The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  If you did not want to wait weeks for photographs to be returned from Srinagar, noted Leila, you took your own printing and development kit. Gilgit was 200 miles from Bandipur, where the motor road from Srinagar ended.

  On the journey, the snow glare and wind burned their faces so badly that they blistered. Leila’s was in such a state that she had to tie on cotton wool and handkerchiefs to cover it when she went out for a walk the next day.

  Once in Gilgit, the Lloyds had to be almost entirely self-sufficient. They were 400 miles from the nearest railway station, there were no European shops and anything ordered might take several months to arrive. They kept a cow, made their own butter and cream, and also had hens and sheep, in addition to ducks and geese, all of which had been brought on the long journey to Gilgit. Local fruit, mainly cherries, strawberries and apricots, was delicious and plentiful and they made jam and crystallized or tinned other fruits, taking the tins to the blacksmith to be soldered. Along with the rest of the livestock, they had luckily brought two cats as there were countless rats, appallingly bold – they even ate the fruit in the dining room and chewed up a string of Lucy’s beads, which had been put out of the way on the top of a high cupboard.

  Remote as it was, there were a number of amusements: riding amid wonderful scenery, tennis that went on all winter and polo matches for Cassels’s soldiers. This was not polo as played in cavalry stations all over India, but more a form of non-lethal inter-tribal warfare. The field was a strip of not very even turf approximately twenty-five yards wide and one hundred and twenty-five yards long (village fields were usually much smaller). There were eight instead of four men a side, riding very small but fast and handy ponies and wielding locally made polo sticks that were always breaking. Each chukka lasted half an hour rather than the usual seven minutes and the sides played all out, encouraged by the crowd, who sat round the field on a low mud wall shouting advice.

  Also squatting on the wall was the band, keeping up its noisy performance all the time, increasing in volume whenever a goal was scored. The player who had scored it, holding the ball in the same hand as his polo stick, would fling it high in the air, hitting it before it reached the ground – often scoring another goal. Another strange aspect of this polo was the rule that allowed a player to catch the ball at any time and try to ride through the goal. If he did this he was immediately set upon by all the other side who tried to snatch the ball from him.

  Tournaments carried even more risk. ‘There were no chukkas,’ recorded Leila. ‘A game went on for one hour or until one side had scored nine goals. In the final, two of the teams (Hunza and Nagar) were hereditary enemies, and a free fight broke out, while the rival bands tried to drown each other out.’

  When Rosemary and Alexander Redpath were sent to Gilgit in 1939 they travelled from the Gurez valley over the Burzil Pass (13,780 feet). At the highest point of the pass stood a wooden hut perched on stilts forty feet high – an indication of the depth of snow in winter – used by mail runners, who could only negotiate the pass on a clear night when the surface snow was frozen hard enough to support their weight.

  Self-sufficiency was still the order of the day and all cooking was still done on wood from the nearby forests; regulating the heat was an art in itself. Their cook baked by placing a tin on top of the embers to produce wonderful cakes and pastry. Preserving tins for the abundant summer fruit were made in the bazaar from kerosene oil tins, filled with fruit and syrup and a lid with a small hole in it was soldered on; the tins were then placed in a fish kettle of boiling water and kept at the correct temperature for a specified time and finally a small disc was clapped over the hole in the lid and soldered on.

  Bread was of course home-made, the cook using yeast from packets of dried hops. In this Hindu state beef was not available but, wrote Rosemary: ‘The butcher came round our houses with a freshly killed carcase and we bought what we wanted from him – eating the offal first and letting the bigger joints hang for a day or two. We also ate chickens and, in the winter, game like duck which we shot ourselves. In the season we had trout from the Kurgah. We also had well-stocked vegetable gardens on which we relied. We entertained each other frequently, usually sitting and talking till all hours after dinner.’

  Gilgit polo had scarcely changed by the time the Redpaths arrived, although a three-foot stone wall had replaced the original mud one. ‘When I first watched this violent game, in which I knew I would soon have to participate,’ wrote Alexander later, ‘I experienced a twinge of apprehension. There were no recognisable rules. You could reach across the front of your opponent’s pony to play the ball – if by doing so you brought the pony and its rider down, they were just unlucky. You could knock your opponent’s stick out of his hand in any way practicable and if his head got in the way it was just too bad.

  ‘Your opponent could grab your pony’s reins and wrestle with you while the rest of his team could seize your team’s bridles and so prevent any attempt at passing the ball. You could cross immediately in front of your opponent if you thought it worth bringing him and probably yourself down in order to prevent a goal being scored against you.

  ‘When a player scored a goal he was given the ball; he then tied his reins in a knot and, holding them and the ball in his left hand, set off at a gallop down the middle of the field with his team in echelon behind him – spectators roaring, bands playing furiously – and when about to reach the halfway mark, threw the ball forward and hit it full-toss towards his opponents’ goal.’

  For his debut in this free-for-all Alexander wore a topi with a strong chinstrap, thick breeches and, to protect his shins, puttees over five-week-old folded copies of The Times. ‘Thus protected I escaped many bruises and was only brought down twice and only once sustained a painful injury – a wild swipe by an opponent missed the ball but hit my left hand, smashing two bones. It was noticeable that the local players avoided involving “the sahibs” in anything really dangerous; and I only saw one man killed during a game.’

  The Redpaths, who lived in Gilgit for three years, found the disadvantages – isolation, long delays in getting home news, no electricity, restriction of supplies – more than offset by the advantages. ‘We looked across over the Gilgit valley to a continuous wall of rock some three miles away which changed colour with every hour of the day and variation of light,’ recorded Rosemary. ‘I never tired of looking at it. I do remember however longing to see the sun rise or set, for the valley must have been roughly east-west, with high mountains to the south blocking out the sun in winter – on the shortest days we only had an hour or two of sunshine.’

  For Alexander Redpath the joys were: ‘no cars, lorries or trains, the exhilaration of being among mountains, trekking and riding everywhere, dealing with people one could not help liking and an equable climate. Winters were cold with occasional snowfalls in Gilgit itself, spring was a delight and so were summers except for a couple of months when the temperatures reached 100°F. During that period our families moved to two log cabins in a Swiss-like valley called Naltar at a height of about 10,000 feet. For both of us Gilgit was a unique experience.’

  In the jungle, too, there were entertainments, notably the Kadir Cup,* desired by every regiment and all the more sporting members of the ICS. It was, basically, an annual hog-hunting competition held in the Kadir jungle near Meerut. Cavalry officers trained for it whenever they could. ‘Lucknow was a paradise for cavalry officers,’ wrote Douglas Gray, who won the Cup as a subaltern in 1932. ‘It had four polo grounds, a racecourse and some good shooting nearby.

  ‘But best of all, the surrounding country provided the finest horse activity in India which was hoghunting, or pigsticking, as it was more commonly called. This involved the finding, hunting and killing of wild boars with a lance called a hog-spear. Falls were frequent, and accidents, though inevitable, were accepted as part of the thrill which comes with pursuits involving some danger.’

  The Kadir Cup was held over three days and involved heats of thr
ee or four riders, each attempting to be the first to show the blood of a boar, driven towards them by beaters, on their spear. As these wild pigs were extremely fast – as well as fierce – jinking and turning often under the horse’s belly, it was not a sport for the faint-hearted. ‘There were about 50 elephants and 500 beaters driving across the riverine country which was the haunt of wild pigs, occasional panthers and even a tiger (once seen during a pigsticking heat).’

  When Gray competed there was a record entry of 120 horses, almost all ridden by cavalry officers from British and Indian regiments. Riders drew for places in heats of four, taking their turns on the line – left, central and right, each with an umpire carrying a red flag. There were about 300 beaters on foot and, behind them, some twenty elephants used as moving grandstands for spectators; women who watched sat in howdahs on these elephants.

  In March 1937 one of these spectators was Lord Baden-Powell, who had himself won the Cup in 1883 and wrote to a friend to describe the final day. ‘We spent from 9 a.m. to sunset out on a vast yellow grass plain – the whole day under blazing hot sun, wobbling along on elephants with the excitement of watching the competitors racing after pig and, in one case, hunting and killing a panther.’

  The rules were simple. As a rideable boar got up, the nearest umpire followed with his heat and, shouting ‘Do you all see him? NOW RIDE’, dropped his flag and away they galloped, competing for first spear; this would advance the winner to the next round. Heat followed heat over the next three days until the final was reached.

  ‘That night,’ wrote Gray of the day he won, ‘in the large tented camp under the mango trees, and with all the elephants lined up as a background in the light of the bonfires, a last-day party was held and as the lucky rider, I was obliged to attempt the traditional Hog-hunter’s song:

  ‘Over the valley, and over the level

  Through the rough jungle now go like the devil

  Here’s a nullah in front, but a boar as well.

  So sit down in your saddle and ride like hell!’

  22

  ‘Cheerio, old girl’

  Sheila Hingston

  Families that lived and worked in the Raj for generations – rather than spending a greater or lesser amount of time there – almost unconsciously developed certain patterns of behaviour. Although they clung to the attitudes and customs of home, sometimes more tenaciously than those who actually lived in England, the blazing suns and torrential rains, perils and sudden deaths, the beauty, stoicism and sheer vastness of their adopted land seeped into their psyches. To stay English, in a land so alien to English culture, required the cultivation of some of the most English of virtues.

  In the women, this bred a particular kind of fortitude. Not making a fuss was high on the list, as was ‘getting on with it’, whether this be packing up a home for the umpteenth time to move to somewhere a thousand miles hence, dealing with unexpected illness when floods had swept away the only road along which the distant doctor could drive or ride or coping with the monotony of life in a remote outpost. It was not usually the sudden crisis that sapped the spirit – most women rose admirably to the challenge – but the prospect of days spent doing virtually nothing that stretched endlessly ahead.

  Most crucial of all, though, was something that Raj daughters had themselves suffered from and that they accepted would continue: the sending home of their children somewhere between the ages of five and ten for an English education, in the knowledge that it might be years before they saw them again. It posed an agonising dilemma that few could solve: whether to abandon the husband who needed them, to live in England, probably on very little money, so that they could be with the children in the school holidays, or to stay with the husband they loved and leave their children with others. In some families, boys and their Fishing Fleet sisters had spent childhoods that ranged from happy – usually with aunts and cousins – to wretchedly lonely with strangers. Yet such was the pull of India, especially with a family out there, that it seemed only natural to return to the land of their birth and, in their turn, take up this inheritance.

  Sheila Hingston was one of these. She came from a family that had spent three generations in India. Her grandfather, Clayton William James Hingston, was born in Antigua in 1849; his mother’s family owned a sugar plantation and his grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel James Hingston, briefly the Governor of the Gold Coast, died in 1857.

  He was brought up in Antigua by an aunt and her husband, a judge, and sent to England to be educated. His career was always going to be the Army, so he was sent to Wellington College and then to Sandhurst. He went out to India with the 62nd Regiment of Foot, Wiltshire, arriving in February 1870, and was based in Lucknow. He transferred to the 10th Bengal Native Infantry and in 1874, aged twenty-five, he married a Fishing Fleet girl, twenty-two-year-old Mary Clementina Gray, who was visiting her eldest brother, the Chaplain of Jabalpur. The couple were stationed at Barrackpur for six years, during which time Clayton Alexander Francis Hingston was born, in May 1877.

  Clayton Hingston was, in the usual fashion, sent home to be educated, staying in England another five years after he had left school to take a degree and be trained as a doctor and surgeon at the Medical School of the Middlesex Hospital, where he passed the College of Surgeons and College of Physicians joint examination. After this he returned to India, joining the 16th Madras Native Infantry when he was twenty-five. For some time he served as a regimental soldier, then decided he wanted to work on the civil side of the Indian Medical Service, which paid better, and successfully applied for the job of Assistant Superintendent of the Government Maternity Hospital in Madras – the largest gynaecological and maternity unit in the British Empire outside the British Isles.

  At thirty-one he likewise married a Fishing Fleet girl, twenty-year-old Gladys Scroggie, the sister of a brother officer in the 16th Madras Native Infantry. Gladys had spent most of her life in India, only being sent home to be educated. It was while Gladys, always known as Glad or – owing to her flirtatious nature – Glad-eyes, was staying with her brother Willie that she met Clayton Hingston, always known as Hinkie.

  Hinkie was an extraordinarily popular and able man, ready to deal with all eventualities, from removing an appendix on a hastily scrubbed-up kitchen table, operating on the fetlock of a friend’s horse in the absence of a vet, to repairing the face, disfigured in a car crash, of a friend’s beautiful wife – so well did he do this that her friends said she looked better than before. His speciality, though, was gynaecology and obstetrics, for which his reputation spread throughout South India; young married women, some former members of the Fishing Fleet, often came out to Madras simply to be cared for by him – to be ‘pupped by Pops’* as one of them put it.

  Hinkie and Glad’s daughter, Sheila Violet Lena Hingston, was born in Madras in July 1911. The family lived at Pantheon House, an imposing, marble-floored Palladian mansion built in East India Company days, that went with Hinkie’s job and was next door to the Women and Children’s Hospital. Hinkie and Glad had thirty servants, including gardeners and syces, with even a small boy to groom and de-tick the dogs and run messages. As a little girl Sheila was taken for a daily outing in a governess cart drawn by a pony called Flying Fox, her sola topi held on by a white broderie anglaise scarf. Like other English children during the Raj, she was forbidden to play with Eurasian children when she went to the beach, a prohibition approved of even by her beloved ayah, who once smacked her with a hairbrush for doing so.

  Sheila and her mother Glad were staying in an hotel in Kanoor, Kerala, when the 1914 war broke out. Although almost forty, Hinkie wanted to volunteer for service at once and was only dissuaded by a petition signed by all the women in Madras. He was not only a brilliant gynaecologist but also a first-rate paediatrician, surgeon and all-round general doctor and in 1917 he was appointed Superintendent of the Hospital.

  For Sheila, life went on much as usual. Three years after the war had ended and now ten years old, Sheila was brought
home to England to be educated at Southlands School in Exmouth. One reason for choosing it was that nearby was an excellent children’s home for ‘Raj orphans’* run by a former Norland Nurse called Alice but always known as Adgie. The kindly Adgie took care that the six or so children staying there felt that they were in a family and enjoyed themselves. For Sheila this was lucky, as she did not see her mother again for four years.

  When she was sixteen, her mother returned to England and Sheila was gradually introduced to grown-up entertainment: a month in Le Zoute in Belgium where there were lots of parties with other English people, a visit to the Dublin Horse Show, with races and a Hunt Ball thrown in, a party at the Savoy and more racing at Goodwood.

  After seven years at Southlands, Sheila left school when she was seventeen, in July 1928. Her parents offered her the choice between ‘coming out’ as a debutante and doing the Season in London, or going to a finishing school in France. The idea of being a debutante did not really interest Sheila, so she chose the finishing school, with its promise of art, museums and music. The one selected was Madame Mombrey’s in Paris, where a fellow pupil was the squash and tennis player Susan Noel. However, Madame Mombrey’s turned out to cost twice as much as the Hingstons had originally been told, and with one son at Malvern and another still to be educated, Hinkie decided to whisk Sheila away after only one term. She was delighted. ‘I was only too pleased to be out in the world and not to have to go to school again,’ she said.

  So what next? She thought vaguely of taking up nursing in England, but ‘First come out to India and have a really nice holiday,’ urged her parents, adding ‘Then you can go back and find a job, if you want to.’ She accepted with alacrity.