The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  She was, however, determined in one respect. ‘I hope you won’t worry,’ she reassured her widowed mother, ‘that I will be meeting nice regimental people and falling in love with them. It would be too awful to marry a soldier and come to some of these stations out here. Just as well my heart is quite intact – it is all too devastating.’

  Jean and her companions, young, healthy and attractive, cramming every moment of the day with the pleasures of companionship, surroundings of exquisite beauty and the enjoyable frisson of sexual tension, exemplified the Raj at play. Hill stations meant holidays, with all that holidays promised in the way of carefree relaxation and romance, away from the all-seeing eyes that surrounded India’s rulers in the plains.

  Or, as John Masters so memorably wrote: ‘Perhaps it was the mountain air that caused so many of the women to cast away their inhibitions. Perhaps the friendly unfamiliar wood fires burning on the hearths warmed their blood and made them think with fervour of romps on tiger skin divans. Perhaps it was moonlight and bulbuls – or perhaps it was human nature . . . the fact was that hill stations presented an unusual picture of a race that was supposed to be frigid.’

  15

  ‘“No” would have been unthinkable’

  Engagement

  Getting engaged in the Raj was sometimes a bit like speed dating. Often, minds were made up and a lifelong commitment to another human being promised after only a few meetings and without the aphrodisiac bait of great wealth, a large and splendid estate, or huge personal prestige to account for such rapidity.

  Violet Swinhoe, who had previously merely played a round of golf with her future husband, recalled in September 1916 of one dance: ‘had two with James and he was ripping and there was a full moon and altogether everything was top hole’. After a few other meetings, at another dance on 19 March, she was writing: ‘began dancing and was at the fourth when he told me he loved me. Dear thing, but I said, I was so uncertain in my mind . . .’. By the 30th it was fixed. ‘James had final talk with Daddy and then we were engaged. Too queer for words. I lay down.’

  Yet looking at the phenomenon of almost instant betrothals from the standpoint of the parties concerned, it is understandable. Most ICS men, once they reached the age when they were allowed to marry, would devote their energies to finding a wife; and if their six-month home leave brought no joy, would continue the search on the ship back to India – most returned from leave in the autumn, when the new crop of Fishing Fleet girls went out. If unsuccessful at home or on the ship but still anxious to marry, they would naturally focus on the available girls in India, who were, in the main, Fishing Fleet girls.

  Once there, with a male-female ratio of about three to one, in the hothouse atmosphere of balls, parties and moonlight picnics, popular and pursued as never before, it was easy for any girl to fall headlong in love. ‘Hearts are strangely inflammable under Indian skies,’ wrote Maud Diver, ‘and propinquity fans the faintest spark into a flame.’

  Rumer Godden found herself engaged to a man she knew she did not love, simply because as an inexperienced eighteen-year-old brought up to agree with older people, this, coupled with the glamorous surroundings and the pressure of romantic expectation on all sides, was overwhelming. ‘On Christmas night, after dinner, Ian took me apart on to the high foredeck of the furthest ship and, under those glittering stars, asked me to marry him . . . I had no chance to say “Yes”. Ian said it for me. “No” would have been unthinkable. “It is yes, isn’t it?” he said, and kissed me. All his love and longing was in that kiss but I think I only blinked . . . This was happening to me and it was wrong.

  ‘Then why did I let it go on? I think I did not know how not to and I was immensely flattered, to be a chosen girl. Hostesses beamed approval on me. “Ian is such a nice man,” which he was. “He deserves to be happy,” which he did. Flowers came every day and Ian would take a case out of his pocket with a smile and there was a brooch, or a bracelet, once a string of pearls.’ Finally, she found the courage to break it off.

  More usually, courtship was a long-distance affair, with a stream of letters passing between a couple who might have met during, say, Delhi Week, thereafter to be separated by hundreds of miles as he returned to station or cantonment and she – who would never have come to Delhi Week on her own – with her hosts to where they were living.

  Philip Docton Martyn (always known as PD) was an ICS man posted, when he joined in 1927, to the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal. On leave from India six years later he met his future bride, Margaret, then twenty-four; one bond was that they were both graduates of Manchester University.

  They met a mere three times that summer and six months later he proposed, from India, although this meant a long engagement until he had reached the age at which marriage was permitted. It was only after four years of letters, written in the form of daily diaries and posted once a week, that he returned, married Margaret and took her back to India in 1939. (Among the advice Margaret received from a woman who lived there was to bring out a garden party dress with hat and gloves for the Christmas Garden Party at Belvedere – the Viceroy’s Calcutta residence – as many evening dresses as possible, a black outfit in case of official mourning and fine lawn underwear.)

  Lieutenant Leslie Lavie, stationed in Vizianagram, a town inland on the coastal plain of Bengal, halfway between Madras and Calcutta, was another for whom letters were the lifeline. He had met Florence Ross in February 1895. The youngest daughter of Dr Hamilton Ross, a former Surgeon Major to the British Army in India who lived in County Antrim, she was staying in Secunderabad with her sister Alice, married to Major Herbert Nepean.

  They became engaged on 30 January 1896, and thereafter the besotted Leslie wrote daily to his beloved: long letters (‘I really ought not to spend about one and a half hours a day writing to you as I have certainly let things get into arrears a little’). These told of the news of the cantonment, of the appalling and enervating heat, the illnesses from which he and his friends suffered and the general discomforts and oppression of life in the hot weather. They gave her instructions couched as wishes ‘I hope you will try to get an idea of the way an Indian household should be run’), and discussed the ups and downs of their relationship (‘be nice and tell me why you were so cold in your letters last week . . .’); ‘My own darling, you have ceased to address me like this, I suppose for some reason best known to yourself, perhaps because you no longer look on me as such . . . I have tried and tried to think how I can have offended you, but don’t know’).

  But even when there had been a spate of reproaches he was devastated when circumstances intervened to interrupt the steady stream of correspondence; when the railway broke down because of floods so that no mail got through he wrote, on 9 August, that it was ‘a fearful blow to me, as my spirits and happiness depend on your letters’.

  Theirs was a story that ended in tragedy. After working through financial problems, negotiating their way past the age barrier (Leslie was not quite old enough at twenty-seven) they married on 16 September in St John’s Church, Secunderabad. Only seven months later he died after an illness of ten days during which, unsuspected, an abscess developed on his liver and eventually was said to have burst through his lungs. He was buried the next day in the cantonment cemetery, under a tombstone of white marble engraved with the sad little phrase, Entered into Rest; and on 24 July 1897 Flossie gave birth to a posthumous daughter, Leslie Mary Maud Lavie – usually called by the diminutive, Mollie.

  A few years later, Flossie decided to try her luck in India again, rejoining the Fishing Fleet in the early 1900s and leaving Mollie in the care of her grandparents. Postcards arrived for Mollie at frequent intervals. One, postmarked 28 December 1905, reads ‘Very many thanks for your letter. I hope you had a Happy Christmas and had plenty to eat. Mummie.’ But Flossie’s second Indian venture was unsuccessful, despite at least one proposal. ‘It may be a waist [sic] of money your trip to India, but since you have only one life to live you might just a
s well enjoy it while you can,’ wrote her sister Ellen from Minneapolis. ‘Who did you get yourself engaged to? Unless you were quite sure you would be happy, it is as well you did not do it. It is easy to get married but not as easy to get out of it …’.

  Later, Flossie said that no one she met on that second visit measured up to her beloved Leslie. Although only thirty-five, she never remarried, remaining a widow for over sixty years, until she died at the age of ninety-seven.

  Not many girls become engaged on top of an elephant but one was Honor Penrose, born in 1888. One of a large family, she was brought up in Lismore Castle, the property of the Duke of Devonshire, as her father was his agent. Life in Ireland was quiet, with entertainment consisting mainly of travelling circuses and concerts, the arrival of the first bicycles (‘I ran all down the drive to see one’ recalled Honor) and then the motor car – a shock for this small community. ‘I seen the Divil in his Hellcart coming into Athlone,’ said one old man, ‘and I just had time to go down on my knees and say two Aves and one Pater when “Hoot-toot!” says he and away with him.’

  Honor herself was responsible for another innovation: riding astride, in those days unheard of, especially in a quiet corner of rural Ireland. Although the FANYs, the nursing yeomanry founded to ride out and give succour to the wounded in the South African War of 1899–1902, took to riding astride in 1910, they wore khaki so that their professional role was clear and therefore acceptable, despite a certain amount of tut-tutting. By contrast Lord Annaly, Master of the Pytchley 1902–14, was so outspoken in disapproval of riding astride that he would not give the Pytchley white collar to any woman who did so.* Honor, who took to riding astride because her back hurt intolerably when sitting sideways on a horse, was apprehensive on her first such outing.

  ‘I can remember my agony of shyness arriving at the Meet and keeping my horse as close to my father’s as I could to hide the terrible fact that I had two legs, even though they were covered discreetly by a divided skirt!’ she wrote later. ‘People were very nice to me but another girl who followed my example some time later had stones thrown at her by the cottage women and shouts of “Go home and put on the petticoat!”’

  As Honor grew up there were teenage dances, conducted in the most formal way with programmes and white kid gloves. But this happy mingling of the sexes soon ceased; there were no jobs for the boys and ‘one by one they departed to distant corners of the Empire to earn a living and we girls were left lamenting at home’. When in 1913 her older sister Judith was invited to India by a cousin but could not go, Honor was sent in her stead ‘to find a husband,’ as she later told her granddaughter. She travelled out with a married friend, Sylvia Cassels, as far as Bombay, and thence by train to Nagpur to stay with her cousin Sylvia Pollard-Lowseley, whose husband was in the Royal Engineers.

  Just before Christmas she left her cousins to stay with Sylvia Cassels, whose ICS husband Seton was Commissioner for an area that contained part of the Terai, a tract of jungle at the foot of the Himalayas renowned as the haunt of tigers and other wild animals. After a duty tour with the Cassels came the highlight of the ten days’ Christmas holidays, a tiger shoot, with a Colonel who served as Game Warden to the Maharaja of Kashmir, his wife and their two daughters. Also in the party was Seton Cassels’s brother and his wife and another ICS man, Rupert Barkeley-Smith, always known as ‘Gappy’ and then aged thirty, whom Honor already knew. He was, she recalled, ‘a handsome chap’.

  For the tiger shoot, towards the end of the ten days luxurious camping – with its sunny days, elephant rides, jungle sights and sounds, excellent meals and the romance of sitting round the blazing camp fire at night under the stars – Honor was put in the back of Gappy’s howdah. It was the first tiger shoot for them both and, nervous that she would not keep quiet, he bet her that she could not remain motionless for twenty minutes.

  They heard the beaters, with their drums, clashing tin cans and whacking trees. ‘Suddenly in the shadows opposite I saw a flash of yellow,’ wrote Honor later. ‘I poked Gappy in the back and pointed. There was a bang and a great mass of yellowy brown toppled forward into the nullah [ravine] and lay there stone dead. Another shot from Gappy and a full grown cub lay dead.’ As the beaters tried to steal the whiskers off the tigers for their magic properties Gappy seized his moment and asked Honor to marry him. She accepted. ‘He was a rotten dancer,’ his granddaughter told me, ‘and thought that if he waited until they reached civilisation and he proposed to her after treading on her toes in a foxtrot she might have refused him.’

  Sylvia Cassels, who felt somewhat responsible for the betrothal, since it was through her that the pair had met, sent a reassuringly enthusiastic letter to Honor’s mother, its phraseology redolent of the time: ‘I do hope you will be pleased. We are delighted and think it is a most satisfactory engagement in every way, and they are so happy. I am sure you will approve of him as a son-in-law, he is such a thorough “sahib” and has good brains and good looks and is healthy and sound in mind and body – and he is so very lucky to get engaged to Honor who will make a most excellent Civilian’s wife! . . . He said to me the other day: “The dibs [rupees] are all right!” which is his way of saying he has a certain amount of money of his own.’

  For a young woman with little to do except enjoy herself, all mundane necessities taken care of by a host of servants, with friendly and hospitable people delighted to see a pretty new face, the cold-weather season could seem like one long party. While she would undoubtedly notice the glamorising effect of uniform on a young, fit but otherwise perfectly ordinary young man, the fact that there was little for the life of the mind would probably pass her by. What was important was the next dance and what to wear there. As for the dance itself, even a stroll on to the veranda in those balmy nights with huge stars overhead was a potent inducement to romance.

  Sometimes, with so many attractive suitors around, it seemed almost a question of luck as to which one a girl would pick, with persistence probably the strongest weapon in a young man’s armoury. It certainly seemed so for nineteen-year-old Claudine Gratton. Her diary is spattered with dates with different young men. ‘Ian called for me at 9.15 and took me to the New Year’s Day Parade. Bad. He then took me to drinks with very queer people. Awful creature, I do detest him He more or less proposed to me last night at the flick. Grim creature.’

  Soon her future husband, John Hamilton (always known as Ham), a Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Indian Navy, then serving on the Cornwallis, appears in her diary. They go sailing, out to dinner, bathing and on 1 July 1939 he kisses her for the first time. Next day, however, ‘Tony asked me to play polo!! I do like him.’ Two days later it is dinner, in a party with Ham to see Pygmalion, on to the Boat Club dance, after which Ham brought her home (more kisses). ‘We said goodbye for ten days as his ship has been called to Bombay.’

  With Ham away, Claudine’s life remained as social as before. ‘Dined at home in a Scots Fusiliers lads’ party, invited by Tony Johnson, we went on to the Boat Club. Had good waltzes with Watt. Home about 3.30.’ Next day, 8 July, it was six people to dinner and ‘on to see Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Flora Robson, David Niven in Wuthering Heights, good but sad. Drinks Sind Club, danced at the Gym [Gymkhana Club]. Bed 3.15.’ Two days later, ‘Fergie took me sailing. He set the course, good one. Grand sail. Home 8.30, changed. Jim Anson called for me. We (six) saw Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Irene and Vernon Castle.’ On the 12th, ‘Mike Carroll called for me and took me to a champagne party at the Noughtons. We all went on to the Boat Club for lunch.’

  Only on Ham’s return on 4 August did the roll-call of other young men stop. ‘Went [to the Boat Club] with him and stayed there for supper. We danced to the gram. He took me to Clifton and proposed to me. “Will you be my wife?” said he. And I said: “and never see you? No! not me.” I’m not really in love with him although I like him a lot. Home at 11.30-ish.’

  A week later, after a cocktail party on Cornwallis and dancing at the Boat C
lub, Ham took her home. ‘He proposed again, poor old thing, but I don’t love him.’ The following night there was a visit to the cinema to see Mother India and another proposal. Next morning, on 16 August, he sent her a note. ‘He thinks the balloon is going up as they have been ordered to Bombay. He can’t even see me to say goodbye. He seems very cut up. Wrote him a chit in bed.’

  1 September. ‘Germany has invaded Poland. They want Danzig. Probably war to come. Messed about. News on the wireless, lunch . . . I went to dinner at 1 Clifton Road with eight other men, we all went on to the Boat Club.’

  Ham’s pursuit of Claudine was eventually successful thanks to his tenacity. On 17 December her diary records: ‘I found a letter on D[addy]’s table from H that he wants to get married!! Oh! I’m so thrilled. Don’t know what to do. D arrived home from camp, want to tell him but I won’t yet. Started a letter to Ham, finished it.’ By the following morning she had made up her mind. ‘When Daddy came to wake me up I told him that Ham and I are engaged. He was so sweet – a bit tearful too I think. I’m going to wear my marquise ring on my engagement finger till I get an engagement ring from Ham.’