The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  Girls who married a man living or working in one of the big cities had a much more social time of it. In Calcutta were the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, and Tollygunge and Jodhpur Clubs. ‘Tolly was the queen of clubs having almost all we needed – golf, tennis, swimming and a race course, all extra to the usual bars and dining facilities, not to mention teas. The latter were usually served on the lawns of the clubhouse until after dark when the mosquitoes drove one in,’ wrote Marian Atkins in 1931.

  ‘The clubs were expensive – I’ve only so far mentioned the mixed social ones – no Indians, more of that later. There were also the United Service Club and the Bengal Club, male membership only with usually an area for the ladies and a lecture room for outsiders. The Calcutta Club was rather similar to the “Slap and Tickle” but with larger grounds and mixed membership – Indians and Europeans but no dancing. Nearly all the ICS men, including judges, belonged and the richer Indians. Father wanted to belong but couldn’t afford the extra – the Slap and Jodhpur did us proud but when I went out a second time we became “millionaire” members of Tolly. This meant no waiting – [normally] seven years at Tolly, four at the Jodhpur – and probably no entrance fee but a very high annual fee. For Mother’s sake he had to join the Slap, and Jodhpur for the tennis and social side.

  ‘The Saturday Club had a few dances in the hot weather, on Saturday nights, but while I was out a special jazz band was engaged for the cold weather and then we had tea dances and evening dances every day bar Sunday and sometimes special ones on certain nights. Of these I remember the Vingt-et-un, a ball given by the twenty-one richest bachelors as a thank-you to their many hostesses for much entertainment of lonely men. When a man married he resigned and was replaced as a member. It was a fancy dress ball, always given early in the season to catch the young girls out for the cold weather.’

  For all but the last few years of its duration the Raj was a patriarchy, as were the indigenous cultures over which it held sway. At the beginning of its history, this merely reflected the Victorian pattern of male-dominated society in exaggerated form; Great Britain may have had a Queen but a female Viceroy to represent her would have been unthinkable. Nor were the struggles of the Suffragettes in any way meaningfully represented in the subcontinent. The Raj was run solely by men. Even as a paterfamilias a man’s authority tended to be greater than in Britain since – with men of thirty securing youthful Fishing Fleet brides – he was almost always considerably older than his wife.

  Thus one aspect of marriage in the Raj was that a woman tended to be subsumed into her husband’s professions or interests more than was ever likely at home; her social position alone depended on his ranking and seniority in his profession. In British India there was no place for the brilliant hostess who, through advantageous friendships with the powerful, advanced her husband’s career, such as Lady Londonderry and her amitié amoureuse with the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – unless perhaps such a hostess happened to be married to the Viceroy.

  While a wife who was difficult or the cause of scandal might damage her husband’s prospects, one who was clever or charming did not have a similar positive weight, but would simply be appreciated for herself. The Raj was even more of a male-dominated society than Britain itself: not only was its ratio of men to women far higher, but it functioned through an all-male hierarchy, a hierarchy in which sport and energetic games, tailored largely to the male physique, played a far greater part than they did at home. And with marriage out of the question for most young men, hard, relentless exercise was the approved way to sublimate sex.

  Not that they would have got very far with the girls of the Fishing Fleet if they had preferred seduction to sport. With rare exceptions, the young unmarried girl of that era was chaste. An illegitimate baby would ruin her chances of a good marriage – often of any marriage – while scandal attached to her name would give her the reputation of ‘damaged goods’ and even if she had wanted to be a good-time girl she would not have known where to go for contraception. She was also sexually ignorant: sex was a subject simply not talked about, even between mother and daughter.*

  When Magda McDowell, aged twenty-three, who had become engaged to her future husband Ralph Hammersley-Smith, whom she had met a few months earlier, her ignorance was total. As she sat in her bedroom on the day of her wedding waiting for her wedding dress to be brought in, her brother-in-law, to whom she was devoted, came hurrying into her room. ‘He said to me: “Whatever Ralph may do tonight, remember it’s all right.” And that was all the preparation I had for married life. I wondered what on earth he could mean!’

  With ‘consorting with natives’ frowned upon, the ethos from the top down was that young men should sublimate their sexual urges in hard exercise and sport. Indeed sport, it is fair to say, was almost a religion; for Army officers, this was largely because it was regarded as a physical and mental preparation for war – cavalry commanders believed that the best way to learn the skills of the cavalry charge was in the hunting field, while pigsticking taught accuracy with a lance. Jackal was hunted on the North-West Frontier, unmarried officers went on shooting and fishing leave. Any Fishing Fleet girl who married one had to realise that sport was an integral part of the marriage.

  Above all there was polo, the game that originated in India and was taken up by the British in the earliest years of the Raj. In, some stations there were chukkas every day, with matches, tournaments and intense rivalry – being one of the four-man regimental polo team was every young officer’s dream. ‘The same qualities which bring a man to the front at polo are required by anyone who aspires to lead men,’ claimed a Lancer colonel in a 1922 polo handbook.* An ability to ride was virtually essential: for many young ICS, men it was the only way to get about. The early Viceroys rode miles; Lord Northbrook once rode fifty-two miles in one day when in Simla. Women rode, played croquet – in the early days archery was popular – tennis, bicycle polo and, in the hills, golf.

  As the historian Margaret Macmillan points out: ‘In their copious memoirs, with a few exceptions, the men say far more about favourite horses and dogs than about their wives.’ General Greaves, recounting a life of shooting, fishing, horses and dogs, mentioned his wife only once. ‘Ranee [his dog] took to her at once, I am glad to say, so there were no complications.’ What, one wonders, would have happened had Ranee growled?

  For any Fishing Fleet bride of the early twentieth century, help was at hand in a small volume entitled The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, which detailed everything from the best layout for a kitchen, the care and management of horses, poultry and dogs, recipes, necessities for store cupboards and medicine chest to the duties of the various servants. It was, in fact, a pocket bible for the new memsahib, even giving advice on what to wear.

  ‘The great secret of coolness and comfort lies in wearing one well-fitting, absorbent undergarment and one only. For this purpose nothing can be better than a combination garment of silk or cellular flannel with the lower part made loose and roomy, without any knickerbockers frills and furbelows. With this, a pair of open-net stays, on to the lower edge of which a fine white petticoat buttons, and a spun-silk jersey bodice as a stay protector, and a lady will find the discomforts of clothing in a temperature over 98 reduced to the minimum compatible with European ideas . . . for hot-weather nightgowns nothing is pleasanter to wear than fine nuns-veiling . . . it is always advisable to buy a cheap quality of stockings as the colour goes in the strong heat . . . at least four pairs of stays (if worn) should be taken, as in hot weather they get sodden and require drying and airing.’ Mercifully for the well-dressed memsahib, a few years after this book was written, corsets went out for good.

  Maintaining figure, complexion and hair was often difficult in India before the days of SPF50 and air conditioning. ‘This is an appalling place for skins and I have suffered tortures with wind, it bums and dries up and your lips get chapped until you could scream with pain. I am brick dust colour yet always wear a veil and take all sorts of
care,’ wrote the appearance-conscious Ruby Madden.

  There was also the dragging-down effect of constant illnesses and the general strain of a difficult climate. ‘I don’t think that people at home realise that the majority of people out there were often half ill, they were either sort of recovering from a burst of fever or about to have one,’ said Honor Penrose, who lived for some time in Benares and later in Agra. ‘They were very lethargic – when you have been out there two or three years you have to be lethargic if you’re going to make a go of it.’

  Sometimes boredom was a contributory factor to this apathy, if a day seems to last forever because there is so little to do, there is no point in rushing through it. At Sauga,* Violet Hanson enjoyed the early mornings and the evenings but found the days tedious. ‘The climate was fairly hot during the daytime so we got up early. The Regimental Parade was about 7.00 a.m., and at that time I went for a ride. I rode side-saddle, of course (most women did at that time) – 1925. I loved riding and soon got quite good and practised jumping. After breakfast, my husband would go back to his duties and I was left to supervise the household, which was a bit strange at first, by checking the cleanliness of the cook house and compound and passing the daily accounts.

  ‘I found the morning very long and boring, as it was too hot to go out and there weren’t many women around. There was no one to talk to and very few books to read. My husband came home for lunch and after that there would be the afternoon siesta.

  ‘Every evening we would either ride out or, if my husband was playing polo, I would go down to the polo ground and join the other ladies and non-players to watch the game. After this was the inevitable visit to the club, the social centre of all Anglo-Indian life, where everyone gathered each evening. This was where I drank the whisky that I had learned to do before in Secunderabad but I got more used to it at Sauga. Water was undrinkable unless it was boiled and even then it tasted terrible.’

  Worst of all were what was known as the ‘Sprees’. ‘In the autumn the tea was pruned and manufacturing stopped,’ wrote Iris Macfarlane, who married a tea planter. ‘So there was a lot of free time for managers and their assistants, and this was filled with Sprees. These were day-long celebrations arranged by each club in turn, and were all exactly the same. The same teams played each other at polo, trestle tables supported the same salads, chicken and ham, souffles and trifles, our cooks sweated over similar cakes for tea and wrote over them in green icing messages like Happy Xmas, Heep Heep Hurrah, Best Luck Sirs. In the evening the club was converted, with palm fronds and crepe paper, into whatever the club committee had decided was to be the motif that year. It was really a waste of time, since everyone was exhaustedly drunk within the hour. A really successful Spree was one where the potted palms were used as goal posts and someone lost his trousers in a scrum-down.’

  Yet at the same time India fascinated Iris and she found it difficult to shake off its spell. ‘This country . . . bored me and made me ill, but which also enchanted me with its moonflowers and enormous arcs of parrots flying down from the hills at dawn. With its smell of smoke and dust and frying gram and marigolds, with its beautiful people I never got to know . . . ’.

  What India gave to Europeans in unparalleled form was its brilliant, exotic beauty, from enormous moons, fireflies, ancient buildings, temples, graceful, smooth-skinned people to – Iris again – ‘the gleam and gush of the south-west monsoon, mimosa and poinsettias and butterflies the size of birds, peppermint green and primrose yellow’.

  18

  ‘No one will want to marry me now!’

  Perils

  In the India of the Raj sudden death was a close neighbour. You could sit next to someone apparently healthy at dinner and hear the next day that he or she had died. Illness struck like lightning, often without warning, and in any social circle; and in that time before antibiotics it was often lethal. Charlotte Canning, the wife of the first Viceroy, who had arrived in India a fit and healthy woman, died in her husband’s arms soon after contracting malaria, aged only forty-four.

  Desirée Hart, Personal Assistant to the Resident of Kashmir, stationed in Sialkot for the cold weather, woke up one morning to find herself so ill that she could not lift her head from the pillow to sip her early morning tea. The previous night, with a severe headache, she had acted as hostess to her boss whose wife was ill, forcing herself into the role. ‘Never had I been so popular, never so good at stimulating the conversation and making the party “go”.’ When the doctor came he took her temperature, looked at the thermometer in disbelief, then ordered an ambulance straightaway. She was so ill that she could hardly breathe or swallow sips of cooling drinks; her thick shoulder-length golden hair was cut off for the sake of coolness and she was prayed for on church parade.

  Desirée was one of the lucky ones. Suddenly the fever broke, sweat poured from her, sponged away by nurses, and she fell into a deep, lengthy sleep, waking to find herself limp but hungry. She had been struck down overnight by a combination of scarlet fever and diphtheria, on top of which she had developed jaundice. Her illness had left her with hair fallen out and turned a dull mouse colour. ‘As for my face,’ she later wrote, ‘sunken eyes with dark shadows and hollow cheeks in a skin left yellow from jaundice and peeling from the scarlet fever. Oh how awful I look!’ she wailed. ‘No one will want to marry me now!’

  She was wrong. During her convalescence the Resident’s brother-in-law, Stuart Battye, who had broken his leg playing polo, arrived on crutches to stay at the Residency while his leg mended. Together they sat in the garden under an old banyan tree, together they read the papers, played cracked old records on Stuart’s portable gramophone, together they were taken for stately drives for an hour every afternoon. In June that year Stuart turned up at the Residency in Srinagar on three weeks’ fishing leave. Very early one morning he took Desiree fishing, proposing to her in the car en route to the bank of the river.

  When she enquired why he had not asked her to marry him when they were convalescing together instead of at 5.30 a.m. before fishing, he told her that it had all been carefully planned. ‘You were in no state to know your own mind then. It would not have been fair. As to this morning, if you’d said “yes”, fine. If you’d said “no” I’d still have had a whole day’s fishing to take my mind off it.’ He was, she told him happily, impossible.

  To the Fishing Fleet girls, merrily dancing the night away at a Government House ball or in the clubhouse of a British cantonment, the idea of life-threatening illnesses striking out of the blue or other disasters might have seemed at best unlikely, at worst far-fetched. And for most, this was perfectly true. Marriage or a visit to someone who lived up country, however, might show a different picture. There were snakes, floods, riots, houses collapsing after the foundations had been eaten away by white ants, occasional panthers in the garden, rabies, earthquakes, landslides and inexplicable fevers.

  ‘I had not dreamed of danger and thought nothing about the journey through the jungle,’ records the journal of Henry Cook, civil servant in Company days, who recounts not only the death of his own wife and child but also of an early Fishing Fleet girl. ‘But about 12 days later one child was struck down with the jungle fever, then a second and a third. The nurse followed next and the infant had to be weaned suddenly; then it sickened and in a short time, died. My poor wife was the next victim, and after a few weeks she also succumbed to the disease. Everyone who had performed that night journey took fever. I lost an infant and my dear wife. A young lady, Miss Searle, had accompanied my wife and was staying with us . . . Her kindness and attention were beyond praise but, alas, she also was stricken down and died.’

  ‘Vyner and a Royal Fusilier buried this evening,’ wrote Violet Jacob on 2 August 1897. ‘I have heard enough of the Dead March lately, for they always strike up as they pass this house, the cemetery being not far off.’ A fortnight later her diary records: ‘We move in on Friday. Two funerals today; thank heaven I shall not see and hear them in the new
place. This season of the year is dreadful in that way.’ Three weeks later, on 6 September: ‘Poor Cordray died at four this morning, quite young and leaving a young wife . . . Things are not very cheerful in the hospital but the unhealthy season ought to be over soon now . . .’.

  Violet put down most of the numerous but isolated deaths around her to enteric fever. Much worse, because of the speed with which it spread, was cholera; although eradicated in Britain by the twentieth century, it was endemic in India during the whole of the Raj (and after it). Almost more terrifying than its deadliness was the speed with which it struck; often it was only a few hours from the onset of the first symptoms to death. In Agra cemetery there is a monument to the memory of 146 men of the York and Lancaster Regiment who died within forty-eight hours of the appearance of cholera. During the First World War, in the state of Jodhpur cholera was so widespread that even the monkeys fell off the trees dying. Children were particularly vulnerable: all over India there are pathetic gravestones indicating a child’s death – sometimes several from the same family at once. Burial had to be immediate, certainly within twelve hours, because of the climate.

  Cholera had originated in India, spreading from the Ganges delta across the world. Yet unlike in England, in India cholera was a disease of the rural poor rather than the urban slum. In its home country its virulence was greatly increased when there had been a famine – rather as the Black Death in England struck hardest against those whose immunity had been weakened through hunger caused by poor harvests. It is acutely infectious, with polluted water one of the main sources, so spreads quickly through tightly packed communities such as the barracks of British soldiers in India (in the 1880s the death rate among the families of British soldiers in India was three times that in Britain).