The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  When there were limited opportunities for meeting, courtship had to be an affair of speed and decision – if the loved one were not to pass irrevocably out of sight. When John Henry, manager of an indigo plantation in Bihar, went to the annual Meet in Muzaffarpur, he met a beautiful girl, Mabel Exshaw, niece of another indigo planter, staying there with her two sisters and her mother (the planter’s sister). John and Mabel fell in love at first sight. But at the end of the week of socializing and gaiety, John, like every other man there, had to return to work; and Mabel, only on a short visit, would soon be leaving for England with her mother and sisters.

  John was desperate – and desperate times require desperate measures. He went back to work but at the end of each afternoon he rode his horse to the nearest railway station and caught the train to Muzaffarpur, a journey of several hours. There he got a one-horse vehicle that took him out to the estate on which his beloved was staying, reaching it in time for dinner. Fortunately her uncle was a hospitable man who liked to entertain and to see his family happy.

  He spent the evening courting Mabel, until the horse and cab arrived to take him to Muzaffarpur, where he caught the train to his own station. There he mounted his horse and rode back, arriving at the plantation at 6 a.m., the time when, like other managers, he rode round inspecting the fields. All his changing of clothes, washing, shaving and minimal sleeping were done in the train. He went on doing this until Mabel’s mother gave her permission for the engagement.

  The lovely young Violet Hanson was, as we have seen, one of the few Fishing Fleet girls who had already been married. The marriage, at seventeen, to a man who proved to be homosexual, had been annulled. Four years later, her mother had despatched her to stay with her aunt Mable, visiting her son in India.

  The omens for finding a suitable husband were favourable. Mable’s son was in a smart English cavalry regiment, the 4th/5th Dragoon Guards. ‘There were very few unmarried girls and dozens of young unmarried men,’ recalled Violet, who had gone back to her maiden name before leaving. The reason was that as well as the 4th/5th, the Secunderabad Brigade consisted of two Indian cavalry regiments – the Deccan Horse and the 3rd (Indian) Cavalry Regiment – and a battalion of the Royal Artillery and a couple of Indian infantry regiments.

  Violet had plenty of admirers. One of them, Podge Gregson, in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, had his mother staying with him for the cold weather. She was fond of entertaining, so he was in a better position to see more of people he liked than most young officers living in the mess. He was good-looking, amusing, around the same age as Violet and, as she noted thankfully, was ‘the very antithesis of the men I had known in the past’ – her husband had had a wide circle of intelligent, witty and almost invariably homosexual friends, to whom Podge, with his mother making a relaxed home for him, seemed quite the opposite. ‘It was all so normal and conventional as to draw me like a magnet,’ said Violet. ‘And so I fell in love – chiefly with normality, I now think.’

  They got engaged at a dance given by the Deccan Horse. ‘I don’t think my aunt was very pleased, as she thought I could have done much better and married into the British Cavalry – as I could have, had I wanted. There was nothing she could do and there was no real objection to the engagement except my fiancé’s youth and the fact that he was not yet a captain. Men in the Indian Cavalry were not supposed to marry as subalterns. However his colonel was quite amenable, if we waited a year before we got married, so that was all settled.’

  Violet’s engagement meant that her mother, a woman to whom the subtle gradations of status meant much, had to balance the desired result – remarriage – against the fact that her daughter’s fiancé was in a less desirable regiment. ‘My mother was quite pleased though not as ecstatic as she might have been,’ recorded Violet. ‘She thought I might have done better than a young officer in an Indian cavalry regiment but I suppose my aunt reported favourably – and my mother was anxious that I should get married as it was embarrassing for her to have to explain why I was still Miss Hanson.’

  Violet returned home as her fiancé was not due for leave that year – officers serving in the Indian Army had six months’ home leave every three or four years – and spent the English summer staying with a cousin and getting her trousseau together. She returned to India in September 1924, was met by her Podge when she landed in Bombay and married the same day in Bombay Cathedral.*

  Dorothy Hughes had been an unofficial member of the Fishing Fleet when she accompanied her older sister Dulcie to India. Dulcie, a young woman of difficult character, had been sent out specifically to look for a husband; Dorothy herself, at twenty, was not considered seriously in need of one at that time. She was, however, perfectly clear that marriage was her eventual goal (she later brought up her own daughters with the words: ‘If you are unfortunate enough to be born clever, for heaven’s sake, be clever enough to hide it.’)

  Soon after her return from India to the family home in Baker Street Dorothy was asked to a dinner party. ‘Please come,’ begged the friend who invited her. ‘I’ve got a frightfully difficult man to cope with. You’ve been out to India and he lives in India – he’s in the Indian Civil Service – and we’re desperate to find someone to keep him amused for the evening.’ Dorothy, with her beautiful figure, blonde hair, blue eyes and easy, lively manner, seemed just the girl to entertain someone clever, shy and reserved.

  This was Charles Ormerod, on record in Chapter Five as saying of his life in India, ‘The people here who have a better life are the ones who are married. So when my next leave comes up I’m going to go back to England with the idea of getting a wife.’ And when, in 1935, aged thirty, he had both passed the age barrier and had six months’ leave, home he came with that goal in mind. Finding Dorothy placed next to him at dinner gave him immediate hope: he found this pretty young woman fascinating – but she found him rather a bore. So when at the end of the evening he asked her: ‘May I have your telephone number?’ she replied rudely, ‘Look it up in the telephone directory if you’re so keen.’

  For a man accustomed to dealing with anything from a runaway horse to a crowd of angry villagers, ringing up a reluctant young woman was not difficult. He was anxious to give her an evening that she would enjoy, without the pressure of a one-to-one conversation, so arranged a party at Quaglino’s, a well-known West End restaurant. It was not an unqualified success. The other guests, prepared to make the most of an evening with a generous host, had no hesitation in drinking the champagne and eating the caviar offered, but Dorothy, always conscious of people spending too much money on her, looked at the prices and was horrified, so picked the cheapest thing on the menu, an omelette. Nor did she realise he had asked the others purely for her benefit.

  Shortly afterwards, a benign fate stepped in. Dorothy developed chickenpox and as she lay first ill and then convalescing at home splendid hampers began arriving from Fortnum & Mason. Her mother looked at them thoughtfully and said: ‘This seems quite promising.’ When she met Charles his northern roots – in those class-conscious days – told against him. All the same, their friendship developed and Charles, aware that this was his chance to realise his dream and by now deeply in love with Dorothy, pursued her until she agreed to marry him.

  The wedding, in July 1936, proved to be the start of a highly successful marriage. Dorothy took to life in India at once. Charles was now a Deputy Commissioner and because his immediate superior, the Commissioner, had no wife, Dorothy became First Lady of their province at the age of twenty- two. For her this was no problem: she had all the social graces, could entertain well, was artistic, and good at bridge and tennis. Her outgoing personality and the friendliness that had originally captivated the quieter Charles was an invaluable counterbalance to his more subdued and less socially adept persona. Much of their time was spent in Delhi, whence Charles would be sent out to neighbouring areas; Dorothy would accompany him, to help the village women with hygiene and medical care.

  Perhaps the strangest sto
ry was that of Rowan Mary McLeish, who knew her future husband for a mere fortnight, became engaged to him over the telephone after six years apart, and finally met him again a week before their wedding.

  Mary (‘I was called Mary, except at school, where there were too many Marys’) was born in April 1921. Her father worked in Burma, in the trading firm started by her grandfather, and she and her brother had one of the more unhappy Raj childhoods. As she told me: ‘I used not to see my father for five years at a time, after which he would come back for a year. It was really very upsetting. My parents were away most of my childhood. We were at school on Hayling Island and we lived at the school all year except for a holiday in the summer when my mother came back and I and she and my brother would meet. You can imagine how we looked forward to it. After this one lovely holiday she would go back again. For us it was devastating being left like that. My parents were almost strangers.’

  One day, on one of her visits to England, Mary’s mother, the prolific romantic novelist Dorothy Black,* asked her daughter if she would like to come out to India to stay with some friends. Mary jumped at the chance and they set off from Tilbury in the autumn of 1937. ‘I remember we changed for dinner every night – I had to take out about six evening dresses. I was just seventeen and I’d very much had a boarding school upbringing so it was my first experience of meeting young men. There were three very nice ones on board so I had a lovely voyage, dancing every night.’

  After a stop-off in Colombo, they landed in Bombay and set off for Madras by train, there to be met by a military car and taken to the cantonment where the King’s Own Royal Regiment was stationed. Their host was the commanding officer. ‘The following night Nigel came to dinner. I can see him now, leaping up the stairs – he was rather agile, with reddish hair, a good bit taller than me. He was twenty-two, and had gone out with his battalion. We clicked at once. He said: “Will you come sailing with me?”

  ‘I’d never really done much but I said I would love to. It was a small sailing boat with one little cabin. We had a lovely time and I found I liked sailing very much. I saw him almost every day during the fortnight we spent there. At the end of the fortnight my mother and I went up to Ootacamund and I had to say goodbye to him, which made me very sad. All the time we were in Ootacamund I was wishing I could be with him in Madras.’

  Nigel St George Gribbon, born in London in February 1917 during a First World War zeppelin raid, was educated at Rugby and Sandhurst and commissioned into his father’s old regiment in 1937. From the point of view of Mary’s mother, and everyone else in that society including Nigel himself, as a twenty-year-old Lieutenant he was far too young to marry.

  Soon after Mary returned to England she was sent to Paris to improve her French. ‘When war seemed a certainty the German girls at the school all went and shut themselves in their bedrooms. I was the only English girl there. I was told to go immediately to Calais and get on the first boat I could.’ Back in England, Mary joined the WAAF as an aircraftwoman second class, gaining a commission after five months. ‘I worked in radar, where we were constantly busy with raids, either coming in or going out.’ All the time, she and Nigel were writing to each other, although there was no question of even an ‘understanding’.

  One day, when she was at home on leave staying with her mother, the telephone rang. ‘Will you marry me?’ said Nigel’s voice, last heard six years earlier. He was telephoning from India. She was, she recalls, completely taken aback – but not enough to prevent her answering ‘Certainly I will.’ Still in the first flush of astonishment, she turned to her mother and asked: ‘Shall I get engaged?’ ‘Yes, darling,’ replied her mother. ‘After all, it won’t tie you down.’

  ‘When I had said “yes”, I didn’t feel “Oh, what have I done?” I just felt, “How wonderful!” I knew I’d done the right thing. You see, nobody else had ever made a real dent on my heart. Partly one was so busy in the war one didn’t have a real social life, and being on this very mixed radar station, although I got on with everyone very well, there was nobody tempting there.’

  Nigel was not able to return to England for another four months, spending part of the voyage stuck in the Mediterranean for a while because the escorting destroyers ran out of fuel (‘everyone sat there with their life jackets on wondering if the Germans would come in for the kill’).

  ‘We met in London. I was very nervous. Would I remember him properly after six years? But there he was, sitting there, looking just as he always had. I suppose I had changed quite a lot in the intervening years but somehow it hadn’t affected us.

  ‘He had one week’s leave, during which we got married. I wore a white wedding dress – I’d been presented before the war and we added sleeves to my presentation dress. He was in uniform. Nigel came down to near my station for the last few days of his leave and we stayed at a grotty b and b. I had to go back on my three watches in the WAAF – eight hours on then eight hours off. So often I would have to get up in the middle of the night and leave him. When I’d thought of marriage before, this wasn’t quite how I’d pictured it.’

  16

  Daughter of the Raj

  Bethea Field

  Fishing Fleet girls had to be ready to expect anything – especially in the wilder parts of India.

  A girl who had come out to join her family, rather than one fresh from a London flat or house in the country, might be less taken aback by unexpected happenings since many fathers, especially in Government service, found themselves posted to remote and sometimes dangerous areas. As a child brought up in India such a little girl would become used to having a sandwich snatched out of her hands by a kite or being told ‘don’t go in the long grass – there may be snakes!’. In some parts, she might have seen one of her father’s dogs taken by a leopard, or been tugged out of the way of a pi-dog frothing at the mouth with rabies.

  When a family had been in India for generations, anything from early deaths and long journeys by bullock cart to glittering dinners in the fabulous palace of a friendly rajah became part of family history. Rather than the steady, often predictable path through the years at home, hardship, privation, adventure, luxury and exoticism were interwoven into the fabric of family life. In Bethea Field’s case, there were many of these elements, plus camel-riding out to dinner in evening dress and a bullet-spattering attack by rebels.

  Bethea’s journal, which records them all, is notable not only for her keenly observant eye for detail but also for its unusual frankness. She makes no bones about her longing (this is not too strong a word) to meet young men and the fact that although firmly bound by the rules of convention, she has a powerful libido (‘I was highly sexed’). She regarded India as home: her family, both before she was born and for subsequent generations, lived and worked there.

  Her grandfather, William Field, had joined the East India Company as a cadet in 1812. His father, in the early days of the nineteenth century, had owned a furniture shop in Windsor patronised by Queen Charlotte, who became interested in the Field family. When William Field died suddenly, the Queen exercised her influence to help his widow and children, obtaining a cadetship to the East India Company for Mrs Field’s son George. He left aged twelve, and his mother never saw him again.

  George, who worked hard for John Company (as the East India Company was then known throughout India), also became one of the heroes of Arrah House, the ‘Small House’ of the Indian Mutiny, which sheltered nearby British and loyal Indian troops when the Mutiny broke out. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company’s army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon spread, largely in the upper Gangetic plain and Central India. The sepoys were a combination of Hindu and Muslim soldiers, with over 200,000 Indians in the army, compared to about 50,000 British. The forces were divided into three presidency armies: the Bombay, the Madras and the Bengal.

  Resentment had built up slowly, over a mixture of causes, from changes in terms of professional service, denial of
pensions to retired sepoys, differences in pay between the three armies, to grievances over the slowness of promotions, based on seniority – many Indian officers did not reach commissioned rank until they were too old to be effective. The final spark was provided by the pre-greased cartridges supplied as ammunition for the new 1853 Enfield Rifle. To load the rifle, sepoys had to bite the cartridge open to release the powder. The grease used on these cartridges contained tallow, which if derived from pork would be offensive to Muslims, and if derived from beef would be offensive to Hindus. At least one British official pointed out, fruitlessly, the difficulties this would cause.

  Unrest arose gradually throughout April and May 1857, spreading until it became a widespread revolt. On 25 July, rebellion erupted in the garrisons of Dinapur (in Bihar, north-east India). The rebels quickly moved towards Arrah and all European residents took refuge at the house of Vicars Boyle, the District Railway Engineer, together with fifty loyal sepoys. Luckily it was not only a dwelling but a mini-fort, having been an outpost in the very early days of the Company. There was a courtyard surrounded by quite thick walls, a well and stabling, stocked by one of their number with goats and grain in readiness for a siege; and a clear area of about 200 yards all round it, which proved to be their salvation.

  They had small arms and some ammunition. George, a good shot, spent the daylight hours on the walls picking off any mutineers who might emerge from the woods. Apart from the fear that supplies would not last out, one of the worst moments was when the villagers, egged on by the mutineers, built a huge bonfire and threw on it at as many red chillies* as they could spare. The acrid fumes blowing across the open space and into the little stronghold blinded and choked the men inside; but the wind suddenly changed direction and it was the enemy who had to flee.