The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  Charles and Dorothy drove off to their reception in the Lieutenant-Governor’s carriage. ‘Then followed one of the most memorable and remarkable processions I have ever seen,’ wrote the groom’s uncle. ‘Most of the people were in rickshaws of which there were about 300, and, as each rickshaw requires four men, this made a rickshaw brigade. Then there were many guests on horseback, two of the clergy being mounted, and with each horseman was a syce [groom]. In addition there was a large number of camp followers and about 40 or 50 dogs, so that Charles and his bride had a marriage procession as big as an army corps.’

  Charles, who spent his career in Calcutta, was to become Senior Resident Partner of Jardine, Skinner & Co., Managing Agents. Outside the business sphere he commanded the Calcutta Light Horse in the 1920s and was Sheriff of Calcutta in 1936–7, when he had the unique experience of proclaiming two new King-Emperors – Edward VIII and George VI – to the populace.

  His father-in-law William went from strength to strength. In 1916 he was selected by the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, for the Viceroy’s Executive Council and a year later was promoted to the post of Home Member of the Government of India and President of the Viceroy’s Council: a position that was second in importance, if not in status, to that of the Viceroy himself. In addition he was Speaker or Leader of the Legislative Assembly (the parliament of India created in 1919), where the Government was always a minority. He held the post of Home Member until he retired from it, aged fifty-six, when he and Grace returned to England.

  Back in London his career continued. He served on the Council of India and as representative of India at the League of Nations until his final retirement in 1931. The Menai Strait farm where he had spent his boyhood through the legacy of a cousin was still in the family, but now the man who had once lived there as a poor boy travelled to it by private railway carriage hitched on to the back of the Irish Mail, stopping at the Vincents’ own platform.

  The story of Grace and William has a painful ending. For both, retirement could have been a life where William’s many distinguished posts brought them much recognition and a wide social circle. But as soon as the Vincents returned to England Grace left her husband, to live in Cheltenham, and rarely saw or spoke to her daughter Dorothy again. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of the reason for her marriage had been to escape from the curse of being Eurasian and to reclaim what she saw as her rightful place in society – and that, once at the top, she pulled up the drawbridge.

  14

  ‘Where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’

  The Hills

  The hill stations – the small towns and stations where the altitude gave welcome coolness in the summer months – were a refuge for wives, children, soldiers and others on a week or two’s leave, and Government officials, many of whom spent entire summers in one. What all of these hill stations shared was the tantalising prospect of an escape from the searing heat of the plains, where temperatures could remain at over 40oC for weeks at a stretch. Today we have air conditioning, electric fans and refrigerators; then, a dampened punkah and moistened reed mats hung over windows were the only relief.

  These hill stations were essentially British in atmosphere and built within a timespan of around thirty years. Most were somewhere between 1,200 and 8,000 feet above sea level. There was more ‘Englishness’ in these small towns than in any other part of India, from the architecture (‘the bow windows really are windows, not doors,’ wrote Lady Wilson) to the climate that allowed the flowers of home – sweet peas, petunias, wisteria, wallflowers, phlox, lilac – to grow. Although the corrugated iron roofs, noisy under heavy rain and the feet of monkeys, did not look exactly homelike, at least they were pitched as at home – and effective against the monsoons.

  The best known is undoubtedly Simla, the most purely British of Indian towns, with its buildings that range from Tudorbethan to neo-Gothic, some with elaborately carved and fretted eaves, others reminiscent of Swiss chalets. As the hill station for Calcutta, the seat of government until 1911, it was, from 1864, the summer capital of British India. It was also justly famous for love affairs and flirtations between married women whose husbands were working in the plains and the young officers and officials who constantly came up to Simla on leave. Immortalised by Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills, it was, as Lady Reading put it, a place ‘where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’. It was in Simla that Frank, the son of the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, caused shocked gossip by forming an ‘unfortunate attachment’ to a married woman he had met there.

  ‘The season blossomed and I became involved in a very gay life,’ wrote Bethea Field of her first visit to Simla as a young married woman in 1928. ‘I was young, attractive and had no lack of male escorts for balls, dances, cinemas and dinner parties. In the afternoons there were tennis games or picnics. I was lent horses to ride so that I could have my morning exercise and also ride down to Annandale for the races.

  ‘To keep up with it all I had to make my own dresses and spent many hours stitching – but material in the bazaar was cheap and I was slim enough to be easily fitted. My ayah helped by pinning seams and doing up the hems. There was a big summer crowd in Simla, summer headquarters for the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab. To add to all this, officers and civilians came on leave from the plains below. It was the Simla that Kipling had known and wrote about.

  ‘One of the most enchanting things were the rickshaw rides at night. It was as if one were travelling through the Milky Way because all the hillside from the mall to the lower bazaar was spangled with lights. Above was the dark, velvet sky with the real stars shining so big and close.’

  Bethea was often taken to Peliti’s restaurant, which had a weekly dinner dance. In Rudyard Kipling’s time, she noted, it was the place, from morning coffee and gossip to late after-theatre supper parties. ‘One crossed a footbridge across a ravine with a cascading little torrent to reach it. The road just before the entrance is said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth – her feet turn backwards from her ankles, though she glares at the passers-by with pale eyes. The coolies speed up and pass the dreaded spot with shouts and extra thumping of their feet, relaxing only when they are safely past.

  ‘The rains come there in July and it can be most uncomfortable and wet. That past, there is a serene time when the sun appears again and with it the view to the plains below the hills. In the sunset they showed golden – and very welcoming.’

  The amateur theatricals for which Simla was famous were considered a particular hazard to virtue, the more obvious temptations like the constant meeting with attractive members of the opposite sex and acting out scenes of passion with them heightened not only by the adrenaline rush of performance but also the holiday sense of liberation. ‘For a woman who is young, comely and gifted with a taste for acting, Simla is assuredly not the most innocuous place on God’s earth,’ wrote Maud Diver warningly; although most Simla romances ended when both parties had left to return to normal life.

  Sometimes there were more serious scandals. Just after the 1914–18 war a Mr King, who disliked dancing but was happy for his wife to attend balls, became suspicious of the way she always arrived home late from dances and in the company of his best friend, a cavalry officer. Once, when they were all staying in the same hotel for a party, he had a few drinks, picked up a poker and burst into the friend’s hotel room to find the couple in bed. He flattened his friend with the poker and called in the other guests to witness what he had done and why. Knowing what the fallout would be, all three fled Simla. The cavalry officer was sent to a department called Remounts, which led Sir Harcourt Butler (shortly to become Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) to believe that the Army had a sense of humour.

  When Simla first caught the eye of Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1828,* he wrote: ‘Simla is only four days’ march from Loodianah,* is easy of access, and proves a very agreeable refuge f
rom the burning plains of Hindoostaun.’ In 1864 it was officially declared the summer capital of India by the Viceroy, Sir John Lawrence, the first to move the administration the 1,000 odd miles from Calcutta to Simla and back again despite the difficulties of the journey (when the Government moved to New Delhi, the journey was cut to 250 miles). This annual spring migration of the whole of central government, files and all, took place first by train across the Ganges plain and then by bullock cart up through forests of oak, deodar and rhododendron until, finally, it arrived at this small town 7,000 feet above sea level.

  What gave Simla its pre-eminent place among hill towns was, of course, the presence of the Viceroy. However far from home, however long a British subject had been away, he or she never forgot that in the person of the Viceroy was the representative of their Sovereign – and for those who served the Empire, the Sovereign was the living embodiment of the ethos that sustained them. No one, therefore, thought it odd that the Viceroy was one of only three people allowed to use first a carriage and then a car in Simla; everyone else had to use a tonga or rickshaw. The Viceroy was in residence from April until October, as were also countless officials.

  Ruby Madden, who arrived in Simla on 12 March 1903, at the tail end of one of Simla’s cold and snowy winters, found it freezing. ‘Everything is run on English lines because of the cold,’ she noted. When she went for a walk with Claude, the husband of her friend Jeanie, ‘[I] hitched up my skirt and with leather boots, coat, furs, muff and red cap was ready to face the elements. My goodness it was cold and fresh. Simla is very empty now but it fills up in April.’ Later there would be rain – sometimes as much as six inches in two days – and thick white mists, soaking the petticoats and heavy dresses of the women who went out in this weather.

  Ruby took her exercise later in the day. ‘Breakfast is nominally ten o’clock but can be ordered any time. Lunch 2.15 then drift about until it’s time to go out at six o’clock when we take our exercise and return glowing, to eat a huge tea at seven o’clock beside a deodar log fire, which gives out a delicious scent, and curtains drawn. Afterwards dress very much at your leisure for dinner at eight or nine, more often at nine. We don’t often finish coffee until ten o’clock and any time after that we go to bed where I sleep under four blankets, an eiderdown, rezai [padded Indian quilt], hot water bottle, flannel nighty and have a big log fire as well and then just feel comfy.’

  Days of serious rain were a drawback, but for the temporary inhabitants of this little hill town, newly released from the miseries of hot weather, the quest for enjoyment was paramount. A description of the determined relish with which the British of the late-Victorian Raj threw themselves into the gaieties of Simla is given by Henry Stewart Cunningham* in his 1875 novel The Chronicles of Dustypore (its heroine, Maud, is a Fishing Fleet girl).

  ‘Nothing damps their ardour – not even the Himalayan rain, which effectually damps everything else. There is a ball, for instance, at the Club House; it is raining cataracts, and has been doing so for twenty hours. The mountain paths are knee-deep in mud, and swept by many a turgid torrent rattling from above. Great masses of thunder-cloud come looming up, rumbling, crashing and blazing upon a sodden, reeking world. The night is black as Tartarus, save when the frequent flashes light it up with a momentary glare.

  ‘The road is steep, rough, and not too safe. A false step might send you several thousand feet down the precipice into the valley below. Will all this prevent Jones the Collector and Brown the Policeman and Smith of the Irregular Cavalry putting their respective ladies into palanquins, mounting their ponies like men, and finding their way, through field and flood, to the scene of dissipation? Each will ensconce himself in a panoply of indiarubber, and require a great deal of peeling before becoming presentable in a ballroom; but each will get himself peeled, and dance till four o’clock. The ladies will emerge from their palanquins as fresh and bright and ambrosial as lace and tarlatan can make them . . . Is this the race which proclaims itself inadept at amusements, and which, historians gravely assure us, loves to take its very pleasures sadly?’

  The town itself spread about three and a half miles from east to west and about two and a half from north to south, with all the houses on a narrow plateau which ran east to west, with some spurs projecting from it, from which descended rough slopes for about a thousand feet.

  It was not a particularly beautiful town: Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, once said that if Simla had been built by monkeys, one would have said: ‘What clever monkeys! They must be shot in case they do it again.’ But its views were spectacular: glorious sunsets and range upon range of mountains, beyond which (in the words of Lady Irwin) ‘you can see the plain 120 miles away, pale cobalt blue and pinky mauve seared with silver bands, which are the rivers in flood’.

  Annandale, famous first for archery contests and later for croquet, was a flat oval stadium at the foot of one of the slopes that descended from the plateau. Viceregal Lodge, huge, ostentatious and as modern as the Viceroy who built it, Lord Dufferin, could make it, stood at the west end of the plateau on Observatory Hill, with the town hall and church two miles away at the east end. Above the trees rose its towers and cupolas, made of greyish stone; inside were rooms sumptuously decorated by Maples of London. The hall was the full height of the house, its central feature a grand teak staircase that spiralled up three floors; in the hall everything was of teak, walnut or deodar, carved and moulded. The big drawing room was furnished in gold and brown silks, the ballroom decorated a lighter shade of yellow, the state dining room hung with Spanish leather in rich, dark colours.

  There were large white-tiled modern basement kitchens, a huge wine cellar; there was electric light – the Vicereine, Hariot Dufferin, found this such a pleasure that she went round touching the on-off buttons from time to time – running hot and cold water in the bathrooms and an indoor tennis court. Outbuildings provided accommodation for the Viceroy’s personal bodyguard and the household band. There was even a shed near the entrance where the gun for firing salutes was kept. In Curzon’s day forty gardeners looked after the spacious ground with a squad of ten men whose sole duty was, to keep away the bold, thieving, chattering, monkeys that were the bane of everyone’s life, Monkeys raided all the gardens in Simla, chasing each other over the red corrugated iron roofs, shrieking and clattering, stripping fruit trees and darting into houses to grab anything small or glittering, such as a silver spoon or snuff box, that caught their eye.

  Viceregal Lodge was a place to impress – the tallest building on the highest spot, home to the most elevated in the country. Curzon, possibly India’s greatest Viceroy and one for whom an image of magnificence was all-important (‘it certainly needs no trained psychologist’s eye to diagnose him at a glance as a man who would prefer to be mounted on an elephant rather than a donkey,’ remarked Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of one of his friends), loved Simla and entertained here freely. A typical festivity was a dinner dance at Viceregal Lodge in July 1901, with seventy to dine plus eighty in afterwards to dance (and everyone out by midnight) and around fifteen spare men so that all the women were able to dance; there were levées, a garden party, a Drawing Room, official dinners for 120 every Thursday, and innumerable smaller dinner and luncheon parties.

  Lord Kitchener, Curzon’s great rival and later enemy, lived almost more splendidly, with the difference that he managed to get the Government of England to pay for most of his alterations and extravagances. In Snowdon, his Simla residence, the great hall was panelled in walnut; in his new library the ceiling was a copy of the one at Hatfield. For ceilings in less visible parts of the house, he used papier mâché, composed largely of great masses of military files pounded into pulp by his two ADCs.

  In the new dining room he added he entertained lavishly. ‘We were forty at six tables, the centre one all gold plate and on the sideboard five gold vases,’ wrote one young woman. ‘We began with iced soup, just stiff enough to spoon comfortably, with little dots of tr
uffles; next fillets of fish with mushrooms and prawns; then filets de boeuf a la banquantine. A mousse de canetons, followed by quails, constituted the fourth and fifth courses. The sixth was a dream of a fruit compote with cream ices. Then cheese and biscuits and the 8th course was a sumptuous dessert of peaches, apricots, mangoes and prunes just softened with a dash of brandy.’

  The Retreat, the Viceroy’s weekend cottage, at Mashobra, was to the north-east of Simla, about six miles from Viceregal Lodge and 600 feet higher. Curzon, an indefatigable worker, sent out a stream of orders, reports, diplomatic messages and proposed reforms even from Naldera, a tented camp seventeen miles from Simla where he and Mary Curzon would withdraw for a respite from official duties, where Mary could rest and Curzon could work out of doors. It was at Naldera in 1903 that Mary conceived her third child, christened Alexandra Naldera, after her godmother Queen Alexandra and the place of which Mary had such idyllic memories.

  Twenty years later the Vicereine, Lady Reading, who had categorised Simla as ‘a hotbed of flirtations and more,’ was also seeking peace and quiet away from Simla. The Readings’ retreat was Mashobra, surrounded by forests of oak, deodar, pine, maple, horse chestnut and rhododendron, the haunt of monkeys, baboons, barking deer and the occasional leopard. In 1921 Mashobra, unlike Viceregal Lodge, had no electric light, and water was still brought to the house in skins. In May 1923 Lady Reading was writing of ‘irises in bloom, hundreds of coloured butterflies, and mules laden with food’. But no Viceroy was ever off duty. ‘Every few hours,’ she added, ‘a tall bodyguard in scarlet and gold uniform on a black horse appears, carrying dispatches, letters and telegrams.’