The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  The converse of this was that girls were supposed to marry young, with only a few years of bloom before falling victim to the dread phrase ‘on the shelf’. When Minnie Wood’s sister turned down a suitor in 1859 Minnie’s comment was more of a warning: ‘She had better take care as she is twenty-two in a few days and could be an old maid!’ A few years later another young woman was noting that ‘if a girl did not marry or at any rate become engaged by twenty she was not likely to marry at all’.*

  The male age barrier meant that, however attractive the dashing young cavalry subaltern who escorted a marriage-minded young woman on a (suitably chaperoned) moonlight picnic, he had to be regarded as nothing more than a glamorous playmate. Marriage, for him, was well in the future – unless he wished to send in his papers and give up his Army career.

  Although many of these parties undoubtedly seethed with unrequited lust – for young, extremely fit, women-less young men the influx of these girls must at times have been overwhelming – behaviour was seldom ‘bad’. Although so distant from home – a factor that often loosens the moral straitjacket – there was none of the sexual free-for-all that characterised the Happy Valley set in the Kenya of the 1930s. For one thing, in Kenya hedonistic individuals were just that – individuals – responsible only to themselves and, perhaps, husband, wife or lover, whereas in the Raj almost everyone was responsible to a direct superior.

  The moral climate of Victorian England held sway among those who governed, as did the belief that sexual misbehaviour would tarnish the impeccable image of probity they struggled to maintain. Another, equally powerful, factor was that during the years of enforced celibacy young men were either up country and working all hours or in a closed community where transgressions would be spotted and suppressed by (safely married) senior officers. But the main reason for the unblemished moral behaviour of the vast majority of the Fishing Fleet was that from the inception of the Raj in 1858 and up to the outbreak of the Second World War gently born young women were brought up in an ambiance where sex was never even discussed, let alone condoned.

  As one of them told me: ‘At seventeen I was so ignorant I thought you could start a baby if someone kissed you. The thought of becoming pregnant was held over our heads like a flaming sword.’ The stigma of giving birth to an illegitimate baby was so great that most such children were given away for adoption, and the girl herself thrust out of sight where possible. With premarital chastity thus the required social norm, few men with pretensions to honour or decency would attempt to seduce one of these sheltered creatures – and so destroy her chances in the all-important marriage stakes.

  Plenty of men flocked round Ruby Madden but she was a forthright, independent creature who knew her own mind and would not be swayed by the romance of her surroundings in a distant land. ‘I rode in the morning at 6.30 and enjoyed it except that Major Pollard, poor little man, would propose to me and I have seen it coming for some time and tried to avoid it by talking hard about mundane subjects such as “should you take cold baths in India?” but all to no good. Poor little man, he seemed very much in earnest . . .’.

  Poor Major Pollard did not give up easily. At a fancy dress ball soon afterwards he stalked up to Ruby looking, as she wrote to her mother, ‘a speaking likeness of the lunatic in Dotty Ville who thought himself a poached egg or a rooster . . . he is rather short and fat and had a furious red beard and moustache glued on very insecurely. Mustard-coloured tights . . . a doublet of sorts slashed in every direction with maroon satin and to crown all a huge felt hat with rather a coal scuttle tendency, presuming to be covered with flowing ostrich plumes, instead of which there were three miserable bones, two standing out at the back and one in front like the feeler of a cockroach. I never recognised him till nearly the end of the evening when he came up to me as I was talking to Lady Clarke and asked in a sepulchral voice, for fear of blowing off his beard if I had remembered to keep his dance.’ She hadn’t – ‘and the feathers wore a hurt expression as he stalked away’. It was the end of Major Pollard.

  Ruby had been determined from the start not to marry and settle down in India, one probable reason for her ‘hands-off’ attitude. For everyone else to be surrounded by eager young men was a heady experience. Lilah Wingfield, in India for the Coronation Durbar of 1912, wrote of a dance to which Lady Bute had asked her and her friend Sylvia Brooke: ‘It is a pleasant sensation to be so much in demand as one is at dances out here! India being a country full of men, the few women find themselves very popular.’ It is a sentiment that recurs again and again in the journal of her visit to India.

  At the same time, so rigid was the hierarchy of the Raj that even flirting with a girl that a senior officer had his eye on was thought to be risky. ‘The first part of the time the boys in the regiment rather avoided me if anything and I wondered why,’ wrote Lilah Wingfield in December 1911. ‘It appears that because I was the only girl in camp who was the Colonel’s guest and no relation or friend of any of the other officers they had got it into their heads that the Colonel must be in love with me and that we were shortly to become engaged! . . . they all looked on me for a certainty as their Colonel’s future wife and as such treated me with due respect and did not talk to me much when he was present, as I suppose they thought he would not like it!’ When Lilah heard this rumour she asked a friend, married to a brother officer, to tell the young officers that there was no truth in this supposition ‘and from that time on they ceased to look at me as another man’s property and no longer kept up the avoiding me and the deep respect’.

  In virtually all Fishing Fleet flirtations, a kiss was about the summit of fantasy for most girls (if only because many of them had no clear vision of what could happen next). Betsy Anderson was typical. In Neemuch she had soon met a young man in the Royal Artillery for whom she had fallen, but who had been sent to a station elsewhere.

  It was from him, when she was eighteen, that she received her first kiss. It was a matter of huge moment. ‘The Gunners we had met at Neemuch were now stationed not far off. There was to be a big dance and I lived in anticipation of seeing my first love again,’ she recalled later. ‘To my joy he was amongst the subalterns who had been invited and arrived looking resplendent in full-dress uniform. I was in a transport of delight as he danced with me most of the evening.’

  Fortunately for Betsy her mother, usually a vigilant chaperone, was also a beauty, and so much in demand that Betsy and her subaltern managed to evade her and slip into the cool garden. ‘It was bathed in blue moonlight and filled with the intoxicating scents of jasmine and frangipani and I felt as if I was going to swoon when he gave me my first kiss as I think I imagined myself as an Ethel M. Dell heroine – the only love stories I had, surreptitiously, read. It seems ludicrous these days,’ she wrote later, ‘that the stirring of first passion which this evoked made me feel guilty and unable to tell my mother in whom I usually confided.’ But there was no Ethel M. Dell ending: when Betsy later met her Gunner he told her he had become engaged to the girl he had left behind.*

  The repression engendered by years of celibacy and, often, loneliness, coupled with the shortage of nubile young women and the lack of opportunity for meeting them, meant that frequently a man of marriageable age would seize the first chance he got to acquire one of these desirable creatures. Even in the 1930s, this was sometimes a matter of mere weeks. Patience Winifred Horne, born on 24 September 1910, became engaged to her future husband within six weeks of landing in Calcutta. He had spotted her immediately but she could not remember him. ‘It was the day after I had arrived, a Sunday, and I went to the cinema with Tommy,’ she wrote to him. ‘I remember a party sitting in the corner but not you I’m afraid.’

  Patience was the daughter of the Reverend Francis Horne, a hunting parson (though he would never hunt during Lent), brought up in the large Georgian rectory of Drinkstone, near Bury St Edmunds. Although the family hunted, and lived in a large house, money was tight – country parsons have never been well paid – an
d all there was went on her brothers’ education, first at prep school and then at Charterhouse and Stowe. Patience, who longed for an education, taught herself to read, and used to pray each night that she would be sent to school.

  She grew up pretty, clever, an excellent rider and county-level tennis player. Although she was presented in July 1930, she did not ‘do the Season’ and the chance to meet suitable young men in the heart of rural Suffolk was limited. The result was that at the age of twenty-three she was considered to be ‘on the shelf’ and sent off to India in October 1933 on what her family called ‘the marriage boat’. There she stayed with family friends, Aline and Hugh (‘Bodie’) Aldous and their daughter Louise in Poona – Hugh was the son of Bury St Edmunds hunting neighbours.

  She scored an immediate success, with young men flocking round. ‘I’m coming back from the wars on Saturday temporarily until Sunday. Will you have a party with me on Saturday night and do something with me on every occasion on which you are not doing something with someone else? Darling I love you. A toi Johnny’ wrote a young soldier in the XIX Hyderabad Regiment. And again: ‘Loveliest Patience, are you doing anything after dinner on Saturday? If not will you dance at Murator’s and Louise? They have a reasonable band there on Saturday night and some amusingly frightful people. I want to dance with you, in fact I think if I don’t dance with you I shall pass quietly away. Desperately, Johnny.’

  Another proposal came from ‘Ian’ on 30 November, only a few weeks after she had arrived. ‘Have your feelings changed at all regarding me? Please answer this question soon . . . Patience darling, is there any chance for me. Do you still love someone, or have your feelings changed?’

  By Christmas 1933, a mere five weeks after she had arrived, she was engaged, but neither to Johnny, Ian, nor Tommy. Her fiancé was Captain Harold Edwin Collett-White, born on 28 September 1902. His father worked for the Indian railways but he was a soldier; he had been to Woolwich, become a Gunner officer and then transferred to the Royal Horse Artillery. When Patience met him he was stationed at Bangalore, as ADC to General Jeffreys, the GOC.

  There is no record of how the others felt but Tommy took it on the chin. ‘I saw Tommy last night at the Club, he was just back from camp for one day and congratulated me very nicely and hoped we should be very happy,’ Patience told her fiancé. ‘We left him sitting there saying he was going to get so drunk he would forget me and as he had had five brandy and sodas in about ten minutes it looked as if he was going to succeed. A ridiculous fuss about me.’

  Collett, as Patience always called him (‘I can’t do Harold’) was tall, dark, good-looking and much sought after. ‘Mrs Ainley was very amusing,’ runs one of Patience’s letters to her fiancé. ‘She said the girls of Poona were jealous of me for being engaged to you as you were supposed to be the nicest and most difficult man to catch in Poona!’ Mrs Ainley appears to have been right, as on 7 December the newly engaged Patience was writing: ‘My darling Collett, I wonder whether you are sitting in the train now or if you missed it! I hope you are thinking of me and not feeling worried about my parents’ consent or regretting your hasty action. I was hauled out by the noble Louise the minute you had gone to play badminton to keep me from crying too much.

  ‘We met Yola Jenkyn on the way down and told her the great news . . . she was so horrid about it I came to the conclusion she was jealous, and her saying she didn’t like you didn’t make much impression on me except one of extreme rage . . . I really was so angry I couldn’t speak because you see when I said: “I’m engaged”, she said: “Who to?” and when I said you she said: “Good heavens, you can’t marry that man.” I said: “Why not?” She said: “He’s the most awful little pipsqueak.”

  ‘So Louise said in a determined voice: “One more word and I push you into the ditch” and she said: “Oh well, I’m engaged you know only I can’t announce it yet,” so we realised she was overcome with jealousy, which I don’t wonder at. I should be very jealous of anyone who was going to marry you.’

  Patience and Collett decided to get married in England so that her family could meet him. She sailed for home on 9 March, on the City of Simla (‘only a month and we shall be together again. I am longing for it. Lots of love and all my kisses’), straightaway running into an old friend. ‘The first person I saw was my dear friend Stewart Brown and he started teasing me about you and the successful fishing fleet!’

  Money, as so often in the Raj, was a worry. Even more than in the English countryside, in India horses were both a focus and a preoccupation – and they were expensive animals both to buy and keep. Another letter from City of Simla shows that Patience, like a good Raj wife-to-be, had got her priorities right. ‘We will do without anything for the sake of the horses, won’t we? I don’t mind doing anything as long as you are nice to me always. If I have you and a horse nothing much else matters, does it?’

  Hunting was also a priority with Valerie Pridmore Riley, born on 1 April 1913, a Fishing Fleet girl who lived in Somerset and, unlike most of the Fleet, only reluctantly went out to India. After leaving finishing school in Paris she had returned home, where her life became centred round hunting and skiing. When her close friend Rosemary Sandys-Lumsden, whom she had known since she was eleven, and Rosemary’s Aunt Katie asked Valerie to come out to India for the winter she refused unhesitatingly. ‘I was having far too good a time at home to want to go,’ she told me. When offered a second chance for a visit, she refused again.

  A year or so later, in 1936, Aunt Katie and Rosemary invited Valerie out for the third time. On an earlier visit, Rosemary had got engaged to the best man at the wedding of her brother, who worked in the family tea firm in Calcutta, but as they were so young they had to wait a year or two. Now, they told Valerie, they were going out for Rosemary’s wedding; would Valerie come this time, to be bridesmaid to her old friend?

  Valerie was still hesitant to leave the life she was enjoying so much at home. But, urged on by her mother, and the telling fact that her hunter was getting old and she had not yet found another horse, she agreed. And, of course, there was the compelling reason of being bridesmaid to one of her greatest friends.

  ‘So in the autumn of 1936 I became a member of the Fishing Fleet,’ said Valerie. Once she was safely on the ship – The Viceroy of India, the most modern and luxurious in the P&O fleet – with her bridesmaid’s dress safely packed in a trunk in the hold, the other two disclosed to Valerie that the wedding was off and that they were not going to the brother in Calcutta but to a cousin of Aunt Katie’s in Delhi. ‘We didn’t tell you before,’ they said, ‘because we were afraid if we did you wouldn’t come.’ But Valerie enjoyed the voyage, acquiring both a boyfriend and the reputation of being the only girl never seen in either shorts or trousers and managing to have a good time while never drinking anything stronger than orange juice.

  In Delhi they stayed at the Cecil Hotel, where a lot of English people lived. ‘I’d met a Royal Fusilier on the boat, who became a bit of a boyfriend, and his regiment was stationed near Delhi.’ Life became even gayer at Christmas, when they went to stay in Calcutta, where Rosemary’s brother and cousin were and where the two girls were asked constantly to dances and parties. ‘Then we went back to Delhi, stopping off en route at Lucknow for Army Cup Week – Rosemary had friends in the Devon Regiment, who were stationed there and they wanted us to come – girls were at such a premium in India.

  ‘Aunt Katie allowed us to go together, and stay at an hotel, without her to chaperone us on condition we stuck together – she made us promise. We had a wonderful time. It was a very gay week, with lots of polo. All the regiments had their teams. The first afternoon I went to watch the polo a chap in the 14th/20th who had known me in England recognised me and we then had about four days of drink parties followed by dances. Every night one of the regiments would give a big cocktail party, followed by a dance. Non-stop.

  ‘It was great fun being surrounded by all those young men, and being so in demand, especially after England wh
ere in our part of the world there were no young men around because there weren’t the jobs for them.’

  After returning to Delhi, Aunt Katie took them to Agra, to visit the Taj Mahal. Back in Delhi, she sent them off one day in the car she had hired for six months with an Indian chauffeur to see the Red Fort. As they came out Valerie recognised on the sentry on guard the red, white and green ribbon of the Welch Regiment. ‘I’d had a boyfriend since I was about fifteen, in the Welch Regiment, who used to send me Christmas cards, so I knew those colours.

  ‘I said to Rosemary: “The Welch Regiment must be here” and she said: “I wonder if that chap Roger Welchman, whom I met two years ago, at a dance in the Berkeley, is with them?” Apparently they’d got on rather well, though as he was going back to India the following day they hadn’t seen each other since. My friend John from the boat was motoring up to Delhi from Bombay and he came to dinner with us in Lorries Hotel and Rosemary kept on about this chap Roger Welchman she had met, but John could not help either. She looked at the various young men having drinks on the veranda speculating if one of them could be Roger – after all, it was two years since she’d seen him.

  ‘Then in the middle of dinner a young man came up to the table and said: “You’re Rosemary Sandys-Lumsden and we met at the Berkeley!” Of course it was Roger. He asked what we were doing that night and we told him we were going to see the Taj by moonlight and he said he’d like to come too. So he escorted Rosemary and I went with John.’