The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  They wrote to Diana every week, letters that were censored. They sent her sweets and tea – rare commodities in wartime England – but with the sinking of so many ships were never sure if their letters got through, or if this was the reason that Diana’s were sometimes irregular. One arrival that did generally make it through the difficulties of a wartime postal service was the magazine Country Life which both read eagerly, sometimes spotting people or places they knew. For Sheila in particular, with nothing to do except worry about her daughter, the war years were a time of acute strain.

  As all the younger men were called up the older ones like Jerry (now forty) were left to run the five Stanmore estates, 5,000-odd acres in all. During the six war years Jerry, as General Manager, would get up at 5 a.m. every day, have breakfast, set out for the estates, return for lunch and then work in a bedroom now turned into an office until about midnight, with Sheila bringing him sandwiches and cups of tea or coffee at intervals. But there was still little for Sheila to do.

  The men who were left formed a ‘Dad’s Army’ in case the Japanese invaded, practising by marching about in the pouring rain with umbrellas because there were no guns then. They also had a hut built in the Grass Hills higher up, at about 8,000 feet, the idea being that if the Japanese did invade the Annamailais the women and children could escape up to this hut, where they would spend the night, then make their way on to the High Range and down to the west coast of India and, with luck, a boat back to England.

  In practice, the hut was used for fishing weekends. Sometimes Sheila and Jerry would have a walking weekend in the Grass Hills, driving part of the way then walking up through the jungle from about 4,000 feet to 7,000 feet.

  Like other daughters of the Raj, Sheila suffered some serious illnesses. The worst was smallpox, probably contracted from the bite of an insect that had bitten someone in the Annamallais bazaar, where there was an outbreak of the disease. Jerry wired down to his father-in-law in Madras – the recently acquired telephone system did not reach that far – and he and Glad arrived the following day to find their daughter covered in spots from head to foot.

  Before he came up Hinkie had asked the advice of an Indian doctor on the latest treatment; he was told to paint each spot with a 2 per cent solution of manganese permanganate and, of course, never to scratch or dislodge them. A disinfected sheet was hung over the door of Sheila’s bedroom, Jerry, Glad, Hinkie and the nurse he had brought with him and all the servants were vaccinated and Sheila’s meals were all brought to her on a tray by the nurse. The only other person allowed to enter her room was Hinkie, who when there chain-smoked the whole time, as he thought inhaling the smoke would help prevent him catching the disease.

  ‘It was like being social pariah,’ said Sheila later. ‘It was weeks before people would come near me, although I stayed in quarantine three weeks longer than medically necessary.’ When the scabs eventually came off, leaving purple marks behind them, there were so many that Sheila had to surround herself with newspaper, later burnt, to catch them. She had been very careful never to scratch, and the purple marks eventually faded until, finally, she was left with an unblemished skin.

  A few years later there was an outbreak of bubonic plague,* but when Sheila learned that several friends who had been immunised against it had had problems with side effects from the drugs they were given – one man had phlebitis for the rest of his life – she said she would not be immunised unless a rat actually fell dead within the house. Fortunately, the nearest dead rodent was in the office, one hundred yards away. Strangely, malaria, one of the commonest illnesses in the Raj and one that in many frequently recurred, only affected her once.

  Just before VJ day, Sheila had another daughter, Helène. This time Hinkie, the famous gynaecologist, missed the date and could not attend to his daughter; instead Helène was delivered by a vet.

  After partition, Jerry joined the South Indian Parliament – known as the Legislative Assembly – as the Planting Member of the United Planters’ Association of Southern India. Sheila and Jerry finally returned to England in 1950.

  Sheila was delighted to be back. She had, as Glad had predicted, been bored and lonely during the eighteen years she had spent in the Annamallais; but she had managed to survive everything without complaint, and with her love for her husband intact. When they were engaged, Jerry had written to her: ‘Looking back on things now, it strikes me more and more forcibly that events could never have gone any other way from the time last September when I sat out a dance with you and said that if you came home this year I’d give you a job on condition you promised to take it on.’ She had indeed taken it on – and triumphantly succeeded.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘The cruel wrench’

  Did the Fishing Fleet girls have any real influence on the conduct of affairs in this vast country that was home to so many of them during the time of the Raj?

  The short answer is no. The Raj was entirely run by men, in the kind of hierarchical fashion that precluded a sudden leap to the top by a man of outstanding brilliance who might normally have been considered an outsider. Ramsay MacDonald, for instance, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer who was virtually self-educated, became Prime Minister of England whereas he would never have been considered as Viceroy. It is true that for the first sixty years of the Raj there was no woman in the British Government either – the first to take her seat, Nancy Astor,* was only elected in 1919 when her husband was elevated to the peerage, and after that women only gradually began to filter into Parliament – but it is inconceivable to think of a woman becoming an ICS District Officer or the Magistrate of a cantonment. In the Raj, the role of the British female was as wife, helpmeet and mother.

  Here came one hideous caveat peculiar to the Raj, causing a wretchedness impossible to over-estimate. ‘Separation is the dark cloud which hangs over an Indian existence; husbands and wives, mothers and children, forced asunder, perhaps at the very time when union is most delightful, and living (how maimed and sad a life!) in the absence of all that is best-beloved,’ wrote H.S. Cunningham in The Chronicles of Dustypore.

  To be a Fishing Fleet girl who married into the Raj was to face this appalling, inescapable burden: separation from either husband or children, sent home at a tender age to England for their education. ‘Early or late the cruel wrench must come – the crueller, the longer deferred,’ wrote Maud Diver. ‘One after one the babies grow into companionable children; one after one England claims them, till the mother’s heart and house are left unto her desolate.’ Quite apart from separation, in many cases, from the land where she was born.

  Only the rich – and there were few of those in the service of the Raj – could afford the cost of constant sea passages back and forth to spend holidays with the children and ameliorate this anguish (until the last few years of the Raj, flying was almost unknown).*

  Sending children home meant that they would not be classed as ‘domiciled’. This was an important distinction, especially in the early days of the Raj, stemming from Lord Cornwallis’s edict in the late eighteenth century that reduced those British born in India – even if of pure English blood – to a status below that of native-born Englishmen.

  Even in the twentieth century there were echoes of this: when Jim Acheson said at a dinner party in 1914 that he liked a certain commissariat colonel from Army headquarters in Simla, adding that with a name like Moriarty he must be Irish, he evoked the response from a fellow diner: ‘You mean a Mussoorie Irishman, don’t you, Mr Acheson?’ At first Jim did not understand but later realised that the poor man was regarded as being not ‘quite quite’ because he belonged to the domiciled community.

  Snobbishness is one of the justified criticisms that has always been hurled at the Anglo-Indian wife, a snobbishness based on petty distinctions of manner, birth or behaviour. Along with the dedication that left India, after independence, with an enviable infrastructure, a democratic Government and a common language came a concern with social matters that refl
ected – indeed, outdid – that at home.

  ‘If I were asked what struck me as the chief concern of English social life in India, I should answer: “to seek Precedence and ensure it.” . . . Precedence is the focal point of India’s social nonsense, convulses the home and has even, it is said, convulsed the government,’ said Yvonne Fitzroy who, as Private Secretary to the Vicereine, saw India from the top of the heap. The effect of this preoccupation was more stifling than that of the home-grown variety, in part because of the lack of alternative concerns but chiefly because, in England, talent, intelligence and beauty were powerful social coinage that added mobility and leaven to the status quo. But in the hierarchy of the Raj position was fixed, according to service, rank and seniority in an unalterable grading, like so many butterflies on pins, within which there was room for petty nuances that could be painful and damaging. Was a man in a ‘good’ regiment? In ‘trade’ as opposed to a ‘profession’? If in the ICS had he caught the approving eye of Government? The young Fishing Fleet bride, moulded by the attitudes and customs of the ‘mems’ higher up in the pecking order, might adopt this unattractive way of thinking.

  Yet these were the same girls prepared to have a baby alone in a bungalow fifty miles from the nearest doctor, to suffer the cruel deaths of sometimes several in succession of their children, to up sticks and move house for the thirtieth time in succession without a murmur, to offer hospitality cheerfully and unstintingly to friends of friends of friends.

  For other Fishing Fleet girls, India meant loneliness, living perhaps on an isolated plantation, the only excitement a weekly dance at the club fifteen miles away. They coped with it, as they coped with almost everything the country threw at them – the vagaries of the climate, illnesses or a perpetual feeling of being ‘below par’, the feeling of desperation if the longed-for mail did not bring a letter.

  For still others, the stultifying boredom of small-town society was the chief memory brought back to England after a husband’s retirement. ‘If there is a hell for me it’ll be an endless day in a club in the North Indian state of Assam; a day of staring through dazzling white dust at men galloping about on polo grounds; of sitting in sterile circles drinking gin with their wives; of bouncing stickily round an unsprung dance floor, clutched to their soggy shirts, of finally being driven home at night by one of them peering woozily over the wheel, tipping old villagers in bullock carts into the ditch. I spent thirty years on a tea plantation enduring such days and nights.’ So wrote Iris Macfarlane after she left India in 1936.

  ‘Seldom in history have women been subjected at one and the same time to so many discomforts, so much monotony, and so many temptations,’ summed up John Masters. Yet plenty of them managed to extract the maximum advantage from their situation. ‘Many things were unforgettable about our life at Ramkolah [close to the borders of Nepal], particularly our rides home through the sunsets, dew replacing the dust, the sky aflame with vivid colours until it turned suddenly to deep blue,’ recalled Betsey Macdonald. ‘We would smell the pungent smoke rising from the village fires as we trotted by, the exotic scents from the shrubs and flowers as we returned to our garden.’

  Rumer Godden, at her happiest in India, characterised its appeal as ‘the honey smell of the fuzz-buzz flowers, of thorn trees in the sun, and the smell of open drains and urine, of coconut oil on shining black human hair, of mustard cooking oil and the blue smoke from cow dung used as fuel; it was a smell redolent of the sun, more alive and vivid than anything in the West . . .’.

  Some felt its magic all their lives, enthralled by the beauty and grace of the people, the landscape that ranged from steamy jungle to the glittering, ethereal purity of the high Himalayas and the wild creatures, the elephants, grey langurs, and above all the birds – friendly little bulbuls with red and yellow rumps, green parrots, golden orioles that flashed from tree to tree, hoopoes in their Art Deco plumage of orange, black and white, Paradise flycatchers with tails like long white streamers. As Veronica Bamfield put it: ‘I was one of the lucky few on whom India lays a dark, jewelled hand, the warmth of whose touch never grows cold to those who have felt it.’

  Many did what they could to take part in the life of the country or to help those around them. Their scope was limited as Government policy was to interfere as little as possible with the habits and customs of ‘the natives’. Plenty helped with simple medication, Army wives concerned themselves with the welfare of the wives and children of their husbands’ soldiers, still others taught. Flora Annie Steele,* appointed Inspectress of Girls’ Schools in the Punjab, campaigned successfully against the selling of degrees at the Punjab University; Anne Wilson made a serious study of Indian music; Violet Acheson was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal for Public Service in India.

  Most prescient, perhaps, was Anne Wilson, writing (at the end of her camping tour) in 1895, in sentiments that expressed not only her realisation of the possible impermanence of British rule but also the idealism that inspired the best of the Raj: ‘When a century or two have gone, will all traces of those tents and their occupants have disappeared? . . . Or will our rule in India be permanent, if not in its present form, at least in its effects? Will it gradually confer on this immense population, numbering a quarter of the inhabitants of the globe, not only greater material prosperity and greater knowledge but a higher intellectual, moral and religious standard, and so permanently raise a mighty people in the scale of humanity?

  ‘Should this be the result of all our labours spent in India – as assuredly it will, if only we fulfil our trust – they will not have been spent in vain, and history will acknowledge the truth of the saying that India is the brightest jewel in England’s crown.’

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

  Katherine Welford leaving for India in 1932 on the P&O liner SS Mongolia.

  Male sports, such as this ‘spar-fighting’ competition, required great athletic ability.

  The arrival of someone important was always marked by ceremonial – note the lascars on the mast of the ship.

  A group of bachelors living together to share household expenses, such as in this one in the Mahalaxmi district of Bombay, was known as a ‘chummery’.

  The five ADCs of the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, in full dress for a levée. As the only one of the close personal staff not a soldier, Henry Babington Smith (centre) wears Court uniform.

  The Hon. Lilah Wingfield, just arrived in India for the Coronation Durbar of 1903, wears a dust veil over her topi to use if necessary.

  The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, processing through the streets of Delhi on his way to the Coronation Durbar of 1903.

  The Viceroy’s Private Secretary, Henry Babington Smith (centre, front row), with his staff.

  Lady Elgin seated in a silver tonjon (portable chair), carried like a palaquin on single poles resting on the shoulders of four bearers.

  When the Viceroy went on tour, an army of tents would spring up, such as this one in Jodhpur.

  Picnics were popular with everyone from the Viceroy down, who is seen here (centre, next to his daughter Bessie) in the Hills in the 1890s.

  Bessie Bruce and Henry Babington Smith before their engagement.

  A hunt breakfast for the Bangalore hounds in 1935. Horses were a central feature of life in the Raj, whether for hunting, riding, racing or playing polo.

  Marian Atkins, seen here at the seventh and final day of the Calcutta paperchase in 1934 on her horse ’Kitty’, was an assured rider.

  Hounds were transported to the meet by camel cart in this part of north India in 1905.

  A day at the races in Ootacamund. Jerry and Sheila Reade, with the Maharaja of Mysore standing between them.

  Annette Bowen, in 1932, aged seventeen (top), in Daphne at the Royal Madras Yacht Club Regatta (centre) and with three friends at the Madras Hunt Gymkhana Races in 1935 (bottom).

  Mary McLeish with her fiancé Nigel Gribbon. They had known each other for only a fortnight before they were parted; six years later he proposed to her by t
elephone – and was accepted.

  Katherine Welford, aged twenty, at the time she went to stay with her aunt and uncle in Madras.

  Jean Hilary, during a 1929 weekend with friends at Puri. She wears one of the conical straw hats worn by the bathing ‘boys’ on Puri beach, who escorted bathers into the water, helping them through the surf.

  A view of Simla, showing the enormous crowds gathered to attend the wedding of Lady Elisabeth Bruce to Henry Babington Smith in September 1898.

  The view from Observatory Hill, Simla, looking north-east.

  Simla was famous for its amateur dramatics, as in this 1930s staging of The Gondoliers.

  Something in the air in the Hills seemed to encourage the British love of dressing up, as seen here at the Viceregal Lodge in the 1890s.

  A picnic in the grounds of the Residency, by the Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir, in the 1920s.

  A walk in the hills.

  Hut 102A in Gulmarg was rented by the Lloyd family every year and regarded as their second home.

  The finals of the Gilgit polo match. These contests were fiercely fought between rival clans. Spectators who could not crowd on to walls perched in the trees.

  In isolated areas cricket matches were a popular social fixture. Billy Fremlin’s father, Ralph, is on the front row, second from left, in this photograph of the Kadur Club cricket team, 1910.