By contrast, going out to dinner was often by the most informal kind of transport. ‘In the army stations, very few people had or could afford cars,’ explained Valerie Welchman (née Pridmore Riley). ‘So you went out to dinner on your bicycle. You picked up the corner of your skirt and both of you pedalled off to dinner, or a dance, and pedalled back afterwards. In cantonments, the roads were built up high with deep gutters each side so that the water could drain down in the heavy rainfall of the monsoons. If someone emerged from a dance having done rather too well it was quite easy to fall down the side into one of these gutters.’
Cards were not the only form of protocol of which the Fishing Fleet had to be aware. Girls whose fathers had risen to high-ranking posts while their daughters were at school in England had to learn the rules when their formal education ended. They were taught how to behave at dinner parties (‘talk first to the man on your right; then to the man on your left; start a conversation but never close it; never shut up either man’), told always to wear long white gloves at viceregal dinners, and to carry frilly parasols to race meetings; to invite to parties only young men who had officially ‘called’.
The ‘right’ clothes were needed: ‘. . . it is so funny having to think so much about clothes as one has to out here,’ wrote Lady Elisabeth Bruce, daughter of the Viceroy Lord Elgin, when she arrived for the Calcutta Season of 1897. ‘Dress at 7 to go out. Dress at 9 for the morning. Dress at two for luncheon. Dress at 4.30 if you walk or play tennis. Dress for dinner. And though one seems to have cupboards full of clothes, one never knows what to wear and has to think a long time so as to have something different on different days.’
Many of these clothes had to be formal, sometimes to emphasise your own status, sometimes to recognise that of others. To meet the Maharani of Travancore Beatrice Baker and her mother dressed rather as for Ascot, in flowered silk dresses, large sweeping hats, gloves, silk stockings and high-heeled court shoes. The Maharani and her daughter wore filmy saris, gold sandals and bare feet, with their long, thick, glossy dark hair decorated with flowers.
When Jon and Rumer Godden went out to India in 1914, all Englishwomen wore corsets, stockings, petticoats, dresses with high necks and long sleeves. The real benefit for women came when, in the 1920s and 1930s, linen or cotton dresses replaced the Victorian and Edwardian assemblage of voluminous underclothes, corsets, whalebone collars and ankle-length skirts.
Seniority was the touchstone when it came to seating and uniforms were not only a part of (Army) life but often a reflection of an individual’s status – a status clearly marked wherever that individual might be. As Edward Wakefield put it: ‘Never, I am sure, has there existed in England such an elaborate structure of class distinction as British exiles erected for themselves in up-country clubs in India.’ At the heart of government, pomp and circumstance ruled even more so – papers for the Viceroy’s attention were carried in by orderlies in long scarlet gowns trimmed with gold lace. (Of one huge pile Curzon remarked: ‘I have perused these papers for two hours and twenty minutes. On the whole, I agree with the gentleman whose signature resembles a trombone.’)
Sometimes the insistence on formality became stifling. When Monica Campbell-Martin, newly married and aged twenty-one, walked to the gate of her bungalow with the elderly official who had called on her with a message about tennis, and chatted to him for a few minutes before he got into his car, she was reprimanded the next day ‘for having been seen talking, for so long, on the public road, to a gentleman, alone.’
The higher up the social scale, the more repressive life could be When Nancy and Daisy Leiter came to stay with their sister Mary Curzon, the Vicereine, in April 1899 these two free-spirited young American girls found the stiffness of Viceregal Lodge hilarious. Curzon, well aware that as the King’s representative he ruled over almost ten times as many subjects as the King himself, was treated with more reverence than was royalty at home. The Leiter girls, rich, pretty and not disposed to bow the knee to someone whom they could now call ‘family’, had to be taken aside by Mary and spoken to sternly: they must not call the Viceroy ‘George’ except when they were alone, and they must always give him precedence. The girls’ reaction was mockery by overblown obsequiousness: at one public ceremony they prostrated themselves before Curzon in exaggerated fashion. This so shocked everyone and horrified the viceregal staff that they were sent to their rooms in disgrace. ‘Socially the advent of the Leiters has done great harm,’ wrote Walter Lawrence, Curzon’s Private Secretary, in his diary.
There were other misdemeanours and to add to it all, both put on a great deal of weight in a mere two months – like most of the British in India, the Curzons’ cuisine was largely English (achieved brilliantly by cooks working in primitive conditions and with no knowledge of what a dish should taste like). Daisy gained fifteen pounds; ‘her sit-upon is perfectly enormous and she is bursting out of her clothes,’ wrote Mary, who added that there is ‘no one on our staff who will be a matrimonial danger and I won’t allow any flirtation.’ Whenever the girls went to dances they were heavily chaperoned by sophisticated older women. Nevertheless, neither the sisters’ behaviour, the attentive chaperoning nor their increased girth stopped both of them meeting their future husbands when staying with the Curzons – and both of these men were Curzon’s ADCs.
Chaperoning, as in England, was a constant for young girls, with the added ramification that a single woman who might in England be considered old and sensible enough to read a railway timetable and get herself from station A to station B was in the Raj regarded as more of a parcel to be handed on from host to host. ‘Even . . . in 1933 I found a girl could not easily travel about independently,’ wrote Helen Rutledge. ‘Or rather geographically she could, but was discouraged from being too independent and doors would not have opened for her . . . Even very distinguished travellers, who “knew the ropes” [and were] hardened to every discomfort, like Gertrude Bell, relied on their letters of introduction and being “passed on”.’
With such letters, or invitations to stay, visitors could rely on hospitality of the most generous kind. Friends of friends would be happily pressed into service to meet an arriving Fishing Fleet girl if her parents were unable to get away. ‘I was met by a friend of my uncle’s, Archie Ricketts, who took me to stay with other friends,’ said Katherine Welford of her arrival in Colombo en route to Madras. ‘Archie must have been kept busy entertaining people passing through Colombo, expensive and time consuming for him but I was given a wonderful time during the four days that I was there. We went to the races and dined at the famous Galle Face Hotel and to Mount Lavinia.’ In the same way, someone who wanted to stay on after the cold weather and see what a hill station was like could rely on being asked up to one.
When the cold weather began in mid-October, it was the signal for four months of non-stop gaiety – race weeks, polo weeks, ICS weeks, horse shows, race meetings, gymkhanas, paperchases, moonlight picnics, garden parties and constant dinner and cocktail parties. For anyone still at a loose end, most twentieth-century cantonments, towns and hill stations had a cinema. With books in short supply, no television or – for the most part – no radio, films were often the focus of evening entertainment. At Bangalore, Claudine Gratton managed to see several most weeks; during the week of 19 November 1937, for instance, there was Harold Lloyd in The Cat’s Paw and Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy.
‘From now on for the following year life became a glamorous fairy-tale,’ wrote Betsy Anderson, who had been brought out to India, aged seventeen, in the Fishing Fleet of 1923 by her mother after years at an English boarding school, followed by presentation at Court and a London Season. They stayed for a few days with friends in Bombay, in a house that reminded Betsy of Rome, with its black and white marble floors, high ceilings and windows with long venetian blinds.
‘I had been to some big dances at home, and to the May Week balls at Cambridge, by which time we would be looking somewhat dishevelled. They had been tremendous fun
– sometimes arriving in a punt, dancing the Charleston with great vigour, and ending with a breakfast picnic on the river at Grantchester.
‘But here at the Yacht Club everything was perfection – gorgeous evening dress, the men in uniform, and we danced on a superbly sprung floor. The gardens, which were discreetly lit, had well-watered smooth green lawns looking across the harbour to the ships twinkling with lights – all very romantic and unreal.’
Betsy’s father held the important position of Resident, at Neemuch, Central India, and so the Andersons had the largest bungalow in the place, its best feature its shiny stone floors. Betsy and her mother set about making it looking attractive with yards of pretty coloured silks from the bazaar and huge vases of bougain-villea, canna lilies and other plants. ‘There were dances at the Club, and this was fun for me, as the Gunners had just arrived from the Frontier and a young girl – the only one in the place – was a novelty. I was thoroughly spoilt, sought after for the dances, taken for picnics and out riding. At which I was not at all experienced.
‘I fell blissfully in love with the handsome young subaltern who tried to teach me to ride, also because he was a divine dancer – this did not last long as, during the cold weather, my father’s work had to be carried out while camping and moving from village to village.’
Betsy was one of the lucky ones taken to see India’s most famous sight: the Taj Mahal. Her parents had met in Agra and her mother insisted that Betsy’s first view of this extraordinary building must be by moonlight.‘We waited together silently around midnight in the stillness of the soft, warm, starlit Indian night,’ she recalled later. ‘[My mother] slipped through a door in the large arched gateway, beckoning me to follow. We stood, hardly daring to breathe, watching the amazing sight before us.
‘As the first light of the full moon rose glowing behind the immense and incredible dome and minarets, it appeared as a translucent, ethereal vision about to float into the sky . . . its shimmering reflection was mirrored in the long stretch of water in the garden, making a pathway almost reaching to our feet.’ An old priest took them down into the vaults, ‘demonstrating that if one sang the notes of an octave the complete chord would be repeated high up in the vast dome . . . we stood singing different chords for a long time’.
In Calcutta, Marian Atkins’s day began with riding a pony lent by friends – her parents thought it not worth buying a horse for her as her father was due for home leave in four or five months. Sometimes on Sunday mornings she rode with friends from the Jodhpur Club.
‘These were red letter days as we went at least ten to fifteen miles into the “jungle” round about. “Jungle” was a misnomer as it consisted of paddy fields, dried up for harvest in the cold weather after the monsoon, and guava orchards. These were always on made-up ground as Calcutta was built on the Ganges delta, its particular branch being the Hooghli. Guava trees are prettier than apple trees, having bark which peeled off regularly, like London plane trees, and wiggly branches. The fruit is apple-sized and green ripening to yellow.’
On Friday mornings the great excitement was a paper chase, in India always played on horseback. ‘The Paper Chase Club met early at 7.00 a.m. at one of the milestones on the Diamond Harbour Route out beyond Jodhpur Club and the Dakuria Lakes (Father’s handiwork),’ wrote Marian in late 1930.
‘They were great occasions; all my friends from the Calcutta Light Horse rode if their horses were sufficiently trained by then. The jumps were mud walls and coconut leaves, making a similar course to a point-to-point at home. Two of the officials rode round first, laying the paper trail. The rest of us, who for one reason or another preferred not to chase, watched the start and finish. The points gained were added up for the final result at the end of the season. After the chase we lazy or incapable ones went round through the holes or over the tops, as we fancied.
‘On one occasion I nearly fell off and found myself suspended from the saddle by my bent knee. There was always a large crowd of Indians watching – they are mad keen on sports – after all, we got polo and gymkhanas from them, to say nothing of tent-pegging.* They all roared with delight at my predicament but I managed to climb back into the saddle, raised my bamboo riding stick in salute – and got an even louder roar as I rode on.’
The largest pool of eligible bachelors in India was in Madras, often known as the catchment area for the Fishing Fleet because of the number of single men working both for the Government and for businesses – Madras had been a centre of trade and industry since the early days of the East India Company and had continued to flourish. A British regiment was always stationed in the Fort; an Indian regiment out at St Thomas’s Mount. There were other resident young men in banks, import and export firms, connected with cotton mills and railways, the Forestry Department, the Public Works Department and of course the ICS. Life was social to an almost frenzied degree, with any Fishing Fleet girl sure of an endless supply of admirers.
Annette Bowen found herself at the heart of it. She had been brought back to India by her parents in the autumn of 1933, aged almost eighteen, after being educated in England, finishing with a term at Queen’s College, Harley Street. Her engineer father, Charles Henry Croasdaile Bowen, had worked most of his life for the Madras & Southern Mahratta Railway; his special line was bridges, and over the years he designed many over the rivers emptying into the Bay of Bengal. In 1933 he was Bridge Engineer and Chief Engineer, based in Madras.
‘Here I spent nearly three years of sheer pleasure and interest,’ Annette reminisced. ‘There was the Indian scene to explore plus the social pattern of dancing, riding, swimming and picnics, Mah Jongg and amateur theatricals, choir singing, a course with the Governor’s Mounted Body Guard, trips up country in my father’s inspection cars, visits, social work (almshouse visiting and library duty on vernacular books), snipe-shooting, paper-chasing, rowing on the Adyar river and plenty of friends of both sexes for the first time in my life.’
She dined out several times a week, sometimes invited to dinner parties, sometimes in parties she and her friends organised in clubs or chummeries, usually going on to a cinema, or to dance all night, often followed by a day in the saddle. ‘Early mornings were spent riding or hunting, when horses were sent out to a planned milestone, miles out from Madras and we, changing from dance clothes to riding clothes, drove straight out in the dark and moved off in the dawn mist through flooded paddy fields and coconut plantations, through pale dusky-laned hamlets smelling of dung fires and coffee. Meets [of the hunt] were usually on Sundays, so we got back for gargantuan late breakfasts, then slept, and reassembled for evensong in the huge cool cathedral.’
Fancy dress and ‘theme’ parties were taken seriously. Annette once designed a ‘circus’ dance, with herself in the costume of the ringmaster – ‘black silk stockings stitched to my briefs, a borrowed scarlet tailcoat, black topper and whip’. Sporting events also meant parties, parties, parties – Race Week, Rugger Week, Cricket Week, Rowing Week, ‘when hordes of delightful young men would arrive from all over India and require accommodation and entertainment. A complete rugger team of planters from Ceylon once slept on our upstairs veranda, and we also hosted some of the MCC on tour.’ It was girlie heaven.
In the grand villas left by eighteenth-century merchants, set in spacious grounds, the entertaining was more formal but just as easy and frequent. Katherine Welford’s diary describes her days in Madras.
‘My uncle was manager of the Burma Shell Oil Company in South India. Labour was cheap and they had many servants. First thing in the morning the butler brought me a cup of tea. Then we went out for a swim at Elliot’s Beach, about a quarter of an hour’s drive from their house. Lovely warm water. We swam about eight or half past then came back and had a bath and breakfast. My aunt and I would go with my uncle in the car to the office, leave him there and then go shopping. Lovely shops – gorgeous silk underclothes, all hand-embroidered. Sometimes we would play mah jongg at another bungalow.
‘After lunch (
always a different curry), we had a siesta. Even in what was called the cold weather, Madras was hot during the day. Lying under the mosquito net I could watch the little lizards running up the walls. After a cup of tea, my aunt and I would go for a drive or a walk round Nungumbaukaum, the part of Madras where they lived, and when my uncle came back we’d have drinks on the balcony upstairs and more often than not a young man would call for me and I’d go out.’
Often Katherine, her aunt and uncle went to watch a polo match and there was a regular twice-weekly visit to the races; her uncle was senior steward of the Madras Race Course, where the jockeys came from Britain and Australia. The gardens there were beautiful, with seats beneath shady trees and brilliant tropical flowers to gaze on. As he was a senior steward, her uncle had his own box. They would drive out in time for a delicious lunch at the course, for which some of the food had been sent out from Fortnum & Mason, London’s most expensive and prestigious grocer. Launching the proceedings, the Governor and his wife, Sir George and Lady Beatrix Stanley,* would drive down the Straight, in an open carriage, behind mounted bodyguards magnificent in their colourful uniforms.
‘Sometimes we would go to the Adyar Club for drinks on the terrace that overlooked the Adyar River. It was a large white colonial building with lovely grounds, a lawn that sloped down to the river and lights in the trees – a very romantic place. There was a big veranda where people sat and had dinner – if you were having drinks there and a young man asked you to dine, you went back and changed into a long dress. There was a ballroom inside where dances were held twice a week. We often stayed for a late supper, or if we’d been dancing all night, for a breakfast of kippers, sent from the UK, at three or four in the morning. Then we’d go home about six.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 12
