Fishing Fleet girls who had come out to rejoin their families might easily find themselves somewhere remote – one planter’s daughter scrawled ‘It is very boring here!’ across a photograph of her father’s bungalow many miles from their nearest (planter) neighbour.
When Charles Ormerod was still a junior member of the ICS his parents decided to send his younger sister, Hrefna, out to stay with him to see if she could find a husband. For Hrefna, used to a smart social life in England, arrival in India to find primitive sanitation, newspaper pasted up on the windows of her bedroom in default of curtains and the lack of other amenities such as electricity and long-distance telephone calls came as a jolt.
The culminating shock was Charles’s brisk way with rats. ‘They were having dinner when all of a sudden my father saw a rat scuttling along the wall of the dining room,’ recounted Charles’s daughter Penelope Mayfield. ‘Without a moment’s thought he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead. Hrefna was astounded but to my father that was normal. He had always been a good shot – at Cambridge he was in the Shooting Eight – so to him this was part of life.’ (Hrefna, happily, overcame her shock sufficiently to find a husband later in the visit.)
Girls who had been invited out by relations or friends usually arrived at a reasonably sizeable destination. They could expect to find themselves in a station or cantonment, with a club or Gymkhana as its social heart. The club could be anything from a few rooms where you could read old newspapers, buy drinks and meet the (often lamentably few) other Europeans in the station, to much grander affairs with tennis courts and golf links, a library and Saturday dances. Its rules were much the same as English clubs, with the addition that almost all excluded Indians, even as guests. Women were kept in their place, often a special annexe, and generally not allowed near the bar.* Sometimes segregation was such that if a husband was in the club and his wife was in the hen house, as the ladies’ annexe was familiarly known, the couple had to send each other notes by a servant if they wanted to leave together.
Often stations were near or had sprung up round a local Indian town or village – but never too near. The huddled dwellings, rudimentary sanitation and often filthy alleys made for a noisome atmosphere. Sam Raschen, driving with a friend in the Mohmand region on the North-West Frontier, was some distance away when he heard a sound like a factory at work, ‘as of high-powered engines and driving belts’. When he asked his companion what it was, he received the laconic reply: ‘Flies.’ And it was – ‘houseflies by the million crawling and swarming over everything’.
Thus when the British built stations and cantonments they were separate and upwind from any nearby Indian village, both for fear of infection and to avoid smells. Cantonments were laid out with wide roads and, usually, sizeable gardens round each bungalow; these had spacious, airy rooms with high ceilings and whitewashed walls. Each bedroom had a bathroom leading off it, with (before running water was installed) a hole in the wall through which water drained when tipped out of the bath, large ‘ali baba’ water jars and the familiar thunderbox.
Pre-Mutiny bungalows generally had thick walls to withstand the heat, and deep verandas. As, in the early days, disease was supposedly often spread by a ‘poisonous miasma’, densest in ravines, gullies and clefts, bungalows were frequently raised on a platform above ground level. This served to counter the danger of the dreaded white ants (termites) that could eat their way through anything from a wall to a library full of books, and also meant that bungalows tended to be more airy.
The main drawback to the average bungalow was lack of privacy, as rooms led into one another and a servant might appear at any moment; against this, as the novelist Maud Diver pointed out in the early 1900s, there were no gas-pipes to leak, no water-pipes to freeze, no boilers to burst, no windows to clean, no grates to polish – and many more servants to do the minimal housework.
The new arrival would quickly learn that certain precautions were a routine part of daily life. Milk and water were boiled, fruit peeled or washed in permanganate of potash, care was taken to ensure food was kept fly-free, topis were invariably worn out of doors, mosquito nets hung over beds and an eye kept out for rabid dogs. Bathrooms were routinely checked for snakes that had crawled in through the drainage hole and wrapped themselves round the cool water jars and no one walked through the beds of lucerne, often grown in large gardens to feed horses and polo ponies, in case a cobra might be nesting there. In the early days, antique furniture legs had to stand in saucers of water to minimise the chance of destruction by white ants and silks and satins mildewed in the rainy season.
The new girl would have been struck at once by the formality of much of life and the protocols that governed it. In the Raj, as with royalty, attitudes and behaviour were well behind contemporary custom and usage, with everything from etiquette to medical theories preserved in a kind of social formaldehyde. This sprang from the hierarchical nature of the governing institutions: the ICS and the Army. When junior members of either arrived in India, they naturally took their lead from the top; by the time they in turn had reached this exalted position, they carried with them the customs and habits imprinted on them in their youth.
Thus the iron rule of precedence regulated social intercourse, from whom you called on to whom you sat next to at dinner. As the position of every official and military officer was detailed in a graded list known as the ‘Warrant of Precedence’, published by the Government of India, it was possible not only to seat people according to seniority but for a new arrival to deduce everyone’s place in the pecking order. There were sixty-six categories in the Warrant; at the top, of course, was the Viceroy, at the bottom, sub-deputy opium agents.
Businessmen did not figure on the Warrant of Precedence but were nonetheless graded according to equally arcane rules. The broadest division among them was that between ‘commerce’ and ‘trade’ – the management of plantations was the former, and higher; selling something directly to the public was the latter. Other markers were education – a good public school and university elevated, as did long familiarity with horse, gun or rod – a decent address and a car. Even clothes came into the equation, with the wrong ones an immediate one-down mark: Owain Jenkins, a young man working in the Calcutta office of Balmer Lawrie, was quickly told by a colleague to buy a ‘better hat’. His topi had been bought in Port Said and was covered in cheap cotton cloth, with a chinstrap resembling cardboard. ‘Acceptable hats . . . were covered in gabardine and had chinstraps of suede,’ he was told.
Women were ranked according to the status and seniority of their husband or father, the senior ladies having ‘their’ seat on a favoured club sofa reserved for them, first shuttlecock in a game of badminton served to them and getting first use of the loos after dinner; nor could anyone leave a dinner party before the most senior lady there. (When the Hon. Margaret Ashton married Hugh Whistler of the Indian Police in 1924 there was much scratching of heads: did Margaret’s status as the daughter of a lord raise that of Whistler – or did his lower hers?)
Most people still changed for dinner, if only because of the pleasure of washing away the heat, dust and sweat of the day and of putting on clean clothes – laid out by one’s bearer – and for women, long skirts were a protection against mosquitoes. Another, more subliminal reason was that the consciousness of being the ruling elite permeated virtually every aspect of daily life.
Where the old East India Company had based its intercourse with India on trade, with intermarriage not only accepted but often welcomed, the British of the Raj were there to govern, and govern they did. As with anyone in a dominant position maintained by acceptance and good will rather than purely by force, and in a nation accustomed to the magnificence and dignity of its princes,* behaviour and outward show counted for much.
The British preoccupation with hierarchy, and the ceremonial that went with it, was not, therefore, a subject of mockery to the Indians themselves, but the reverse, something they understood since ceremonial and ritua
l had long been part of their own lives: their rulers were accustomed to unquestioning obedience and palaces full of servants and panoply as impressive as they could muster on occasions of importance.
Similarly, for the British, standards not only had to be maintained, they had to be shown to be maintained – and dinner dresses, white gloves and hats were simply one way of expressing this. ‘Yesterday night I dined with the Hoddings; neither he nor the Major dress for dinner apparently when they dine on the quiet,’ wrote Leslie Lavie disapprovingly (on 21 July 1896) to his fiancée Flossie ‘I don’t like the idea of not dressing at all, but I remember the Major used to say the same thing, and he seems to have dropped into the way of it. I hope I shan’t and, darling, I hope you won’t.’ Edward Wakefield, writing in the 1930s, described changing for dinner ‘even in camp’.
Even mourning emphasised the importance of the regime and by extension that of the Viceroy; following the death of a Sovereign, officers wore black armbands and their wives wore black for three months. In Government House, even the death of a lesser member of the royal family received the same treatment. ‘Rushed off to shops and bought some white material with wee black spots on it as we’ve all got to wear black or white or black and white for weeks at GH on account of Queen Maud of Norway,’* wrote Claudine Gratton, then eighteen, on 1 December 1938.
The Raj was shot through with protocol of different sorts. First, there was the complicated caste system of India. A gardener – a fairly lowly job – could be a poor man but of a high caste; if he was a Brahmin and your shadow fell on the food he was eating, this had to be thrown away because your impurity had defiled it. Most table servants were, in fact, Muslim. Only those of the lowest caste could be sweepers, who brought in and emptied water for baths and emptied the thunderboxes.*
What would probably not strike the newcomer for several days was the homogeneity of the society into which she had arrived. Except in the ranks of British regiments, the British ‘working class’ was poorly represented – Indian labour, cheaper and local, took its place – as were children over eight and teenagers (only a few remained with their parents and were educated by the PEN system); and almost no old people.
The formality of much of English life often contrasted unhappily with the elegance, colour and fluidity of the inhabitants of their adopted country. As Lilah Wingfield noted appreciatively: ‘The way these Eastern women of the bazaars, the very poorest of the poor, walk with lithe grace, carrying a pot of burnished brass on their heads, apparently so easily, supported by one shapely raised arm, and the stealthy, noiseless tread as they pace along with bare feet in the dust, more gliding than walking, with that inimitable gracefulness of movement and poise that marks the east from the west will always remain a wonder and a delight to me. I love watching them.’
6
‘A hell of a heat’
The Climate
What struck new arrivals first was the heat, sometimes like a scorching blast from a hot oven, sometimes sticky and damp.
To Europeans, the sun was the enemy; to protect against its assault, one garment was essential: the topi. ‘We were all convinced that to abandon it even for a moment meant sickness and death,’ wrote Owain Jenkins, in 1929. Most of the Fishing Fleet would have bought theirs at the invaluable Simon Artz on the way out. This lightweight helmet, made from the pith of the Indian plant sola and covered in khaki cloth, was worn almost to the last days of the Raj. Earlier, the spine pad was also deemed essential for soldiers and sportsmen: this object, about seven inches long by three inches wide, filled with cork shavings, hung down from the collar of jacket or coat (it disappeared in the early 1900s).
One of the stranger habits of the Raj was the insistence on wearing flannel next to the skin, advocated by virtually all doctors until well into the twentieth century. ‘There are few of the ordinary diseases in India, which may not in the majority of cases be traced to the action of cold on the surface of the body, relaxed by the antecedent heat,’ ran one piece of medical advice.
As flannel was thought to absorb perspiration more successfully than cotton or linen, this fabric was recommended as underwear – in one of the world’s hottest climates. In the 1880s it was a ‘must’ for outdoor exercise, usually in the shape of a long-sleeved flannel tunic and flannel drawers. In the 1890s, as the heat in Simla increased, poor Lady Elgin, the Viceroy’s wife, spoke anxiously to their doctor about wearing winter clothing in such heat. He answered firmly, ‘No underclothing was to be changed.’
The stomach in particular was considered to be most at risk through over-rapid cooling, so a special flannel belt was designed, known as a cholera belt, supposed to protect against the disease. This quickly became a standard item; it continued to be worn long after the discovery of the cholera bacillus and the way that this was transmitted. In 1902 Ruby Madden was writing: ‘I wear my belt every night and find it a comfort.’ Unsurprisingly, perhaps, when she wanted to take a cold bath to counter the heat, Ruby was told that she couldn’t, as it laid one open to ‘all sorts of illnesses’.
As well as stifling in flannel underwear, women invariably wore corsets – it was a girl’s ambition to have, at marriage, a waist measurement no more than the number of years of her age – together with several petticoats, trimmed with frills or lace, beneath long-sleeved dresses. (In the nineteenth century, the fashion for crinolines and bustles had led some Indians to believe that European women had tails.) As the Raj was several years behind England in customs and fashions it was not until the 1920s that cotton dresses and light underwear made their appearance. Yet even as late as 1929 Jean Hilary was writing home, with a touch of excitement: ‘I found I could keep my stockings up rolled round garters, so wore no stays on the journey, which was much cooler!’
What sometimes caused even more problems was the question of dealing with the monthly menstrual cycle. Before tampons, women relied on sanitary towels or, sometimes, washable towelling squares. Adding to this inconvenience was the silence and embarrassment surrounding the subject; the thought of buying these necessaries from a male assistant in a chemist’s shop would have sent most girls away scarlet-faced. In the Raj, a girl caught unawares could only rely on female friends; although most had washable towels tucked away in case of emergencies, this was not always foolproof. Jean Hilary discovered, to her slight indignation, that the dhobi (washerman) in one house was too high-caste to undertake this task ‘so shall have to have mine burnt. Such a bore, as I seem to have very few left. They were always done in Calcutta.’ To a girl brought up with servants, now in a land where women did even less, the idea of doing such an unpleasant job herself simply did not occur.
The seasons – cold, hot or wet – dictated the pattern of British life in India. The start of the cold weather, lasting from November to April, was marked by the flowering of social life, the arrival of the Fishing Fleet and the return of the British officers and ICS men who had been on leave in England – most of them took leave to coincide with the English summer, though some in cavalry regiments preferred the winter, with its chance of a season’s hunting with a crack pack.
In Calcutta, the capital of British India until 1911, the seasons were predictable and easily dated. During the four winter months it was, in the opinion of Marian Atkins, ‘perfect summer weather, 70°F and no rain except for a few days either before or just after Christmas and therefore known as the Christmas rains.’ November was a popular month for weddings; it was also the month for a number of Indian festivals, such as Diwali. Christmas was celebrated as at home – from which presents had been ordered as early as October – but with local variations such as peafowl instead of turkey and perhaps a swim later in the day instead of an energetic frosty walk.
Delhi Week, with the Viceroy’s Ball as its climax, signalled the end of the cold-weather season. On 12 March the men changed into white and the hot weather officially began, with the temperature gradually increasing up to a maximum of around 45°C (or 130°F in the shade).
Even
in the cold weather, though, the dust in Delhi was a byword. ‘Quite a foot deep on the road and powdery white stuff – you can’t see a yard in front of you,’ wrote Ruby Madden, who went out riding with a veil to protect the pink and white complexion she was so proud of. ‘When I got home my veil was perfectly white one side and green the other, so it showed what I had been saved.’
‘We are beginning to feel the real heat,’ wrote Lady Canning, wife of the Governor-General* in March 1856. The shutters were shut and the punkahs kept going but the Calcutta heat took its toll. ‘Any attempt to go out, even in a carriage, makes one gasp, and dissolve immediately, and an open window or door lets in a flood of hot air, as though one were passing the mouth of a foundry,’ wrote Lord Canning. Other seasonal hazards were snakes and monkeys. Lady Canning wrote that in her bedroom were lizards, running about the floor, and bats. ‘One evening I had five in the room flying about and squeaking and worse in the night; I was glad of my mosquito net for protection.’
‘The Punjab [then in the north-west of India, now in Pakistan] has a bad climate,’ wrote Bethea Field. ‘For the four months of the so-called “winter” it is pleasant – sunny, though chilly at night. Through February and early March, it is enjoyable. Then suddenly the great “heat” starts. In April and May there is relief from time to time from a sandstorm, bringing in its wake a cooler wind. Late May, June and July is a hell of heat, with daytime temperatures up to 120°F in the shade. In August the monsoon arrives, bringing relief from the high temperatures – but also so much humidity that the human body has to exist in a state of sweat.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 10
