Marriage in the Raj generally involved an approach quite different from the home-grown variety. As Kipling had pointed out, ‘[marriage] in India does not concern the individual but the Government he serves’. Even a girl’s wedding day was often different from what she might have expected. Lucy Hardy – who had become engaged to her future husband Harry Grant, an officer in the Royal Artillery, when she went out to India in the 1904 Fishing Fleet on a year’s visit, staying first with her brother and then with friends – could hardly have had a more disconcerting introduction to married life: with a wedding in an isolated spot threatened nightly by marauders from over the border and, on the day itself, a drive behind a runaway horse that could easily have resulted in a fatal accident.
Harry, not yet of the seniority in the Army and therefore of the financial standing to support a wife, had circumvented this obstacle by successfully applying for the post of Assistant or Second Officer with the Kashmir State Mountain Artillery, a job which carried good pay but which was not entirely wife-friendly. Meanwhile, Lucy waited at home until he could afford to send for her. When the vital cable came, she sailed for India in February 1904, and went up to Attock, close to the borders of Afghanistan and Kashmir, where her brother Willie was quartered in the old Fort. Here, with Willie, she stayed. Although Lucy had arrived in March, she and Harry could not get married until 5 April, as not until then was the nearest chaplain available – it was thirty-seven years since a wedding had taken place in the church there.
By this time it had become very hot, especially at night, as the windows of the Fort had to be kept closed on account of cross-border marauders, who lived on the opposite bank of the swift-flowing river. ‘I often watched them crossing the river on inflated bullock skins,’ wrote Lucy. ‘They used to walk up some distance, straddle the skins and launch out into the rapid current, swimming with arms and legs till they fetched up lower down on our side.’
On her wedding day, hot as usual, she dressed with care. ‘I had a very pretty white crêpe de Chine day dress gathered round the hips, a full skirt with a flounce at the hem, and a white tulle hat with a spray of real orange blossom from the garden.’ Her brother, elegant in blue and gold full dress, was to escort her to the church, perched on a steep hill above the Fort. For this short journey he had ordered a tonga in which they planned to leave as soon as they saw her bridegroom and his best man arrive at the church door.
But the moment they stepped into the tonga the pony bolted for its stable in the bazaar and no effort of the driver could stop it hurtling along the stony track, a hair-raising ride as they narrowly missed the large boulders at each side. Finally, arriving at its stable, it stopped. There was nothing for it but to walk to the church. ‘I bundled up my long skirt and then we walked back nearly a mile in the heat, both of us dripping with sweat and on my part all of a tremble! We staggered up to the church porch where they had been all amazed at our non-appearance. They got me a chair and a glass of water and I rested till I had recovered a little, and then we were married. There was only the chaplain, a sergeant who acted as verger and witness, our two selves, Willie and the best man –six people in all.’ Unsurprisingly, Lucy’s was the last marriage to take place at that church.
Quite apart from physical aspects such as the differences in housekeeping, climate, surroundings and so forth, there were various social and psychological factors peculiar to marriage in the Raj, many imposed by the ‘rules’ integral to service in the Empire.
Whereas in England a man, provided he could support a wife and family, could marry virtually whenever he chose, those who worked for the Raj – and many of those employed on plantations or in businesses – were forbidden marriage for the first years of their service. For the ICS, who usually joined a year or so after university, this in practice meant until around the age thirty. The alternative was to leave the ICS or, if permission was grudgingly granted, suffer some form of financial penalty. For soldiers, as the informal rule had it, ‘subalterns cannot marry, captains may marry, majors should marry and colonels must marry’. Even so, everyone who wanted to do so had to seek his commanding officer’s permission; if this was refused (almost invariably, in the case of any officer below the rank of captain) he had either to remain single or send in his papers (i.e., leave the regiment). When Henry and Margery Hall married in the 1930s Henry – who was in the Foreign and Political Department – had to get special permission from the Viceroy to marry, nor did he get the marriage allowance (only given at ‘marriageable’ age). The Halls lived as cheaply as they could on Henry’s pay of about £15 a week, rationing themselves to one bottle of whisky a month and joining only one club – that with the best library.
Towards the end of the Raj the ban on marrying before thirty was less stringent, but as one young man wrote: ‘A young married officer found it rather a struggle to furnish a house. When you were senior enough to be allocated a furnished residence most of the essentials were provided by the Public Works Department . . . I remember that my wife had to use a packing case as a dressing table and a wire stretched across a corner of the room as a wardrobe. We had camp beds and small mosquito nets tied to tiny frames fixed on the ends of the beds. We could buy beautifully made furniture from the district jail, constructed to my own design by long-term prisoners. But I had to calculate my monthly budget carefully before I ordered anything and we used to estimate a large round of drinks after tennis at the club to be worth a chair that we badly needed.’
Nor was it simply a question of existing on meagre funds. In the tight-knit community of an officers’ mess, a glaring discrepancy in the ability to pay your way caused embarrassment all round. ‘James Hodding is coming out in May after marrying in April,’ wrote Lieutenant Leslie Lavie of a brother officer of the 20th Madras Native Infantry. ‘Goodness only knows how he is going to live, when I have qualms, and very strong ones, and my case is much better than his. The Major was angry about my engagement and he is very much so about his, and with even more reason; paupers in the Regiment succeed in annoying everyone and poor old Hodding! Though he is always ready to join in everything, he absolutely won’t be able to afford himself a peg much less join the Regiment in giving anybody else one.’
For anyone who did marry early – or for many on the bottom rungs of the ladder – money was a perennial worry. There were the basic expenses such as the cost of educating children, of keeping them healthy by sending them, their mother and several servants to the hills in the hot weather and the expense of a doctor if, as almost always, one of them became ill. ‘We had to weigh up how ill a child was before calling the doctor because of his heavy fees,’ said Viola Bayley.
Over and above that was something that at home was less pressing: the need – to put it in modem terms – to keep up with the Joneses and, in a country where the ethos of display was a sign of elitism, to be seen to be doing so. For in British society in India there was none of the anonymity that could be preserved at home even in close-knit circles: under the glare of the Indian sun and the gaze of Indian servants everything was high-visibility, everything had to conform to certain standards of protocol and custom. If you were in a cavalry regiment, it was important to have good polo ponies; for everyone, entertaining was expected and reciprocal dinner parties could not be skimped; and a man was expected to stand his round in mess or club. Only in camp or up country was a simpler life possible.
Often, too, in Raj marriages there was an element of clinging together, like the babes in the wood. For many Raj children, childhood and adolescence were times of misery and separation. Sent home to be educated in English schools, they might see their father only once or twice during these years and their mother little more. ‘When my mother went back to India my brothers went as boarders to Berkhamstead School and I to a school in Watford,’ wrote Iris James. ‘I was six, and I remember on the first evening sitting by the window of the common room with the laurels in the rain outside tapping against the glass, night and aloneness of a kind so desolating that all other separations take me back to it . . .’.
Some children were lucky enough to stay with loving aunts, cousins or grandparents and for these, if cousins and friends were also around, life was the most normal. Others less fortunate were lodged in boarding houses that catered specifically for Raj children, with unloving relations to whom children were merely a nuisance to be tolerated, or simply left at school all year. One little boy, aged six, was sent to a Dame school where the boys were not allowed to drink anything after 5.30 p.m. in case they wet their beds – suffering from thirst, they got round this by drinking their bathwater. Iris and her brothers, sent to the vicarage at Potten End (run as a home for Raj children), spent as much time as they could on the moor behind the house, eating imaginary meals ‘to try and fill the gap left by the sparse vicarage fare’. When not on the moor the shy Iris ‘spent a lot of time planning how not to be seen going in and out of the lavatory, which was a shed in the garden. The shame of being seen using this was not to be borne.’
Thus the idea of a home – the home they never had – was something to which these young people clung tenaciously; and a husband or wife, the one person always there for them, was the emotional equivalent. Iris James, sent home at six and brought out to India again at sixteen and a half with the express purpose of finding a husband, realised by the time she was almost eighteen that the only way to escape her difficult home life was through marriage (‘at seventeen and a half I began seriously to size up my escorts’). The man she fell in love with and married, always known simply as ‘Mac’, was another Raj child, left at school in Scotland at the age of twelve and sent out to plant tea at nineteen. ‘Now he was twenty-three and I was eighteen and we both felt needed, loved, settled.’ Perhaps, too, this feeling of having at last ‘come home’ was the reason why so many Raj brides were undaunted by the difficulties or dangers, either physical or psychological, often faced in India.
Lack of occupation was one. Servants took care of every domestic chore. Even the ordinary excitement of making a first home together was lacking when you knew that in two or three years you might be posted somewhere completely different, with a fresh lot of furniture to rent or buy. With no libraries or radios, cultural entertainment was far down on the list; here the girl with an interest like photography or painting was lucky. Many of the more spirited would accompany their husbands on tour or camping, making the most of the sights and sounds of the jungle. For birdwatchers, India was a paradise – golden orioles that flashed through tree tops, long-beaked bee eaters, weaver birds that made loofah-like nests, pigeons, hoopoes striped in orange, black and white, the crests on their heads opening and shutting like small black fans, bright green parakeets, minah birds that mimicked everything from the songs of other birds to household noises.
One of the main hazards of married life was loneliness. Girls who married a man whose work was in the mofussil – anywhere up country or well away from cities, towns, stations or cantonments – were often miles from their nearest neighbour, with their social highlight a weekly visit to the club, with its leather chairs, month-old newspapers and, if enough people came, a Saturday night dance. Planters, policemen, forestry experts, missionaries, young ICS men and, often, doctors, many of whom travelled almost constantly to treat outbreaks of infectious diseases as they occurred, often led lives of great isolation – one reason why most of them were anxious to marry and gain the companionship of a wife and family – but they at least had their work.
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’.