The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

* After the sinking on 7 May 1915 of the Lusitania, with its large complement of (neutral) American passengers, there was such outrage that in June the Kaiser forbade all attacks on large passenger liners; but on 19 August 1915 the White Star’s Arabic (with three Americans among the losses) was sunk off the coast of Ireland by the German submarine U-24, without any form of warning whatsoever. After this, the Kaiser decreed that crews and passengers of merchant ships should be given the chance to abandon ship; but in the Mediterranean a sinking without warning policy was adopted, since large merchant ships were attacked ‘on suspicion of being transports or auxiliary cruisers’. Finally, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917; by 21 March seven American merchantmen had been sunk. President Wilson summoned Congress and on 6 April 1917 America entered the war.

  * The reason for Quetta was that men stationed there were allowed to have wives.

  * Jim was appointed early to the political department of the ICS. Most of his postings were in the sensitive tribal areas of the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan; as a brilliant linguist, he could negotiate well with the local population, who were often extraordinarily difficult. He was also Deputy to the Viceroy’s Foreign Secretary. His final post was a Resident in Kashmir from 1943 to 1945. He was knighted in 1945.

  * Famous for its rubies.

  * Haileybury Archives 10/2 (1893) 357–832.

  * By 1922 the number had risen to 1,200; by the end of the Raj there were only 500 British ICS men.

  * Punjab, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (now Uttar Pradesh), the North-West Frontier Province, the Central Provinces (now Madhya Bharat and Maharashtra), Bihar and Orissa, Assam and Burma.

  * Latin for ‘I have sinned’. A possibly legendary story, but one which certainly appeared as a cartoon in Punch in 1844.

  * John Lawrence later became Viceroy of India 1864–9 and was created 1st Baron Lawrence.

  * Later she became known as the Flying Duchess when she took up flying in her early sixties. She disappeared on her last flight, aged seventy-one, and no trace of her has ever been found.

  * Such was protocol that this was often an insuperable barrier.

  * Their wedding took place in Karachi on 22 February 1922.

  * The equivalent of a bludgeon or truncheon: a stick, often made from the male bamboo and bound at intervals with iron rings.

  * In the Madras Club, Humphrey Trevelyan records that women were not even allowed to watch the men playing tennis.

  * In 1900 there were roughly 680 princely states.

  * The fifth child of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, who had died on 20 November 1938.

  * Government House in Calcutta was not fitted with a bathroom with running water until 1905 – the last year of Curzon’s viceroyalty – and flush lavatories did not reach Simla until just before the 1914 war, arriving in Delhi even later.

  * Two year later he became the first Viceroy.

  * If excessive sweating causes the sweat glands to become blocked, the sweat is trapped under the skin in swollen pockets, seeping into nearby tissue and causing a rash and irritation. In the days before antibiotics, if a bacterial infection developed, these could turn into boils.

  * A town eighty miles from Lahore and over 700 from Karachi, now known as Faisalabad.

  * Contestants would ride at full gallop, attempting to spear a narrow wooden peg stuck in the ground with a long lance, then raising the lance and carrying the peg away. It is supposed to have originated from the idea that cavalry could charge through the camp of the enemy, carrying away the pegs of the tents so that these would collapse on the sleeping occupants, causing complete chaos.

  * Youngest daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Headfort.

  * The Government felt that administration would be easier from Delhi, a northern city, rather than from the coastal city of Calcutta.

  * Rowton Houses were a chain of hostels built in London by the Victorian philanthropist Lord Rowton to provide decent accommodation for working men in place of the squalid lodging houses of the time. George Orwell later wrote of them enthusiastically, in Down and Out in Paris and London.

  * A travelling conveyance used mainly in the Himalayas, a dandy consists of a large hammock-like piece of strong cloth fixed to a pole borne on the shoulders of two or more men.

  * Only the Viceroy, and by extension his family, and the Commander-in-Chief were allowed carriages.

  * He became Sir Henry Babington Smith, GBE, CH, KCB, CSI.

  * The princely states had remained loyal to Britain throughout the Mutiny and, in return for this steadfastness, the various maharajas, rajahs, ranas, nizams, gaekwars and nawabs continued as rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown.

  * Author of The Durbar, published by A. and C. Black in 1903.

  * Quoted by David Gilmour in Curzon.

  * In a custom started in 1905. It was not until the viceroyalty of Lord Irwin (1926–31) that, after gaining the necessary consent from George V, this was changed to the practice of the British Court, where only the ladies on either side of the King made a full curtsey.

  * Quoted by Francesca Beauman in Shapely Ankle Preferr’d.

  * Betsy herself went on to make a happy marriage, described later.

  * Quoted by Lawrence James in Raj.

  * A light, two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle, seating up to four people.

  * According to rank, each prince was entitled to a gun salute that rose by odd numbers from nine to the twenty-one given for the five most senior: Hyderabad, Baroda, Mysore, Gwalior and Kashmir.

  * Platform hide, usually built in a tree.

  * At one time it was almost de rigueur to return home from India with a tiger skin or two – and more if you were a Viceroy. Curzon took home five and used one as an opening salvo in his courtship of the beautiful red-haired novelist Elinor Glyn, sending it round to her dressing room when he saw her on the stage in the adaptation of her scandalous novel Three Weeks. He was irritated to discover later that Lord Milner had done exactly the same.

  * Circumcision, though routine among Jews and Muslims, only became an acceptable practice (apart from medical reasons) in Britain in the late nineteenth century, and then only among the better-off. But by the 1930s, exactly one third of the British male population was being circumcised – again, with a preponderance among the upper classes.

  * E.A. Horne, who had served in the Indian education service and was the author of The Political System of British India.

  * See Introduction for details

  * Even if both regarded it as a marriage, no British clergyman would have married an unbaptised Indian and no Indian cleric would have married a practising Christian.

  * Promotion in the HEIC was solely by seniority. Every officer would eventually become a general if he lived long enough; until the Mutiny generals were often in their seventies.

  * The capture, followed by the taming, of wild elephants.

  * Open space.

  * William Vincent was knighted in 1913.

  * Later of India, when the title was created in 1833.

  * Ludhiana, the largest city in the Punjab.

  * Henry Stewart Cunningham (later Sir Henry) was a witty and charming lawyer and writer who practised in British India from 1866 and was a popular figure on the social scene. He became Advocate-General of the Madras Presidency in 1872 and in 1877 was appointed a judge of the High Court in Calcutta.

  * Ships carrying heavy cargo such as teak wood from India would return with Alderney shingle as ballast in their holds and places near the coast would buy this up to make carriage drives or cover for forecourts, as in front of Government House in Calcutta.

  * Wooden boats of different sizes, some gondola-like, that have become the architectural symbol of Srinagar.

  * From Ladies of the Chase by Meriel Buxton.

  * Staying even one night in a hotel without a chaperone would have damaged her reputation severely. Many women married straight off the ship to avoid this.

  * S
he also ghosted The Little Princesses, by their governess ‘Crawfie’.

  * These must have been Bhut jolokia, the world’s hottest chilli, grown in north-east India and used today by the India Army as ‘chilli grenades’ to stun the enemy. Effects include dizziness, sweating, breathlessness, racing heart and streaming eyes.

  * Then called Mian Mir, about six miles from the city of Lahore. It was where the barracks of British and Indian troops were situated.

  * For a previous book, the author interviewed forty-seven pre-wartime debutantes. As debs of eighteen, only two knew what were called ‘the facts of life’; and none had heard them from their mothers.

  * Quoted by Lawrence James in Aristocrats.

  * Sauga is 112 miles north-east of the state capital, Bhopal, in the United Provinces (as they were then).

  * The cholera microbe was isolated and identified in 1883 but medical advances took a certain time to reach the Raj.

  * There was no ban on bringing dogs into India. The first legislation imposing quarantine on animals being brought back from India was the Importation of Dogs Order 1897, which came into force on 15 September and made provision for animals to be quarantined for six months.

  * In Reminiscences of Sport and War (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1939).

  * Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler, who joined the ICS in 1890, was the first Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, from January 1921 to December 1922.

  * The bob, the shingle and short skirts came in a year or two later.

  * The capital of Central Provinces and always considered the exact centre of India.

  * Except in the princely states, where the maharajas did more or less as they pleased.

  * After being widowed, Iris wrote three biographies: The Rule of Three: Sarah Duchess of Marlborough and her Companions in Power (1967), The Viceroy’s Wife: Letters of Alice, Countess of Reading, from India 1921–5 (1969) and The Eldest Brother: the Marquess Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s eldest brother (1973). All were published by Hodder and Stoughton.

  * They were usually made from the skin of a sambhur, India’s largest deer; their quality of noiselessness made them a favourite choice for anyone shooting or stalking.

  * Held every year since 1873; it was discontinued after 1939. It is now displayed at the Cavalry and Guards Clubs, London.

  * Pops was his children’s name for him, often used by his wife and thence picked up by younger patients.

  * As their parents could only visit at intervals, unless children were lucky enough to have aunts, grandparents or cousins with whom to live, they had to stay either at their school or in children’s homes for their holidays. Some of the latter were very good, some appalling.

  * Viceroy, 1931–6.

  * For many lonely, sports-oriented men it seems to have been theoretically women and children first but dogs and favourite polo ponies before either.

  * The average rainfall from 1899 to 1941 was 137.2 inches. The year with the greatest rainfall, 204.3 inches, was 1933 – the year after Sheila’s marriage.

  * She may have been referring to an outbreak of Relapsing Fever, caused by the bite of a louse or tick, of which rodents are sometimes the carrier. Without antibiotics, mortality could be high. Shortly before her arrival twenty coolies had died of Relapsing Fever on a neighbouring estate.

  * The first woman to be elected was the Countess Markievicz, a member of Sinn Fein, who stood for a Dublin seat while in Holloway Prison in London in 1918. She won – but never took her seat in the House of Commons.

  * The first direct Air Mail service from London to Karachi was in 1933. Early passenger flights involved not only many stops but also changing to rail and seaplanes between flights. In 1935 Imperial Airways took a total of 983 people to and from India, on 104 flights. By 1937 a direct flight to India by flying boat from Southampton to Karachi took five days.

  * Co-author of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook.