and excellent degree, he was just the type they wanted and when he
passed their exam was appointed to the Punjab (where he eventually spent twenty years).
During his first ten years he was on his own, moving from village to village, occasionally returning to the office of his immediate superior. Eventually the isolation and lack of congenial company became an overwhelming burden. One day, as he later told his daughter, he was sitting in an up-country village not too far from a railroad, when he said to himself: ‘I could get on that train – that’s all it would take and I could go back home. What is it that keeps me here in India? I don’t know. I’m here with just this one man and we’re on our own and I’m spending all this time in the real wilderness in India, and I’m getting older. The people here who have a better life are the ones who are married. So when my next leave comes up I’m going to go back to England with the idea of getting a wife.’ As we will see later, this is exactly what he did.
Another who wrote home unhappily about this emotional and sexual black hole was William Saumarez Smith. ‘As long as I am in the junior ranks of the ICS I shall not marry. It is absolutely unfair to ask any Englishwoman to live in a station in Bengal. The alternative is celibacy, in the monastic sense of never seeing a female face from week’s end to week’s end. A bachelor in England will at least have female relatives and friends, but my work is exclusively with men, so that practically speaking I live in a world populated by one sex. This is unnatural and abnormal.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 7
