For the Fishing Fleet, arriving in Bombay was extraordinarily exciting. There before them lay the vast landlocked harbour, the towers and flat roofs of the city, the tugs ready to tow, push and nudge their liner into her berth. Beyond was the country that to some of them was home – a home they had missed almost more than they had realised, its sights, sounds, and above all smells, bringing back the India they knew and loved. Where a girl arrived depended on where her family or friends lived or were stationed – Bombay for Rajputana and much of Central India, Calcutta for Bengal and the United Provinces, Madras for much of southern India.
‘Arriving in India then, and always, was dazzling and familiar,’ wrote Iris James (later Macfarlane), who had travelled out with her mother. ‘The smell of burnt gram and open drains, of sweat and spices, was carried in a warm breeze. The noise was deafening, the crowds jostled and shrieked but in the days of Empire we white women had paths cleared for us and my mother’s Dalmations.’
To newcomers it was a land so strange that the only way forward was acceptance. On the quay, towards which passengers looked anxiously for those who had come to meet them, humanity swirled, shouted, begged, pushed and swore in different incomprehensible languages and dialects. The brilliant colours of saris in shrill pinks, emerald green, orange or red gleamed against dark skins, men in white uniforms mingled with sellers of fruit, curry, sweetmeats and rolled-up leaves with red betel nuts inside – when the juice was spat out it looked like blood.
The first glimpse of the other great seaport, Calcutta, where Minnie Wood arrived in 1857, was very different. Her little sailing ship passed through the mangrove swamps of the Ganges delta, with jungle running down to the edge of the various tributaries; next came the large, well-kept riverside villas of rich European merchants and officials; then, round the final bend, Calcutta itself, with its packed, busy harbour, scarlet-coated soldiers on the ramparts and, amid the crowd of coolies, bullock carts, camels and traders, crinolined Englishwomen and men in top hats awaiting the arrival of friends.
The colour, the light, the heat and above all the teeming mass of people could be almost too much to bear. ‘I honestly confess that the overwhelming crowds of people frightened me,’ wrote Anne Wilson in 1895 of her arrival in India. ‘What were we in the land, I thought, but a handful of Europeans at the best, and what was there to prevent those myriads from falling upon and obliterating us, as if we had never existed?’ As there were never more than 300,000 Britons in India, amid an indigenous population of 250 million, her apprehension was understandable.
Sometimes those whose destination was Calcutta, by the time of the Raj the capital of India and its main port, travelled overland from Bombay; sometimes they approached through the Hooghly River and green jungle. Wherever they arrived, Fishing Fleet girls were met, by parents, friends or, for some, the bearer (personal servant) of their hosts. For Desirée Hart this was the servant of the Resident of Kashmir’s wife. ‘At last I was cleared by the doctors and immigration officials and descended the gangway clutching my small luggage to find myself surrounded by hordes of beggars showing stumps where hands and feet should have been,’ she wrote. ‘Many were children with fly-encrusted eyes, others were so lacking in limbs that they propelled their truncated bodies on roughly made trollies . . . I began to despair of ever getting to the station until my salvation appeared.
‘“Shut up, be off with you,” I heard an authoritative voice declaim and saw the crowd part by the exit to allow through a tall fierce-looking Indian. How he picked me out from the crowd I never knew.
‘“Miss-Sahib?” he enquired haughtily.
‘I nodded suspiciously and he handed me a large buff envelope embossed with a gold coat-of-arms, then raised his right hand, palm inwards towards his pugri, bowing his head at the same time in one graceful movement.
‘“Welcome to India,” I read in the letter from Lady Fraser. “My personal bearer, Dost Mahommed, will escort you on the journey. He speaks adequate English and you can trust him with your life.” . . . in no time my status was transformed from buffeted nonentity to veritable princess.’
After the port of entry – Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Madras, Rangoon – came the rail journey, often of several days, to station or cantonment. So long were these train journeys that when Lord Ripon travelled from Bombay to Simla to be installed as Viceroy in the summer of 1880 his chaplain was depressed to learn that there were coffins in readiness at every station along the line in case a passenger succumbed to one of India’s fatal illnesses en route.
The first sight of the station could be unnerving, with its jostling, thronging crowds and loud cries. Sweetmeat sellers, their sticky sweets swarming with flies, thrust their wares at you, fruit sellers offered plates of ‘jolly decent fruit!’; there were sellers of flower garlands, curries, water from sheepskin bags. Long lines of sleeping men, shrouded in white, waited for their train, their wives squatting patiently beside them. And when the train came, few Europeans could have survived the general scramble to climb aboard, friends pushing each other through windows, families colonising every spare inch, with makeshift bedding and cooking arrangements in corridors.
For those who had been born in India, even if they had left it as a small child, residual memory held back the shock of the new. ‘The Gateway of India was as familiar as the bustling crowds, the poverty and wealth, the squalor and the splendour of Bombay, even the smells,’ wrote Richard Slater, who had left India as a baby, to return to it to take up his first posting in the ICS. ‘The green upholstered compartment of the Frontier Mail in which I headed for the Punjab, so unlike anything in the experience of the traveller back home, was not unexpected, any more than the white incandescence of midday over the endless plain as we rattled north, the wallowing buffaloes, the toy villages barely distinguishable from the mud from which they were made, the Persian wheels, the temples and the mosques . . .’.
Like so much in India, train travel for the servants of the Raj managed to combine luxury with hardship. Trains were extremely comfortable owing to the broad gauge of the rolling stock (most were around 5 feet 6 inches), and the absence of corridors meant first-class carriages (routine for Europeans) were more like sitting rooms, with fans, leather sofas and private bathrooms attached. The attention of your personal servant (who travelled in the scrum of an adjacent third-class carriage), who brought you tea, soda water or hot water for washing, meant that you did not have to deal with luggage, food or any other arrangements.
Everyone travelled with a bedding roll, with which your servant made up your bunk at night. Another piece of travel equipment was a leather-covered enamel basin that doubled as a sponge bag. The cupboard-like bathroom at the side of the carriage had room for a thunderbox and an overhead pipe from which dripped a thin flow of water, a form of primitive shower.
‘We took a train up India for two days and nights,’ wrote Iris James. ‘Of course, we had a carriage to ourselves, and in the evenings unrolled our “bisters” – canvas sausages that held our bedding, with pockets at each end for towels and a chamber pot. The dust rolled in clouds through the open windows and the studded leather seats grew slimy under our sweating thighs. At stations men handed in trays with teapots, and plates of bread covered with rancid butter, and little green bananas.’ Their destination was Naini Tal, a hill station 6,560 feet above sea level in the Kumaon Hills.
There were no restaurant cars but stops of about an hour were made at suitable times at wayside stations. Here British travellers would proceed to the station restaurant, where a meal was provided. Usually this consisted of stringy curried chicken and a caramel custard as dessert. If it were evening, when you returned to your carriage you would find your bedding laid out and everything ready for the night.
Fishing Fleet girl Bethea Field crossed India from west to east when she journeyed the 1,500 miles from Quetta to Calcutta to meet her fiancé, leaving Quetta one late afternoon in December 1919.
‘Sleep was often disturbed from a stop at some big station. The clamour was unbelievable and nobody could have slept through it or the garish lights. The Indian would-be passengers ran in all directions and shouted to each other as they ran. The sweet sellers, the water sellers, the tea sellers, all announcing their wares at the tops of their voices. Here and there a khaki-clad policeman with his lathi* prepared to restore order should the crowd become too turbulent. The guard would walk up and down the platform near the train, shouting out the name of the stations. Indians have the most powerful larynxes and no amount of shouting seems to exhaust them.’
Apart from the stations, Bethea would also often wake up when the train was about to cross one of the many long bridges, as its rhythm would change from the steady double jolt of the train going over the sleepers laid on ballast to a hollow, booming sound. The pace slowed and she felt a frisson of tension. ‘The bridges were magnificently built but there was always the chance that some pier had been undermined. In December, the dry season, the great rivers were trickles between sand banks but I remember once crossing the Jumna in the rains when the brown floodwaters, crested with creamy waves, almost reached the sleepers of the bridge.
‘In the dawn one saw small boys with little sticks driving the cattle, who had been herded during the night in the small village enclosures surrounded by thorn barricades, out into the fields to graze the day away. They shouted and whacked as the still-sleepy cattle and goats stumbled along. Dim figures emerged from the thatched huts. Women drew water from the village well and took it to the men who gargled and spat and rinsed their faces before girding themselves in their loin clothes and tying their big turbans in preparation for the day’s toil in the fields. The dogs came out and barked at the crows – the innumerable carrion crows of India.
‘Through the United Provinces it was all fertile, the fields green with the young crops, mango plantations in between and on the hillocks the animals grazed. Villages were frequent, the huts hung with pumpkin vines growing over the thatch. Sometimes, more distant, there was a small town with whitewashed houses and a Hindu temple or a mosque with minaret. The grand trunk road mostly ran alongside the railway, carrying its traffic of horse-drawn vehicles and the occasional motorcar or lorry. We arrived at Howrah station, Calcutta at 6.30 in the morning.’
Some carried travel comforts to extremes. Sixty servants were thought necessary to look after Lord Reading, Viceroy from 1921 to 1926, when he, Lady Reading, their assistants and their guest Edwina Ashley paid a three-day visit to the Maharaja of Alwar, a state known as one of the hottest parts of India (here India’s highest-ever temperature, 50.6°C, was recorded on 10 May 1956). They travelled in the Viceroy’s personal narrow gauge train; on arrival they were met by a fleet of Rolls-Royces; four lorries for the luggage and an omnibus for the servants.
But even in the luxurious, white and gold viceregal train on the way to the hills from Delhi the door handles were too hot to touch and, as Lilah Wingfield had noted ten years earlier: ‘It is a bore not to be able to drink any water from now on and the boiled or condensed milk one has in one’s tea or coffee is very nasty.’ The dust and the smutty debris of the coal-fired locomotives penetrated everywhere, in spite of the three layers of glass, wire gauze and slatted Venetian blinds against extreme sunlight on the windows of the carriages. ‘We had clean clothes twice a day and our pillowcases and sheets were just black,’ wrote one woman after three nights and several changes; and often it was difficult to take enough (safe) water to satisfy.
Most people, like Lilah, travelled in the cooler weather. In the heat it was not so much travel as an endurance test. ‘The drill was to set out with a wet towel round the head,’ wrote Humphrey Trevelyan in May 1936, about to leave the baking heat of Gwalior for a few weeks in Poona. ‘Keep the windows of the car tight shut against the scorching wind, get in the burning hot train with a large block of ice, eighty pounds of it, in a container between the seats, dip a towel in the ice water and tie it under the fan, shut the windows and shutters, dip your own towel in the ice water and tie it round your head again, lie down and hope that you would still be alive the other end.’
Desirée Hart was lucky enough to enjoy an air-conditioned carriage until Delhi, after which she was settled into a small ladies-only compartment in a train that had been waiting in a siding all day under the blazing sun. To render it tolerable a slab of ice was placed in a flat tin on the floor under a whirring fan. At first, the air was deliciously fresh but inevitably the ice began to melt and Desirée spent much of the time trying to keep her feet out of the growing pool of water, as a film of red dust that had percolated through the closed windows gradually covered both her and the carriage.
When Jean Hilary left Calcutta to travel to Sialkot the journey came as a shock. Her father Henry Hilary had first come to Calcutta in 1903, and ten years later had become Chief Executive of the Calcutta Port Trust. When the 1914 war broke out he had returned to England to fight for his country and was killed in action near Arras in June 1917, aged forty-one. He had been involved in plans to build a new dock for the port, finally opened in 1929. His widow had been invited to the opening but, with two boys still at school in England, she sent her twenty-two-year-old daughter Jean to represent her. Jean, Fishing Fleet material par excellence, had constantly to reassure her mother that she was not going to marry one of the many men who proposed to her. ‘Don’t imagine anything will happen as I definitely don’t care enough, and find other men much too amusing,’ she wrote home of one luckless suitor.
Because by the first week of April she was beginning to find the heat of Calcutta oppressive she accepted the invitation of another admirer to stay (suitably chaperoned) in Sialkot. The friends with whom she had been staying in Calcutta sent their bearer with her as escort. ‘This journey is being pretty good hell and my only consolation is that I am travelling alone,’ she wrote in one of her weekly letters to her mother. ‘Most of the day I have been just lying on the bed, with only a petticoat on (no stockings) and a dressing gown to throw over me at the stations. All the windows and jalousies are up and it’s fearful – one simply can’t bear to be touching anything for long as it’s red hot. It’s quite impossible to touch any part of one’s own body with any other part. I have lemonade and soda water brought to me at every stop as one has to drink it at once or it’s hot. I am now having tea consisting of petit beurre biscuits and fizzy lemonade. I am just full of eau gaseuse.
‘Simon the bearer is good and kind, comes along at each station and stays with my things while I eat. I paid thirteen rupees eleven annas for his ticket and twelve rupees ten annas for mine, and I have to pay him a return second class, as he goes back alone. Reggie got all the tickets for me and sent his bearer down with my baggage. I have a bottle of Evian for my teeth and have not forgotten soap or Bromo [toilet] paper! I have some good books to read which are saving my life as it’s too hot to sleep.’ But arrival at Sialkot did not bring the longed-for relief from the heat; soon afterwards, Jean was writing: ‘I can’t imagine why I left Calcutta because it was getting hot – it’s hotter here and none of the facilities for coping with it. Each bungalow has [only] one fan and some have none, and it’s turned off periodically during the day to save the current.’
Fishing Fleet girls who had come out to rejoin their families might easily find themselves somewhere remote – one planter’s daughter scrawled ‘It is very boring here!’ across a photograph of her father’s bungalow many miles from their nearest (planter) neighbour.
When Charles Ormerod was still a junior member of the ICS his parents decided to send his younger sister, Hrefna, out to stay with him to see if she could find a husband. For Hrefna, used to a smart social life in England, arrival in India to find primitive sanitation, newspaper pasted up on the windows of her bedroom in default of curtains and the lack of other amenities such as electricity and long-distance telephone calls came as a jolt.
The culminating shock was Charles’s brisk way with rats. ‘They were having dinner when all of a sudden my father saw a rat scuttling along the wall of the dining room,’ recounted Charles’s daughter Penelope Mayfield. ‘Without a moment’s thought he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead. Hrefna was astounded but to my father that was normal. He had always been a good shot – at Cambridge he was in the Shooting Eight – so to him this was part of life.’ (Hrefna, happily, overcame her shock sufficiently to find a husband later in the visit.)
Girls who had been invited out by relations or friends usually arrived at a reasonably sizeable destination. They could expect to find themselves in a station or cantonment, with a club or Gymkhana as its social heart. The club could be anything from a few rooms where you could read old newspapers, buy drinks and meet the (often lamentably few) other Europeans in the station, to much grander affairs with tennis courts and golf links, a library and Saturday dances. Its rules were much the same as English clubs, with the addition that almost all excluded Indians, even as guests. Women were kept in their place, often a special annexe, and generally not allowed near the bar.* Sometimes segregation was such that if a husband was in the club and his wife was in the hen house, as the ladies’ annexe was familiarly known, the couple had to send each other notes by a servant if they wanted to leave together.
Often stations were near or had sprung up round a local Indian town or village – but never too near. The huddled dwellings, rudimentary sanitation and often filthy alleys made for a noisome atmosphere. Sam Raschen, driving with a friend in the Mohmand region on the North-West Frontier, was some distance away when he heard a sound like a factory at work, ‘as of high-powered engines and driving belts’. When he asked his companion what it was, he received the laconic reply: ‘Flies.’ And it was – ‘houseflies by the million crawling and swarming over everything’.
Thus when the British built stations and cantonments they were separate and upwind from any nearby Indian village, both for fear of infection and to avoid smells. Cantonments were laid out with wide roads and, usually, sizeable gardens round each bungalow; these had spacious, airy rooms with high ceilings and whitewashed walls. Each bedroom had a bathroom leading off it, with (before running water was installed) a hole in the wall through which water drained when tipped out of the bath, large ‘ali baba’ water jars and the familiar thunderbox.
Pre-Mutiny bungalows generally had thick walls to withstand the heat, and deep verandas. As, in the early days, disease was supposedly often spread by a ‘poisonous miasma’, densest in ravines, gullies and clefts, bungalows were frequently raised on a platform above ground level. This served to counter the danger of the dreaded white ants (termites) that could eat their way through anything from a wall to a library full of books, and also meant that bungalows tended to be more airy.
The main drawback to the average bungalow was lack of privacy, as rooms led into one another and a servant might appear at any moment; against this, as the novelist Maud Diver pointed out in the early 1900s, there were no gas-pipes to leak, no water-pipes to freeze, no boilers to burst, no windows to clean, no grates to polish – and many more servants to do the minimal housework.
The new arrival would quickly learn that certain precautions were a routine part of daily life. Milk and water were boiled, fruit peeled or washed in permanganate of potash, care was taken to ensure food was kept fly-free, topis were invariably worn out of doors, mosquito nets hung over beds and an eye kept out for rabid dogs. Bathrooms were routinely checked for snakes that had crawled in through the drainage hole and wrapped themselves round the cool water jars and no one walked through the beds of lucerne, often grown in large gardens to feed horses and polo ponies, in case a cobra might be nesting there. In the early days, antique furniture legs had to stand in saucers of water to minimise the chance of destruction by white ants and silks and satins mildewed in the rainy season.
The new girl would have been struck at once by the formality of much of life and the protocols that governed it. In the Raj, as with royalty, attitudes and behaviour were well behind contemporary custom and usage, with everything from etiquette to medical theories preserved in a kind of social formaldehyde. This sprang from the hierarchical nature of the governing institutions: the ICS and the Army. When junior members of either arrived in India, they naturally took their lead from the top; by the time they in turn had reached this exalted position, they carried with them the customs and habits imprinted on them in their youth.
Thus the iron rule of precedence regulated social intercourse, from whom you called on to whom you sat next to at dinner. As the position of every official and military officer was detailed in a graded list known as the ‘Warrant of Precedence’, published by the Government of India, it was possible not only to seat people according to seniority but for a new arrival to deduce everyone’s place in the pecking order. There were sixty-six categories in the Warrant; at the top, of course, was the Viceroy, at the bottom, sub-deputy opium agents.
Businessmen did not figure on the Warrant of Precedence but were nonetheless graded according to equally arcane rules. The broadest division among them was that between ‘commerce’ and ‘trade’ – the management of plantations was the former, and higher; selling something directly to the public was the latter. Other markers were education – a good public school and university elevated, as did long familiarity with horse, gun or rod – a decent address and a car. Even clothes came into the equation, with the wrong ones an immediate one-down mark: Owain Jenkins, a young man working in the Calcutta office of Balmer Lawrie, was quickly told by a colleague to buy a ‘better hat’. His topi had been bought in Port Said and was covered in cheap cotton cloth, with a chinstrap resembling cardboard. ‘Acceptable hats . . . were covered in gabardine and had chinstraps of suede,’ he was told.
Women were ranked according to the status and seniority of their husband or father, the senior ladies having ‘their’ seat on a favoured club sofa reserved for them, first shuttlecock in a game of badminton served to them and getting first use of the loos after dinner; nor could anyone leave a dinner party before the most senior lady there. (When the Hon. Margaret Ashton married Hugh Whistler of the Indian Police in 1924 there was much scratching of heads: did Margaret’s status as the daughter of a lord raise that of Whistler – or did his lower hers?)
Most people still changed for dinner, if only because of the pleasure of washing away the heat, dust and sweat of the day and of putting on clean clothes – laid out by one’s bearer – and for women, long skirts were a protection against mosquitoes. Another, more subliminal reason was that the consciousness of being the ruling elite permeated virtually every aspect of daily life.
Where the old East India Company had based its intercourse with India on trade, with intermarriage not only accepted but often welcomed, the British of the Raj were there to govern, and govern they did. As with anyone in a dominant position maintained by acceptance and good will rather than purely by force, and in a nation accustomed to the magnificence and dignity of its princes,* behaviour and outward show counted for much.
The British preoccupation with hierarchy, and the ceremonial that went with it, was not, therefore, a subject of mockery to the Indians themselves, but the reverse, something they understood since ceremonial and ritual had long been part of their own lives: their rulers were accustomed to unquestioning obedience and palaces full of servants and panoply as impressive as they could muster on occasions of importance.
Similarly, for the British, standards not only had to be maintained, they had to be shown to be maintained – and dinner dresses, white gloves and hats were simply one way of expressing this. ‘Yesterday night I dined with the Hoddings; neither he nor the Major dress for dinner apparently when they dine on the quiet,’ wrote Leslie Lavie disapprovingly (on 21 July 1896) to his fiancée Flossie ‘I don’t like the idea of not dressing at all, but I remember the Major used to say the same thing, and he seems to have dropped into the way of it. I hope I shan’t and, darling, I hope you won’t.’ Edward Wakefield, writing in the 1930s, described changing for dinner ‘even in camp’.
Even mourning emphasised the importance of the regime and by extension that of the Viceroy; following the death of a Sovereign, officers wore black armbands and their wives wore black for three months. In Government House, even the death of a lesser member of the royal family received the same treatment. ‘Rushed off to shops and bought some white material with wee black spots on it as we’ve all got to wear black or white or black and white for weeks at GH on account of Queen Maud of Norway,’* wrote Claudine Gratton, then eighteen, on 1 December 1938.
The Raj was shot through with protocol of different sorts. First, there was the complicated caste system of India. A gardener – a fairly lowly job – could be a poor man but of a high caste; if he was a Brahmin and your shadow fell on the food he was eating, this had to be thrown away because your impurity had defiled it. Most table servants were, in fact, Muslim. Only those of the lowest caste could be sweepers, who brought in and emptied water for baths and emptied the thunderboxes.*
What would probably not strike the newcomer for several days was the homogeneity of the society into which she had arrived. Except in the ranks of British regiments, the British ‘working class’ was poorly represented – Indian labour, cheaper and local, took its place – as were children over eight and teenagers (only a few remained with their parents and were educated by the PEN system); and almost no old people.
The formality of much of English life often contrasted unhappily with the elegance, colour and fluidity of the inhabitants of their adopted country. As Lilah Wingfield noted appreciatively: ‘The way these Eastern women of the bazaars, the very poorest of the poor, walk with lithe grace, carrying a pot of burnished brass on their heads, apparently so easily, supported by one shapely raised arm, and the stealthy, noiseless tread as they pace along with bare feet in the dust, more gliding than walking, with that inimitable gracefulness of movement and poise that marks the east from the west will always remain a wonder and a delight to me. I love watching them.’