‘£300-a year man – dead or alive’
In the days of the East India Company, a favourite after-dinner toast was a pun on the mournful phrase ‘alas and alack-a-day’; aspiring Company men would drink to ‘a lass and a lakh a day’ – the acquisition of 100,000 rupees and an Indian mistress.
The ethos behind the Raj could not have been more different. The bribes that piled up East India Company fortunes were a thing of the past and miscegenation was discouraged. Give or take a few bad apples, the men who governed India throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century up to independence in 1947 came from another mould altogether. They were not motivated by pure self-interest, rather by a sense of mission. Trade, of course, was still a main concern but they believed equally that the world would be a better place if ruled by Britain – as much of it was. They also believed in their responsibilities to those they ruled.
It was a time when horizons seemed to be expanding in all directions. New inventions were proliferating, new peoples, in barely mapped parts of the globe, were being added to the Empire almost daily. For two and a half centuries India – so far away, so mythic in the tales, the exotic silks and spices brought back by travellers – had been a fabled land. With the Raj, the 1876 incorporation into the Empire and the greatly shortened journey time, the great subcontinent exercised a gravitational pull on the popular imagination. More than any other tribe, province or country, India embodied the idea of Empire. To rule it required almost a new breed of men: tough, hardy, able to withstand frequent loneliness, adaptable yet capable of maintaining standards, just, impartial and not afraid of responsibility.
Their nurseries were the public schools, with certain of these almost wholly dedicated to producing the desired result, a custom started by the East India Company with its East India College. With the disbandment of the Company in 1857 the College was closed down and in 1862 a new school, Haileybury, took over its former grounds and buildings – and its eastward-looking attitude, with the result that many of the old boys of the former College sent their own sons there. ‘To the student at Haileybury the abiding subject of interest was the expansion and maintenance of British rule in India . . . Many a Haileyburian had been dandled as a child in arms which had help to bind a province together or bring savage tribes into subjection.’*
India demanded so much of its servants that some families lived there for several generations, sending offspring home for the obligatory English education. Although over half of India’s viceroys had been educated at Eton, not many of the families involved in the day-to-day running of the country earned enough to send their sons to the ‘great’ English public schools, so that several schools were founded to provide an education acceptable, in those class-conscious days, for the children of gentlefolk but at a lower fee. Thus the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon was founded in 1874; it, too, looked outward towards the Empire, indeed recruiting its first headmaster and initial group of pupils from Haileybury (with which it later amalgamated). Bedford School was another; endowed by the Harpur Trust, which kept fees low, so was the choice of many of the poorer Anglo-Indian families.
Cheltenham College, founded in 1841, also attracted the sons of Anglo-Indians – Cheltenham was a place to which many of them retired – gradually becoming one of the two leading schools for boys who wanted to join the Army (virtually all regiments served a tour of duty in India). The other was Wellington College, founded in 1859 to commemorate the great military Duke. It, too, kept its fees low: in 1912 it charged between £84 and £103 for boarders (Eton and Harrow charged £166 and £153 respectively).
All these schools based their curricula on the needs of a future career in the Empire. For the future ICS man this meant the classical education necessary to achieve the essential good degree at university as well as equipping him for a society that became steadily more sophisticated and steeped in the nuances of protocol and etiquette as he climbed the ladder. On the ‘Army’ side, boys were tutored for the entrance examination to military academies.
Permeating everything these institutions taught was an ethos that came to be known as the public school spirit. As the influence of the great Dr Arnold (headmaster of Rugby 1828–41) trickled out through boys, masters and parents, so did his belief that the primary aim of education was not purely to instil learning but to form ‘character’ – the character of a Victorian gentleman. So from the schools that produced the soldiers and administrators who ran India emerged young men with a belief in team spirit, the prefectorial system, the importance of both moral responsibility and games (read ‘sport’ in later life), the health-giving virtue of cold baths and the need to maintain a stiff upper lip at all times. Today the latter is often mocked; then, it was essential – for a young man sent out at twenty-five to run a district the size of an English county any display of emotion would instantly weaken both his authority and his dignity in the eyes of those he was governing.
The Indian Civil Service – the 1,000-odd* Government officials, administrators, judges, collectors and commissioners who ran that vast country – were the cream of Oxbridge graduates. In an average year about 200 candidates competed for around forty places in the ICS; by 1900 the ratio was about four to one. They took the same entrance examination as that for the Home Civil Service; if they were successful they then had to spend a year on probation, during which they had to pass a riding test – much of their time as juniors would be spent on a horse – learn about Indian history and law, and receive a grounding in the language of the province to which they had been assigned. Much was expected of them and standards were high, hence their nickname ‘the Incorruptibles’. As there was no home leave for eight years, young men often left in the knowledge that they would never see someone dear to them again.
There were three presidencies: Madras, Bengal and Bombay, and seven provinces;* and while governors of presidencies were sent out from England, the provinces were governed by senior members of the ICS. Many were classical scholars, the mark for decades of an educated man. Their knowledge of these ancient worlds often spilt into the routine work of their departments, from the days when Major-General Charles Napier despatched his one-word report ‘Peccavi’* to denote his capture of the province of Sindh to junior ICS man Edward Wakefield’s agricultural notes written in flowing Virgilian hexameters.
Wakefield, who had been sent on a three-week course of instruction at an agricultural college, found that the lectures on wheat cultivation reminded him of the advice given to farmers by Virgil and, feeling bored, decided he would write up his notes in the same way. His jeu d’espirit had a sequel: the instructor, sensing something was wrong, reported him to the Punjab Government. When sent for by the Chief Secretary he was told that his notes had been found unsatisfactory. He sat there apprehensively only to hear the Secretary remark: ‘I am sorry to say that they contain at least one false quantity. Nevertheless, they are in other respects admirable.’ They were placed on record in the archives.
ICS members served in three main departments: judicial, executive or political. The political service was an elite corps, drawn from both the Army and the ICS, which represented the British Raj in the more important native states such as Kashmir. Members of the judicial department served as judges in the districts with some in the High Courts, while most Executive officers remained in the districts.
The key man in all this was the District Officer whose job, described by one of them, L.S.S. O’Malley, was all-embracing in his district, where he was responsible for the maintenance of law and order, for the prevention of disorder as well as its suppression and, for the collection of taxes over hundreds of square miles. He also, as O’Malley put it: ‘has to be able to deal with anything from riots to flood, famine and cyclones.’ Of Rupert Barkeley-Smith his Fishing Fleet bride, Honor Penrose, wrote: ‘Most of my husband’s days were spent keeping a balance between the Hindus and the Mahommedans and preventing them from scratching each other’s eyes out.’
Edward Wakefield spent much of 1931 trying to eradicate locusts from Ajmer, in the heart of Rajputana. His success illustrates the kind of lateral thinking expected of these men. Against what might be thought heavy odds he succeeded through an ingenious campaign based on knowledge of locust habits. When the insects settle to lay their eggs the females deposit 300–400 eggs each a few inches below the surface of the ground and die within a week of doing so. A fortnight later the eggs hatch out into tiny ant-like hoppers. These hoppers move slowly across the countryside, devouring wholesale everything in their path. After a month they are as large and active as grasshoppers; six or seven weeks from the date of hatching they fly in a cloud, bringing ruin to every farmer on whose crops they may choose to settle.
Edward Wakefield began by flooding the fields where eggs were known to have been laid. When the hoppers emerged, he organised the digging of deep trenches in front of the direction in which they were moving while setting up canvas screens alongside the hurrying army to funnel them towards these trenches. Then, when each trench was full of hoppers, his men instantly buried them under mounds of earth, stamping it down hard. It was work that went on for several weeks but in the end all were destroyed.
At the top of the ICS were nine posts of Resident, First Class, all of whom had started in the lowest rank, that of Assistant Magistrate, during which they learned their trade from a senior or seniors. The experience of William Saumarez Smith is typical. After successfully passing both the entrance exam and that at the end of a year’s probation, on riding, Indian law and the history and language of the province to which he had been assigned, he was sent out to his first job.
This was as Subdivisional Officer, or Assistant Magistrate, of Madaripur, a district roughly the size of Herefordshire in the Ganges delta, East Bengal. The population of the subdivision was more than a million – he was under twenty-five. The annual rainfall was seventy-three inches and the rivers changed course constantly, flooding some fields and leaving other riverbeds suddenly dry, so that many disputes were about who had the right to harvest the crops of rice and jute. There were no real roads, a horse was no use, the nearest railway station was over fifty miles away and all communication was by water. Several ICS men had been murdered during the terrorist campaign that raged in Bengal during the 1930s.
The young Subdivisional Officer’s work varied from a report on an unsatisfactory headmaster, making a speech in Bengali or cross-examining witnesses in an abduction case to inquiring into a petition by villagers who claimed their land had been washed away by floods but that they were still being forced to pay rent on it. There were no real office hours, months were spent under canvas and the only leave was local.
Marriage was not on the cards. It was an iron rule of the Service that no one married before the age of thirty: the young ICS man had to be mobile and undergo any necessary hardship. In 1859 one of them, John Beames, described the ideal of a District Officer as laid down by John Lawrence, the man who subdued and reformed the Punjab,* as ‘a hard, active man in boots and breeches, who almost lived in the saddle, worked all day and nearly all night, ate and drank when and where he could, had no family ties, no wife or children to hamper him and whose whole establishment consisted of a camp bed, an odd table and chair or so; and a small box of clothes such as could be slung on a camel.’
The cross most of them had to bear was extreme loneliness coupled with sexual deprivation, as evinced in the case of Charles Maurice Ormerod, born in 1904 in Brighouse, Yorkshire. Charles Ormerod, born to a wealthy father who owned silk mills and retired to a large place in Westmorland, was one of four clever children – his eldest sister became a doctor (then extremely unusual for a woman), his brother a barrister. Charles, the brightest of the lot, got a Double First at King’s College, Cambridge, after which he was attracted by the idea of the ICS. With his classical education and excellent degree, he was just the type they wanted and when he passed their exam was appointed to the Punjab (where he eventually spent twenty years).
During his first ten years he was on his own, moving from village to village, occasionally returning to the office of his immediate superior. Eventually the isolation and lack of congenial company became an overwhelming burden. One day, as he later told his daughter, he was sitting in an up-country village not too far from a railroad, when he said to himself: ‘I could get on that train – that’s all it would take and I could go back home. What is it that keeps me here in India? I don’t know. I’m here with just this one man and we’re on our own and I’m spending all this time in the real wilderness in India, and I’m getting older. The people here who have a better life are the ones who are married. So when my next leave comes up I’m going to go back to England with the idea of getting a wife.’ As we will see later, this is exactly what he did.
Another who wrote home unhappily about this emotional and sexual black hole was William Saumarez Smith. ‘As long as I am in the junior ranks of the ICS I shall not marry. It is absolutely unfair to ask any Englishwoman to live in a station in Bengal. The alternative is celibacy, in the monastic sense of never seeing a female face from week’s end to week’s end. A bachelor in England will at least have female relatives and friends, but my work is exclusively with men, so that practically speaking I live in a world populated by one sex. This is unnatural and abnormal.’
What effect did it have? ‘My life was as sexless as any monk’s at this time; and in a sense I was only half alive, lacking the companionship of women. But what is good for the Roman priest is good (I suppose) for the Indian Cavalry subaltern, who has work to do (like the priest) which he could scarcely perform if hampered by family ties,’ wrote Francis Yeats-Brown, a subaltern in the Bengal Lancers, in 1905. ‘I do not know how far discipline of the sex life is a good thing. But I know that a normal sex life is more necessary in a hot than a cold country. The hysteria which seems to hang in the air of India is aggravated by severe continence of any kind . . .’.
Pay and conditions, however, were good. All ICS men had to contribute to a fund that, after a certain number of years, paid the widow of an ICS man who died on duty £300 a year – roughly the same salary as a junior received – hence the phrase ‘a £300-a-year man, dead or alive’. ICS men also stood at the top of the social tree together with Army officers, in the Raj their only social equals.
For the Fishing Fleet, an ICS man was considered the crème de la crème – once he was eligible. ‘Mamas angled for us for their daughters,’ wrote John Beames. ‘The Civil Service was in those days [1858] an aristocracy in India, and we were the jeunesse dorée thereof.’ Or, as Jim Acheson put it in 1913, ‘The young ICS men were generally supposed to be the chief quarry – the turbot and halibut of the matrimonial nets.’
Army officers were also a catch; again, the under-thirty rule applied. This meant that most had to be captains before they could start looking for a wife, though some managed it a year or two earlier. On 17 February 1896 twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Leslie John Germain Lavie, newly engaged to Miss Florence Ross, told her in his daily letter: ‘I wrote to Major Wood yesterday and he wrote back . . . he said the reason he had not congratulated me was because he thought I was too young to marry and so this would not have been sincere. But he wished us the best of luck and said he hoped I would not leave the Regiment [Lavie was in the 20th Regiment Madras Native Infantry].’
The highest social strata of the Army were the ‘good’ regiments, in particular the (British) cavalry who were, on the whole, richer than most of their contemporaries – often young men from wealthy families who had joined because they were attracted by the hunting and polo that were then considered a part of cavalry life.
It was the same in the Indian Army; there, the cavalry, too, considered themselves the cream. To a young and impressionable girl, their colourful, romantic uniforms of long jackets, cummerbunds, turbans and breeches with English boots had an irresistible dash and glamour, from the yellow coats of Skinner’s Horse to the dark blue jacket, scarlet and gold cummerbund and striped gold and turquoise turban of Probyn’s Horse.
Possibly the most desirable partis in India were the ADCs and Private Secretaries to the Viceroy (and, in descending order, to governors and generals). Most were from backgrounds that were impeccable financially and socially (many were or would be peers), wore clothes well, knew how to put people at their ease and were entertaining enough for the Viceroy and his family to enjoy having them as part of their household. If soldiers, they usually came from a ‘good’ regiment; if from the ICS they were likely to be future stars – just the sort of man, in fact, that a Viceroy might hand-pick as a son-in- law. Owing to constant, daily proximity, marriages between viceregal daughters and their fathers’ ADCs were common; and to the outside world these gilded young men were regarded, in some subliminal sense, as viceregal property. So if one of them looked elsewhere it caused a mild frisson – as when Mary Tribe, the daughter of a clergyman (then, as now, paid little) secured as a husband a young man destined to become one of the richest dukes in England.
Mary du Caurroy Tribe, born in 1865, was the younger daughter of the Reverend Walter Tribe, a parson who had come out to India with his wife Sophie in 1897, largely for financial reasons – he felt that in India he could earn more, live at a higher standard and also save. Their two daughters, Mary aged two and her older sister Zoe, four, were left behind with a beloved aunt. They were educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College (then becoming so famous for its emphasis on proper education that it elicited complaints from many parents who believed that too much education in a girl was a serious handicap to her matrimonial chances). Mary loved school but was longing to leave and go to India, not so much to see her parents – whom she hardly knew – but for the thrill and excitement of what awaited her there. She loved an outdoor life: there would be tennis, riding, parties, friends of her own age and, for the first time, of the opposite sex.
She was sixteen when she arrived in India. She was not yet ‘out’, she did not know how to dance or make small talk but she was beautiful, bright and had, as her sister Zoe commented, ‘such a lovely figure!’ By nineteen she was a magnet to young men. She became engaged to one faithful swain but then broke it off (‘I have nothing left in life now to hope for, nothing to work for,’ he wrote to her mother in an attempt to make Mary change her mind).
Early in 1886 her father was appointed Archdeacon of Lahore. From then on there were summers at Simla with regular invitations to dance at Viceregal Lodge. On 15 September that year she was recording in her diary of one of these: ‘Very jolly dance. Danced 4 with Lord H.’ Soon Mary’s dance cards were filled with ‘Lord H’, her diary with appointments to ride with him; and he was deeply in love with her.
Lord Herbrand Russell, a Grenadier Guards officer, was then twenty-seven to Mary’s twenty-one, and the second son of the 9th Duke of Bedford; he had been personally selected as one of his ADCs by the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin – who had two unmarried daughters, aged twenty-two and eighteen.
Herbrand was under no illusions as to why the Viceroy had chosen him as an ADC. After he and Mary were engaged, he wrote to her to explain the need for dealing delicately and tactfully with the Dufferins. ‘Because . . . Lord and Lady Dufferin always meant me to marry someone else and not your own dear little self at all. This parental plan you have entirely upset. It was this idea that kept me on the staff, otherwise, being the worst of ADCs, I should have been sent away with several fleas in my ear long ago.’ As it was, the Duke’s permission was eventually extracted, Mary and her Herbrand were married on 30 January 1888 and – on the death of Herbrand’s elder brother George in 1893 – she found herself a duchess.*
In the 1930s, the army officer in India was allowed two months’ privileged leave, to give him a break from working in the hot weather, when the plains were an inferno until the monsoon broke. The heat took a toll on almost everyone. ‘I’m in an awfully bad temper and feel very liverish. Everything has been going wrong this morning,’ wrote Lieutenant Lavie to his fiancée Florence (always known as Flossie), on 18 February 1896. ‘I’ll tell you what I do every day . . . so you may give me the benefit if I don’t write so fully. Getting up at 5.30 a.m. it’s parade we go to at 6.30 a.m. get off at 8.00 a.m. Sometimes orderly room and always duty till 9.00 a.m. when breakfast, 10–12 office, 12–1 or 1.30 my letter to you. 1.30–2.30 office, 2.30 tiffin, 3–3.30 learning new Sword Exercise, parade 4.00. Racquets or something 5.15. Mess for Billiards or Whist 6.15–7.30. Dinner 8.00, bed 10.30.’ There were few diversions. A month later Lavie was writing to Flossie: ‘Last night we had quite a gathering at the “At Home” – you must not get bored at my perpetually talking about this weekly excitement – as we mustered four ladies!’
All this was in the sweltering, draining heat. Partly to offset it, there were also three ‘casual’ leaves a year of up to ten days, spent by many on shooting or fishing expeditions. Once every three years there was home leave for eight months, to include the journey (flying, which began just before the war, took three days). ‘Not always enough time,’ remarked one, ‘to find a wife.’ Many of them married Fishing Fleet girls who had come out to stay with sisters or aunts married to brother officers, but for most, especially those serving where action was to be found, the lack of female company, and sex, could be torture.
‘It is useless to pretend that our life was a normal one,’ wrote John Masters of his life as a subaltern in the 4th Gurkhas in the mid-1930s. ‘Ours was a one-sexed society, with women hanging on to the edges. Married or unmarried, their status was really that of camp followers. But it is normal for men to live in the company of women, for if they do they do not become rough or boorish and the sex instinct does not torment them. In India there was always an unnatural tension and every man who pursued the physical aim of sexual relief was in danger of developing a cynical hardness and a lack of sympathy which he had no business to learn until many more years had maltreated him. Of those who tried sublimation, some chased polo balls, and some chased partridge, some buried themselves in their work and all became unmitigated nuisances through the narrowness of their conversation.’
After soldiers in the social pecking order came railway engineers, businessmen, other civil servants, missionaries, police superintendents and tea, jute or indigo planters. Tea planters, too, were usually single throughout their twenties. ‘Before The Second World War, a tea plantation manager would probably have to do ten years without leave, except for local leave,’ said former planter Mike Waring. ‘Before you owned your own estate you couldn’t go away. Most of the tea planters who married would be thirty or over. They often met someone on the ship.’
It was the same for indigo planters. In Bihar in the north-east, on the borders of Nepal, a centre for the industry, at its height in the late 1890s, the highlight of the year was the Meet – a week given over to enjoyment with others of one’s kind. Every District had its Meet, to which planters, their assistants, ICS men, police officers and businessmen and their wives flocked by train, horse, pony and trap, with their luggage arriving by bullock cart. The most popular were the couples who could produce a Fishing Fleet girl – single women were notoriously scarce while lonely bachelors were plentiful.
Some found it hard to wait until custom and their financial state allowed marriage and set up irregular ménages with local women, known as ‘polls’. Said Waring: ‘It wasn’t exactly done but it was accepted – as long as you didn’t produce children. You didn’t mess around with your own staff or labour force – you got your poll from somewhere completely different. The girls knew the men wouldn’t marry them but they also knew they would be looked after. The man would give the girl or her family a nice little house somewhere – and if she did produce a child that would be looked after too. A lot of the cleverer half-castes, who became lawyers, doctors and teachers, went to Australia, because they could produce proof of white ancestry.’
For most of the young Raj bachelors, sport had to take the place of sex. Brought up in the athletic games-playing tradition of the public schools, they flung themselves into everything India had to offer – and this varied from adaptations of what they knew from home to the exotic. Key to most of it was the horse – from pig-sticking, polo, gymkhanas and horse shows to jackal hunting with packs of foxhounds brought out from England and masters and hunt servants in pink coats. All could be risky but, as Desirée Hart (who arrived in 1939 to take up a post as social secretary to the Resident of Kashmir) in Sialkot noted, ‘the hardest and most dangerous time was playing polo on the dry hard ground where bones got broken, heads bashed, limbs bruised and that winter “one death”; all bumps and accidents, even fatalities, accepted as part of the game . . . Play starts off with a spurt of dust and rattle of hoofs on the iron ground, and in no time at all all that could be seen was the arc of a swinging stick through billows of white dust. As the tournament progressed the games got tougher, the finals becoming a deadly battle.’
There was also fishing and shooting, from duck flighting to – if you were lucky – a tiger shoot on elephants with a maharaja. Indeed, sport, including games like tennis and cricket and early morning rides when the air was fresh and cool, played a large part in the lives of all the British in India, where most people were young or youngish: it was both exercise, fun and the sublimation of one of humankind’s most pressing instincts – an instinct to be heavily discouraged until the servants of the Raj could fall thankfully into the arms of suitable brides.
In part this reasoning was to maintain the social distance between the rulers and the ruled; in part because if a man had an Indian mistress he would not be perceived as impartial – Indians, whose loyalty was to caste or clan, would believe that such a man would always favour the family of his wife or mistress in any dispute. There was also the question of prestige: if a man was seen to frequent the same courtesans or prostitutes as, say, his Indian colleagues, the respect owed to the Raj would be subtly diminished. Nor could such behaviour be kept secret; India was a land where privacy was impossible (‘everything in a man’s private life is public property in India,’ said Kipling), and gossip of this type would spread like wildfire round bazaar, cantonment or village. As one ICS man remarked, the District Officer, ‘living as he did, under constant public inspection, particularly when he was in tour or on camp, had of necessity to be something of an anchorite, or possibly even a stylite.’ Said another: ‘This was one of the sacrifices I thought I was making for the Raj.’
At the same time, it was realised that such considerations would weigh not a jot with the average private soldier – young, healthy and deprived of female companionship – a fact recognised by his commanding officers. Almost from the start, the solution had been licensed brothels, with Indian girls under the jurisdiction of a madam who were regularly examined by the regimental doctor. The rigour of this system owed much to the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 which allowed police to arrest known or suspected prostitutes, who were then medically examined; if found to be suffering from venereal disease they were forcibly incarcerated in locked hospitals (‘Lock Hospitals’) until cured.
The repeal of the Act in 1886 (in India this occurred in 1888) coincided with the growing power of the social purity movement which sought, among other aims, to abolish prostitution. The expected (by senior Army officers) happened: with the repeal of the Act and the consequent discontinuation of compulsory medical examinations, the incidence of venereal disease shot up among the troops: between 1889 and 1892 roughly half the British soldiers in Bengal were treated for venereal disease. The Army response was pragmatic: Lock Hospitals now became ‘voluntary’ and a blind eye was turned to the discreet return of brothels for the troops. But there were no such facilities for their officers.
Both campaigners and the Government were fiercely against the idea of European prostitutes – the campaigners from a moral point of view, the Government because if Indians could use them, they might stop viewing the British as the ruling elite. It was, therefore, easier for purity campaigners to try and tackle ‘vice’ in large towns where, if European girls were found – there were several hundred in the largest ports – they would hope for Government backing. In Calcutta and Bombay these girls worked in the well-established red light districts – respectively in Free School Street and Cursetji Sukhlaji Street (described by one missionary as ‘the seething hell of European vice’) – so that the target area was easy to find. This led to what were called the Bombay Midnight Missions, when these streets were patrolled at night by missionaries and purity campaigners trying to dissuade potential customers from the wares on offer, making the prostitutes so furious at their loss of custom that they would pour water and ‘other fluids’ out of upstairs windows onto the heads of passing missionaries. For the police, this meant endless trouble: the missionaries complained and so, too, did the respectable women whom the missionaries mistook for ladies of easy virtue. Finally, after the women had been told that the courts of justice were open to them as to everyone else for redress and the missionaries had been reproved for interfering with the liberty of citizens to enjoy themselves, things settled down again.
Businessmen, often known as boxwallahs, usually lived in or around the larger cities. European trading firms were doing well; nor had Indian mills become serious competitors in the making of cotton cloth. Particularly popular were the strong grey, unbleached shirtings beloved by the Pathans, and muslins, known as ‘mulls’. For most young businessmen, too, marriage was not on the cards if only because they did not earn enough. Thus young men usually lived in ‘chummeries’; with several bachelors together sharing the expenses of a household, all of them could manage a fairly pleasant life. Only when they reached managerial status could they afford a bungalow to themselves – essential if they wished to marry. Meanwhile, even if they could not afford a horse of their own, plenty of people had a full stable, and were keen to get their horses exercised.
One of these young businessmen was Sam Raschen, who went to India in January 1913, to a chummery in Karachi. ‘When I arrived there were fewer than a dozen cars in Sind. There was no tarmac on the roads and the dust was all-pervasive and often almost blinding.’ But money went a long way. As an impecunious bachelor Sam managed to belong to three clubs (Sind, Gymkhana and Boat). Every bungalow had a fair-sized compound and large servants’ quarters and, while there was no electric light or electric fans, there were paraffin lamps and punkah coolies pulled a rug or blanket suspended overhead in a steady rhythm.
Standards were high. ‘In India, even as the newest joined “chota sahib” one automatically assumed the responsibilities of a man ten years one’s senior,’ found Sam. Export was the backbone of the business then, with wheat in particular; this came down in train after train from the Punjab, to be unloaded, sampled and generally passed through the cleaning machine to remove dust, barley and other seeds, then rebagged ready for shipment.
Two years later, Sam Raschen left to fight in the 1914–18 war. He was badly wounded, and returned home to convalesce. Then, in January 1918, he met Maj, a girl he had encountered some time earlier; two months later they were married and, in December 1918, the young couple sailed to India, where Sam returned to his old job. With the birth of their daughter Adelaide in October 1920 their happiness seemed complete – especially when Sam, a keen rowing man, won the Sculls, spending the prize money on a christening mug for their daughter.
A week later, Maj contracted puerperal fever and ten days later she was dead. To Sam, it seemed ‘as if the world had stopped and I had been flung off into space with nothing to which to cling’. He packed up their personal treasures, sold their furniture, left his job and sailed home on the City of Baroda for England. It was the roughest trip he had ever made and he had to look after a two-week-old baby – the kind woman who had offered to help him was incapacitated by seasickness.
He took the baby to his parents in Maidstone, Kent and, believing that he would easily find one, began to look for a job. With the press of those seeking work after the war, none seemed available so when after a few months his former firm, Ellerman, City and Hall, offered him his old position back, he took it, although it meant leaving behind his child, the living memento of his wife. But his story had a doubly happy ending.
Katherine (known as Kitty) Irwin, born in November 1888, was the seventh of eight children, and the fourth daughter. Her family, well known in Cumberland, lived in a large house, Justicetown, six miles from Carlisle. Although the family had fourteen indoor servants and a coachman in the gate lodge, and her father was a former High Sheriff of Cumberland, Kitty led a restricted life. Her eldest sister married young and the next two were sent to London to ‘do the Season’ but Kitty – with no independent means to support herself otherwise – perforce had to follow the Victorian custom whereby the youngest daughter was expected to stay at home and keep her mother company, helping her where necessary.
When her mother died and her eldest brother and his wife inherited the house, she had to leave. She had come into a little money and bought herself a flat in London’s Stanhope Gardens. She spent the war years in London, doing voluntary work making minor munitions such as gas masks. As a pretty woman, with lovely blue-green eyes, she had several boyfriends, but all were killed (two of her elder sisters were also widowed).
So she was delighted when she received an invitation from a married friend, Zinnia Patterson, to come and stay with her in Karachi. Kitty was such a bad sailor she chose to go overland to Venice, then on 4 November 1920 she sailed on the SS Innsbruck to Karachi, arriving in India on her thirty-second birthday. She spent six enjoyable months there with the Pattersons, then went to Kashmir on a round of visits, returning to Karachi on 6 November 1921.
Next day, at a dinner party, she met a young widower recently returned from England. It was, of course, Sam Raschen; and her impact on him was immediate. Later he wrote: ‘We had been at the same dinner party and were at the dance afterwards but were never formally introduced.* Her dance card was fully booked up but somehow I managed to arrange a dance with her. She told me she was returning home after spending some months in India and I discovered that she intended to call at our office to arrange her passage home.
‘In the office I gave strict instructions that Miss Irwin was to be brought in to me when she arrived at our Passenger Department.’
Kitty duly arrived. And in Sam’s words: ‘Then, instead of choosing her a cabin, I managed to persuade her to marry me.’*