What effect did it have? ‘My life was as sexless as any monk’s at this time; and in a sense I was only half alive, lacking the companionship of women. But what is good for the Roman priest is good (I suppose) for the Indian Cavalry subaltern, who has work to do (like the priest) which he could scarcely perform if hampered by family ties,’ wrote Francis Yeats-Brown, a subaltern in the Bengal Lancers, in 1905. ‘I do not know how far discipline of the sex life is a good thing. But I know that a normal sex life is more necessary in a hot than a cold country. The hysteria which seems to hang in the air of India is aggravated by severe continence of any kind . . .’.
Pay and conditions, however, were good. All ICS men had to contribute to a fund that, after a certain number of years, paid the widow of an ICS man who died on duty £300 a year – roughly the same salary as a junior received – hence the phrase ‘a £300-a-year man, dead or alive’. ICS men also stood at the top of the social tree together with Army officers, in the Raj their only social equals.
For the Fishing Fleet, an ICS man was considered the crème de la crème – once he was eligible. ‘Mamas angled for us for their daughters,’ wrote John Beames. ‘The Civil Service was in those days [1858] an aristocracy in India, and we were the jeunesse dorée thereof.’ Or, as Jim Acheson put it in 1913, ‘The young ICS men were generally supposed to be the chief quarry – the turbot and halibut of the matrimonial nets.’
Army officers were also a catch; again, the under-thirty rule applied. This meant that most had to be captains before they could start looking for a wife, though some managed it a year or two earlier. On 17 February 1896 twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Leslie John Germain Lavie, newly engaged to Miss Florence Ross, told her in his daily letter: ‘I wrote to Major Wood yesterday and he wrote back . . . he said the reason he had not congratulated me was because he thought I was too young to marry and so this would not have been sincere. But he wished us the best of luck and said he hoped I would not leave the Regiment [Lavie was in the 20th Regiment Madras Native Infantry].’
The highest social strata of the Army were the ‘good’ regiments, in particular the (British) cavalry who were, on the whole, richer than most of their contemporaries – often young men from wealthy families who had joined because they were attracted by the hunting and polo that were then considered a part of cavalry life.
It was the same in the Indian Army; there, the cavalry, too, considered themselves the cream. To a young and impressionable girl, their colourful, romantic uniforms of long jackets, cummerbunds, turbans and breeches with English boots had an irresistible dash and glamour, from the yellow coats of Skinner’s Horse to the dark blue jacket, scarlet and gold cummerbund and striped gold and turquoise turban of Probyn’s Horse.
Possibly the most desirable partis in India were the ADCs and Private Secretaries to the Viceroy (and, in descending order, to governors and generals). Most were from backgrounds that were impeccable financially and socially (many were or would be peers), wore clothes well, knew how to put people at their ease and were entertaining enough for the Viceroy and his family to enjoy having them as part of their household. If soldiers, they usually came from a ‘good’ regiment; if from the ICS they were likely to be future stars – just the sort of man, in fact, that a Viceroy might hand-pick as a son-in- law. Owing to constant, daily proximity, marriages between viceregal daughters and their fathers’ ADCs were common; and to the outside world these gilded young men were regarded, in some subliminal sense, as viceregal property. So if one of them looked elsewhere it caused a mild frisson – as when Mary Tribe, the daughter of a clergyman (then, as now, paid little) secured as a husband a young man destined to become one of the richest dukes in England.
Mary du Caurroy Tribe, born in 1865, was the younger daughter of the Reverend Walter Tribe, a parson who had come out to India with his wife Sophie in 1897, largely for financial reasons – he felt that in India he could earn more, live at a higher standard and also save. Their two daughters, Mary aged two and her older sister Zoe, four, were left behind with a beloved aunt. They were educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College (then becoming so famous for its emphasis on proper education that it elicited complaints from many parents who believed that too much education in a girl was a serious handicap to her matrimonial chances). Mary loved school but was longing to leave and go to India, not so much to see her parents – whom she hardly knew – but for the thrill and excitement of what awaited her there. She loved an outdoor life: there would be tennis, riding, parties, friends of her own age and, for the first time, of the opposite sex.
She was sixteen when she arrived in India. She was not yet ‘out’, she did not know how to dance or make small talk but she was beautiful, bright and had, as her sister Zoe commented, ‘such a lovely figure!’ By nineteen she was a magnet to young men. She became engaged to one faithful swain but then broke it off (‘I have nothing left in life now to hope for, nothing to work for,’ he wrote to her mother in an attempt to make Mary change her mind).
Early in 1886 her father was appointed Archdeacon of Lahore. From then on there were summers at Simla with regular invitations to dance at Viceregal Lodge. On 15 September that year she was recording in her diary of one of these: ‘Very jolly dance. Danced 4 with Lord H.’ Soon Mary’s dance cards were filled with ‘Lord H’, her diary with appointments to ride with him; and he was deeply in love with her.
Lord Herbrand Russell, a Grenadier Guards officer, was then twenty-seven to Mary’s twenty-one, and the second son of the 9th Duke of Bedford; he had been personally selected as one of his ADCs by the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin – who had two unmarried daughters, aged twenty-two and eighteen.
Herbrand was under no illusions as to why the Viceroy had chosen him as an ADC. After he and Mary were engaged, he wrote to her to explain the need for dealing delicately and tactfully with the Dufferins. ‘Because . . . Lord and Lady Dufferin always meant me to marry someone else and not your own dear little self at all. This parental plan you have entirely upset. It was this idea that kept me on the staff, otherwise, being the worst of ADCs, I should have been sent away with several fleas in my ear long ago.’ As it was, the Duke’s permission was eventually extracted, Mary and her Herbrand were married on 30 January 1888 and – on the death of Herbrand’s elder brother George in 1893 – she found herself a duchess.*
In the 1930s, the army officer in India was allowed two months’ privileged leave, to give him a break from working in the hot weather, when the plains were an inferno until the monsoon broke. The heat took a toll on almost everyone. ‘I’m in an awfully bad temper and feel very liverish. Everything has been going wrong this morning,’ wrote Lieutenant Lavie to his fiancée Florence (always known as Flossie), on 18 February 1896. ‘I’ll tell you what I do every day . . . so you may give me the benefit if I don’t write so fully. Getting up at 5.30 a.m. it’s parade we go to at 6.30 a.m. get off at 8.00 a.m. Sometimes orderly room and always duty till 9.00 a.m. when breakfast, 10–12 office, 12–1 or 1.30 my letter to you. 1.30–2.30 office, 2.30 tiffin, 3–3.30 learning new Sword Exercise, parade 4.00. Racquets or something 5.15. Mess for Billiards or Whist 6.15–7.30. Dinner 8.00, bed 10.30.’ There were few diversions. A month later Lavie was writing to Flossie: ‘Last night we had quite a gathering at the “At Home” – you must not get bored at my perpetually talking about this weekly excitement – as we mustered four ladies!’
All this was in the sweltering, draining heat. Partly to offset it, there were also three ‘casual’ leaves a year of up to ten days, spent by many on shooting or fishing expeditions. Once every three years there was home leave for eight months, to include the journey (flying, which began just before the war, took three days). ‘Not always enough time,’ remarked one, ‘to find a wife.’ Many of them married Fishing Fleet girls who had come out to stay with sisters or aunts married to brother officers, but for most, especially those serving where action was to be found, the lack of female company, and sex, could be torture.
‘It is usel
ess to pretend that our life was a normal one,’ wrote John Masters of his life as a subaltern in the 4th Gurkhas in the mid-1930s. ‘Ours was a one-sexed society, with women hanging on to the edges. Married or unmarried, their status was really that of camp followers. But it is normal for men to live in the company of women, for if they do they do not become rough or boorish and the sex instinct does not torment them. In India there was always an unnatural tension and every man who pursued the physical aim of sexual relief was in danger of developing a cynical hardness and a lack of sympathy which he had no business to learn until many more years had maltreated him. Of those who tried sublimation, some chased polo balls, and some chased partridge, some buried themselves in their work and all became unmitigated nuisances through the narrowness of their conversation.’
After soldiers in the social pecking order came railway engineers, businessmen, other civil servants, missionaries, police superintendents and tea, jute or indigo planters. Tea planters, too, were usually single throughout their twenties. ‘Before The Second World War, a tea plantation manager would probably have to do ten years without leave, except for local leave,’ said former planter Mike Waring. ‘Before you owned your own estate you couldn’t go away. Most of the tea planters who married would be thirty or over. They often met someone on the ship.’
It was the same for indigo planters. In Bihar in the north-east, on the borders of Nepal, a centre for the industry, at its height in the late 1890s, the highlight of the year was the Meet – a week given over to enjoyment with others of one’s kind. Every District had its Meet, to which planters, their assistants, ICS men, police officers and businessmen and their wives flocked by train, horse, pony and trap, with their luggage arriving by bullock cart. The most popular were the couples who could produce a Fishing Fleet girl – single women were notoriously scarce while lonely bachelors were plentiful.
Some found it hard to wait until custom and their financial state allowed marriage and set up irregular ménages with local women, known as ‘polls’. Said Waring: ‘It wasn’t exactly done but it was accepted – as long as you didn’t produce children. You didn’t mess around with your own staff or labour force – you got your poll from somewhere completely different. The girls knew the men wouldn’t marry them but they also knew they would be looked after. The man would give the girl or her family a nice little house somewhere – and if she did produce a child that would be looked after too. A lot of the cleverer half-castes, who became lawyers, doctors and teachers, went to Australia, because they could produce proof of white ancestry.’
For most of the young Raj bachelors, sport had to take the place of sex. Brought up in the athletic games-playing tradition of the public schools, they flung themselves into everything India had to offer – and this varied from adaptations of what they knew from home to the exotic. Key to most of it was the horse – from pig-sticking, polo, gymkhanas and horse shows to jackal hunting with packs of foxhounds brought out from England and masters and hunt servants in pink coats. All could be risky but, as Desirée Hart (who arrived in 1939 to take up a post as social secretary to the Resident of Kashmir) in Sialkot noted, ‘the hardest and most dangerous time was playing polo on the dry hard ground where bones got broken, heads bashed, limbs bruised and that winter “one death”; all bumps and accidents, even fatalities, accepted as part of the game . . . Play starts off with a spurt of dust and rattle of hoofs on the iron ground, and in no time at all all that could be seen was the arc of a swinging stick through billows of white dust. As the tournament progressed the games got tougher, the finals becoming a deadly battle.’
There was also fishing and shooting, from duck flighting to – if you were lucky – a tiger shoot on elephants with a maharaja. Indeed, sport, including games like tennis and cricket and early morning rides when the air was fresh and cool, played a large part in the lives of all the British in India, where most people were young or youngish: it was both exercise, fun and the sublimation of one of humankind’s most pressing instincts – an instinct to be heavily discouraged until the servants of the Raj could fall thankfully into the arms of suitable brides.
In part this reasoning was to maintain the social distance between the rulers and the ruled; in part because if a man had an Indian mistress he would not be perceived as impartial – Indians, whose loyalty was to caste or clan, would believe that such a man would always favour the family of his wife or mistress in any dispute. There was also the question of prestige: if a man was seen to frequent the same courtesans or prostitutes as, say, his Indian colleagues, the respect owed to the Raj would be subtly diminished. Nor could such behaviour be kept secret; India was a land where privacy was impossible (‘everything in a man’s private life is public property in India,’ said Kipling), and gossip of this type would spread like wildfire round bazaar, cantonment or village. As one ICS man remarked, the District Officer, ‘living as he did, under constant public inspection, particularly when he was in tour or on camp, had of necessity to be something of an anchorite, or possibly even a stylite.’ Said another: ‘This was one of the sacrifices I thought I was making for the Raj.’
At the same time, it was realised that such considerations would weigh not a jot with the average private soldier – young, healthy and deprived of female companionship – a fact recognised by his commanding officers. Almost from the start, the solution had been licensed brothels, with Indian girls under the jurisdiction of a madam who were regularly examined by the regimental doctor. The rigour of this system owed much to the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 which allowed police to arrest known or suspected prostitutes, who were then medically examined; if found to be suffering from venereal disease they were forcibly incarcerated in locked hospitals (‘Lock Hospitals’) until cured.
The repeal of the Act in 1886 (in India this occurred in 1888) coincided with the growing power of the social purity movement which sought, among other aims, to abolish prostitution. The expected (by senior Army officers) happened: with the repeal of the Act and the consequent discontinuation of compulsory medical examinations, the incidence of venereal disease shot up among the troops: between 1889 and 1892 roughly half the British soldiers in Bengal were treated for venereal disease. The Army response was pragmatic: Lock Hospitals now became ‘voluntary’ and a blind eye was turned to the discreet return of brothels for the troops. But there were no such facilities for their officers.
Both campaigners and the Government were fiercely against the idea of European prostitutes – the campaigners from a moral point of view, the Government because if Indians could use them, they might stop viewing the British as the ruling elite. It was, therefore, easier for purity campaigners to try and tackle ‘vice’ in large towns where, if European girls were found – there were several hundred in the largest ports – they would hope for Government backing. In Calcutta and Bombay these girls worked in the well-established red light districts – respectively in Free School Street and Cursetji Sukhlaji Street (described by one missionary as ‘the seething hell of European vice’) – so that the target area was easy to find. This led to what were called the Bombay Midnight Missions, when these streets were patrolled at night by missionaries and purity campaigners trying to dissuade potential customers from the wares on offer, making the prostitutes so furious at their loss of custom that they would pour water and ‘other fluids’ out of upstairs windows onto the heads of passing missionaries. For the police, this meant endless trouble: the missionaries complained and so, too, did the respectable women whom the missionaries mistook for ladies of easy virtue. Finally, after the women had been told that the courts of justice were open to them as to everyone else for redress and the missionaries had been reproved for interfering with the liberty of citizens to enjoy themselves, things settled down again.
Businessmen, often known as boxwallahs, usually lived in or around the larger cities. European trading firms were doing well; nor had Indian mills become serious competitors in the making of cotton cloth. Particularly popular were t
he strong grey, unbleached shirtings beloved by the Pathans, and muslins, known as ‘mulls’. For most young businessmen, too, marriage was not on the cards if only because they did not earn enough. Thus young men usually lived in ‘chummeries’; with several bachelors together sharing the expenses of a household, all of them could manage a fairly pleasant life. Only when they reached managerial status could they afford a bungalow to themselves – essential if they wished to marry. Meanwhile, even if they could not afford a horse of their own, plenty of people had a full stable, and were keen to get their horses exercised.
One of these young businessmen was Sam Raschen, who went to India in January 1913, to a chummery in Karachi. ‘When I arrived there were fewer than a dozen cars in Sind. There was no tarmac on the roads and the dust was all-pervasive and often almost blinding.’ But money went a long way. As an impecunious bachelor Sam managed to belong to three clubs (Sind, Gymkhana and Boat). Every bungalow had a fair-sized compound and large servants’ quarters and, while there was no electric light or electric fans, there were paraffin lamps and punkah coolies pulled a rug or blanket suspended overhead in a steady rhythm.
Standards were high. ‘In India, even as the newest joined “chota sahib” one automatically assumed the responsibilities of a man ten years one’s senior,’ found Sam. Export was the backbone of the business then, with wheat in particular; this came down in train after train from the Punjab, to be unloaded, sampled and generally passed through the cleaning machine to remove dust, barley and other seeds, then rebagged ready for shipment.
Two years later, Sam Raschen left to fight in the 1914–18 war. He was badly wounded, and returned home to convalesce. Then, in January 1918, he met Maj, a girl he had encountered some time earlier; two months later they were married and, in December 1918, the young couple sailed to India, where Sam returned to his old job. With the birth of their daughter Adelaide in October 1920 their happiness seemed complete – especially when Sam, a keen rowing man, won the Sculls, spending the prize money on a christening mug for their daughter.
The Fishing Fleet Page 8
