Apart from her sola topi and an open mind, the Fishing Fleet Girl’s most important accessory was her calling card. Without it, she was a non-person, socially invisible.
‘The first thing my aunt did when I arrived was to have some cards printed for me and then take me round to all her friends and to Government House to leave cards,’ Katherine Welford told me. ‘This ensured an invitation to dinner. And all the young men would call on my aunt and leave their cards and then she would invite them to dinner parties. And then they would ask me out dancing. I met hundreds of them. It was lovely.’
Violet Hanson, who had come to India to stay with her aunt in Malabar Hill – one of the best quarters of Bombay – was familiar with the practice of calling from staying with her grandmother, who would summon her carriage and drive round to various ladies’ houses.
The etiquette of calling had been firmly established in English nineteenth-century life, as a means of keeping in touch with a wide circle of social equals, of establishing oneself in society, or of rising in it (if one’s call was accepted), for these small rectangles of pasteboard could keep social aspirants at a distance until they could be assessed as suitable – or not. In the Raj, this complicated ritual had been refined down into the simple matter of dropping a card in a box. When Olive Douglas paid calls in 1913 she went out with a list in her hand and asked the servant who answered at the first house for the ‘bokkus’ (the wooden box into which calling cards were dropped). As she wrote: ‘If the lady is not receiving he brings out a wooden box with the inscription “Mrs X not at home”, you drop in your cards and drive on to the next bungalow . . . If she is receiving, he comes out with her salaams and you go in for a few minutes but that doesn’t often happen. The funny thing is one may have hundreds of people on one’s visiting list and not know half of them by sight, because of the convenient system of the not-at-home box.’
It was exactly the same for men, especially for the numerous bachelors if they wanted any kind of life away from the confines of club or chummery. Sam Raschen recorded, also in 1913: ‘Armed with a carefully prepared geographical list of names and with a box of cards, one set off in one’s best suit and a gharry [horse-drawn cab], driving from bungalow to bungalow dropping cards into the box hung outside every door. In due course the calls were returned by the husbands of the ladies called on; cards with your name written on were placed in the racks provided for the purpose at the Sind Club or the Gymkhana. It may sound very formal, but it served its purpose of drawing attention to a newcomer’s arrival, and an invitation to a dinner party, picnic or tennis soon followed.’
If a family was temporarily leaving the area, perhaps to go to the hills, they wrote ‘P.P.C.’ (pour prendre congé) on their cards when they called, as a reminder that they would soon be back.
By the late 1920s calling was just as necessary but even more of a hollow ritual, with not even a pretence that the caller might be asked in. ‘One of my first duties after arriving at Lyallpur* had been to pay a round of social calls,’ wrote Edward Wakefield. ‘I was given a list of thirty or forty names and told to leave my visiting card in the little black tin box that I would find attached to a board at the entrance to each bungalow. Each box had painted on it in white letters the words “Not at Home”. Conscientiously, on a bicycle, I did the tedious round, gradually working through the list.’
When he left out one because he could not find the bungalow, its indignant owner wrote to Wakefield’s superior, the Deputy Commissioner, declining an invitation to dinner at which Wakefield would be present: ‘as he has not had the courtesy to call on us we would prefer not to meet him.’ The matter was rectified by the speedy dropping in of a card. To avoid this kind of gaffe, people would keep little leather booklets, like diaries, entitled ‘Register of Calls’, headed ‘Date and Calls Received’ on one page and on the opposite, facing page, ‘Date and Calls Made’.
Equally imperative was the ceremony of signing the Book, kept either in the house of the Divisional Commander or near the gate of a Governor’s residence, if you wished to be included in any of the top-level invitations. So vital was this considered that Katherine Welford, invited with her aunt and uncle to dinner at Government House, found herself tracked down during the day of the dinner by a flustered ADC, who told her reprovingly: ‘You’re supposed to be dining with us tonight but you haven’t signed the Book!’ She had to be driven immediately to Government House in her uncle’s car to sign the Book and then dash back home to change for the dinner, returning to Government House an hour or so later.
‘It’s surprising how touchy people are about this whole business of calling,’ reflected Margaret Martyn. ‘They compare notes to see if so-and-so has called on you and not yet on them, and vice versa, and Mrs A won’t invite young Mr X for dinner or drinks – he’s so uncouth, has been here a week and hasn’t called yet.’
Nor was distance considered an obstacle. In 1920 Fishing Fleet girl Bethea Field was a new bride and the wife of the most senior Government official in the district, which meant that cards were left on her first ‘and then I had to return them. Some of the nearer ones I could do on foot but those further away I had to post. My callers left their cards on the way to the Club but I had no means of going the fifteen miles or so to return them. Even so, there were whisperings that I was “slack”.’
By contrast, going out to dinner was often by the most informal kind of transport. ‘In the army stations, very few people had or could afford cars,’ explained Valerie Welchman (née Pridmore Riley). ‘So you went out to dinner on your bicycle. You picked up the corner of your skirt and both of you pedalled off to dinner, or a dance, and pedalled back afterwards. In cantonments, the roads were built up high with deep gutters each side so that the water could drain down in the heavy rainfall of the monsoons. If someone emerged from a dance having done rather too well it was quite easy to fall down the side into one of these gutters.’
Cards were not the only form of protocol of which the Fishing Fleet had to be aware. Girls whose fathers had risen to high-ranking posts while their daughters were at school in England had to learn the rules when their formal education ended. They were taught how to behave at dinner parties (‘talk first to the man on your right; then to the man on your left; start a conversation but never close it; never shut up either man’), told always to wear long white gloves at viceregal dinners, and to carry frilly parasols to race meetings; to invite to parties only young men who had officially ‘called’.
The ‘right’ clothes were needed: ‘. . . it is so funny having to think so much about clothes as one has to out here,’ wrote Lady Elisabeth Bruce, daughter of the Viceroy Lord Elgin, when she arrived for the Calcutta Season of 1897. ‘Dress at 7 to go out. Dress at 9 for the morning. Dress at two for luncheon. Dress at 4.30 if you walk or play tennis. Dress for dinner. And though one seems to have cupboards full of clothes, one never knows what to wear and has to think a long time so as to have something different on different days.’
Many of these clothes had to be formal, sometimes to emphasise your own status, sometimes to recognise that of others. To meet the Maharani of Travancore Beatrice Baker and her mother dressed rather as for Ascot, in flowered silk dresses, large sweeping hats, gloves, silk stockings and high-heeled court shoes. The Maharani and her daughter wore filmy saris, gold sandals and bare feet, with their long, thick, glossy dark hair decorated with flowers.
When Jon and Rumer Godden went out to India in 1914, all Englishwomen wore corsets, stockings, petticoats, dresses with high necks and long sleeves. The real benefit for women came when, in the 1920s and 1930s, linen or cotton dresses replaced the Victorian and Edwardian assemblage of voluminous underclothes, corsets, whalebone collars and ankle-length skirts.
Seniority was the touchstone when it came to seating and uniforms were not only a part of (Army) life but often a reflection of an individual’s status – a status clearly marked wherever that individual might be. As Edward Wakefield put it: ‘Never, I am sure, has there existed in England such an elaborate structure of class distinction as British exiles erected for themselves in up-country clubs in India.’ At the heart of government, pomp and circumstance ruled even more so – papers for the Viceroy’s attention were carried in by orderlies in long scarlet gowns trimmed with gold lace. (Of one huge pile Curzon remarked: ‘I have perused these papers for two hours and twenty minutes. On the whole, I agree with the gentleman whose signature resembles a trombone.’)
Sometimes the insistence on formality became stifling. When Monica Campbell-Martin, newly married and aged twenty-one, walked to the gate of her bungalow with the elderly official who had called on her with a message about tennis, and chatted to him for a few minutes before he got into his car, she was reprimanded the next day ‘for having been seen talking, for so long, on the public road, to a gentleman, alone.’
The higher up the social scale, the more repressive life could be When Nancy and Daisy Leiter came to stay with their sister Mary Curzon, the Vicereine, in April 1899 these two free-spirited young American girls found the stiffness of Viceregal Lodge hilarious. Curzon, well aware that as the King’s representative he ruled over almost ten times as many subjects as the King himself, was treated with more reverence than was royalty at home. The Leiter girls, rich, pretty and not disposed to bow the knee to someone whom they could now call ‘family’, had to be taken aside by Mary and spoken to sternly: they must not call the Viceroy ‘George’ except when they were alone, and they must always give him precedence. The girls’ reaction was mockery by overblown obsequiousness: at one public ceremony they prostrated themselves before Curzon in exaggerated fashion. This so shocked everyone and horrified the viceregal staff that they were sent to their rooms in disgrace. ‘Socially the advent of the Leiters has done great harm,’ wrote Walter Lawrence, Curzon’s Private Secretary, in his diary.
There were other misdemeanours and to add to it all, both put on a great deal of weight in a mere two months – like most of the British in India, the Curzons’ cuisine was largely English (achieved brilliantly by cooks working in primitive conditions and with no knowledge of what a dish should taste like). Daisy gained fifteen pounds; ‘her sit-upon is perfectly enormous and she is bursting out of her clothes,’ wrote Mary, who added that there is ‘no one on our staff who will be a matrimonial danger and I won’t allow any flirtation.’ Whenever the girls went to dances they were heavily chaperoned by sophisticated older women. Nevertheless, neither the sisters’ behaviour, the attentive chaperoning nor their increased girth stopped both of them meeting their future husbands when staying with the Curzons – and both of these men were Curzon’s ADCs.
Chaperoning, as in England, was a constant for young girls, with the added ramification that a single woman who might in England be considered old and sensible enough to read a railway timetable and get herself from station A to station B was in the Raj regarded as more of a parcel to be handed on from host to host. ‘Even . . . in 1933 I found a girl could not easily travel about independently,’ wrote Helen Rutledge. ‘Or rather geographically she could, but was discouraged from being too independent and doors would not have opened for her . . . Even very distinguished travellers, who “knew the ropes” [and were] hardened to every discomfort, like Gertrude Bell, relied on their letters of introduction and being “passed on”.’
With such letters, or invitations to stay, visitors could rely on hospitality of the most generous kind. Friends of friends would be happily pressed into service to meet an arriving Fishing Fleet girl if her parents were unable to get away. ‘I was met by a friend of my uncle’s, Archie Ricketts, who took me to stay with other friends,’ said Katherine Welford of her arrival in Colombo en route to Madras. ‘Archie must have been kept busy entertaining people passing through Colombo, expensive and time consuming for him but I was given a wonderful time during the four days that I was there. We went to the races and dined at the famous Galle Face Hotel and to Mount Lavinia.’ In the same way, someone who wanted to stay on after the cold weather and see what a hill station was like could rely on being asked up to one.
When the cold weather began in mid-October, it was the signal for four months of non-stop gaiety – race weeks, polo weeks, ICS weeks, horse shows, race meetings, gymkhanas, paperchases, moonlight picnics, garden parties and constant dinner and cocktail parties. For anyone still at a loose end, most twentieth-century cantonments, towns and hill stations had a cinema. With books in short supply, no television or – for the most part – no radio, films were often the focus of evening entertainment. At Bangalore, Claudine Gratton managed to see several most weeks; during the week of 19 November 1937, for instance, there was Harold Lloyd in The Cat’s Paw and Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy.
‘From now on for the following year life became a glamorous fairy-tale,’ wrote Betsy Anderson, who had been brought out to India, aged seventeen, in the Fishing Fleet of 1923 by her mother after years at an English boarding school, followed by presentation at Court and a London Season. They stayed for a few days with friends in Bombay, in a house that reminded Betsy of Rome, with its black and white marble floors, high ceilings and windows with long venetian blinds.
‘I had been to some big dances at home, and to the May Week balls at Cambridge, by which time we would be looking somewhat dishevelled. They had been tremendous fun – sometimes arriving in a punt, dancing the Charleston with great vigour, and ending with a breakfast picnic on the river at Grantchester.
‘But here at the Yacht Club everything was perfection – gorgeous evening dress, the men in uniform, and we danced on a superbly sprung floor. The gardens, which were discreetly lit, had well-watered smooth green lawns looking across the harbour to the ships twinkling with lights – all very romantic and unreal.’
Betsy’s father held the important position of Resident, at Neemuch, Central India, and so the Andersons had the largest bungalow in the place, its best feature its shiny stone floors. Betsy and her mother set about making it looking attractive with yards of pretty coloured silks from the bazaar and huge vases of bougain-villea, canna lilies and other plants. ‘There were dances at the Club, and this was fun for me, as the Gunners had just arrived from the Frontier and a young girl – the only one in the place – was a novelty. I was thoroughly spoilt, sought after for the dances, taken for picnics and out riding. At which I was not at all experienced.
‘I fell blissfully in love with the handsome young subaltern who tried to teach me to ride, also because he was a divine dancer – this did not last long as, during the cold weather, my father’s work had to be carried out while camping and moving from village to village.’
Betsy was one of the lucky ones taken to see India’s most famous sight: the Taj Mahal. Her parents had met in Agra and her mother insisted that Betsy’s first view of this extraordinary building must be by moonlight.‘We waited together silently around midnight in the stillness of the soft, warm, starlit Indian night,’ she recalled later. ‘[My mother] slipped through a door in the large arched gateway, beckoning me to follow. We stood, hardly daring to breathe, watching the amazing sight before us.
‘As the first light of the full moon rose glowing behind the immense and incredible dome and minarets, it appeared as a translucent, ethereal vision about to float into the sky . . . its shimmering reflection was mirrored in the long stretch of water in the garden, making a pathway almost reaching to our feet.’ An old priest took them down into the vaults, ‘demonstrating that if one sang the notes of an octave the complete chord would be repeated high up in the vast dome . . . we stood singing different chords for a long time’.
In Calcutta, Marian Atkins’s day began with riding a pony lent by friends – her parents thought it not worth buying a horse for her as her father was due for home leave in four or five months. Sometimes on Sunday mornings she rode with friends from the Jodhpur Club.
‘These were red letter days as we went at least ten to fifteen miles into the “jungle” round about. “Jungle” was a misnomer as it consisted of paddy fields, dried up for harvest in the cold weather after the monsoon, and guava orchards. These were always on made-up ground as Calcutta was built on the Ganges delta, its particular branch being the Hooghli. Guava trees are prettier than apple trees, having bark which peeled off regularly, like London plane trees, and wiggly branches. The fruit is apple-sized and green ripening to yellow.’
On Friday mornings the great excitement was a paper chase, in India always played on horseback. ‘The Paper Chase Club met early at 7.00 a.m. at one of the milestones on the Diamond Harbour Route out beyond Jodhpur Club and the Dakuria Lakes (Father’s handiwork),’ wrote Marian in late 1930.
‘They were great occasions; all my friends from the Calcutta Light Horse rode if their horses were sufficiently trained by then. The jumps were mud walls and coconut leaves, making a similar course to a point-to-point at home. Two of the officials rode round first, laying the paper trail. The rest of us, who for one reason or another preferred not to chase, watched the start and finish. The points gained were added up for the final result at the end of the season. After the chase we lazy or incapable ones went round through the holes or over the tops, as we fancied.
‘On one occasion I nearly fell off and found myself suspended from the saddle by my bent knee. There was always a large crowd of Indians watching – they are mad keen on sports – after all, we got polo and gymkhanas from them, to say nothing of tent-pegging.* They all roared with delight at my predicament but I managed to climb back into the saddle, raised my bamboo riding stick in salute – and got an even louder roar as I rode on.’
The largest pool of eligible bachelors in India was in Madras, often known as the catchment area for the Fishing Fleet because of the number of single men working both for the Government and for businesses – Madras had been a centre of trade and industry since the early days of the East India Company and had continued to flourish. A British regiment was always stationed in the Fort; an Indian regiment out at St Thomas’s Mount. There were other resident young men in banks, import and export firms, connected with cotton mills and railways, the Forestry Department, the Public Works Department and of course the ICS. Life was social to an almost frenzied degree, with any Fishing Fleet girl sure of an endless supply of admirers.
Annette Bowen found herself at the heart of it. She had been brought back to India by her parents in the autumn of 1933, aged almost eighteen, after being educated in England, finishing with a term at Queen’s College, Harley Street. Her engineer father, Charles Henry Croasdaile Bowen, had worked most of his life for the Madras & Southern Mahratta Railway; his special line was bridges, and over the years he designed many over the rivers emptying into the Bay of Bengal. In 1933 he was Bridge Engineer and Chief Engineer, based in Madras.
‘Here I spent nearly three years of sheer pleasure and interest,’ Annette reminisced. ‘There was the Indian scene to explore plus the social pattern of dancing, riding, swimming and picnics, Mah Jongg and amateur theatricals, choir singing, a course with the Governor’s Mounted Body Guard, trips up country in my father’s inspection cars, visits, social work (almshouse visiting and library duty on vernacular books), snipe-shooting, paper-chasing, rowing on the Adyar river and plenty of friends of both sexes for the first time in my life.’
She dined out several times a week, sometimes invited to dinner parties, sometimes in parties she and her friends organised in clubs or chummeries, usually going on to a cinema, or to dance all night, often followed by a day in the saddle. ‘Early mornings were spent riding or hunting, when horses were sent out to a planned milestone, miles out from Madras and we, changing from dance clothes to riding clothes, drove straight out in the dark and moved off in the dawn mist through flooded paddy fields and coconut plantations, through pale dusky-laned hamlets smelling of dung fires and coffee. Meets [of the hunt] were usually on Sundays, so we got back for gargantuan late breakfasts, then slept, and reassembled for evensong in the huge cool cathedral.’
Fancy dress and ‘theme’ parties were taken seriously. Annette once designed a ‘circus’ dance, with herself in the costume of the ringmaster – ‘black silk stockings stitched to my briefs, a borrowed scarlet tailcoat, black topper and whip’. Sporting events also meant parties, parties, parties – Race Week, Rugger Week, Cricket Week, Rowing Week, ‘when hordes of delightful young men would arrive from all over India and require accommodation and entertainment. A complete rugger team of planters from Ceylon once slept on our upstairs veranda, and we also hosted some of the MCC on tour.’ It was girlie heaven.
In the grand villas left by eighteenth-century merchants, set in spacious grounds, the entertaining was more formal but just as easy and frequent. Katherine Welford’s diary describes her days in Madras.
‘My uncle was manager of the Burma Shell Oil Company in South India. Labour was cheap and they had many servants. First thing in the morning the butler brought me a cup of tea. Then we went out for a swim at Elliot’s Beach, about a quarter of an hour’s drive from their house. Lovely warm water. We swam about eight or half past then came back and had a bath and breakfast. My aunt and I would go with my uncle in the car to the office, leave him there and then go shopping. Lovely shops – gorgeous silk underclothes, all hand-embroidered. Sometimes we would play mah jongg at another bungalow.
‘After lunch (always a different curry), we had a siesta. Even in what was called the cold weather, Madras was hot during the day. Lying under the mosquito net I could watch the little lizards running up the walls. After a cup of tea, my aunt and I would go for a drive or a walk round Nungumbaukaum, the part of Madras where they lived, and when my uncle came back we’d have drinks on the balcony upstairs and more often than not a young man would call for me and I’d go out.’
Often Katherine, her aunt and uncle went to watch a polo match and there was a regular twice-weekly visit to the races; her uncle was senior steward of the Madras Race Course, where the jockeys came from Britain and Australia. The gardens there were beautiful, with seats beneath shady trees and brilliant tropical flowers to gaze on. As he was a senior steward, her uncle had his own box. They would drive out in time for a delicious lunch at the course, for which some of the food had been sent out from Fortnum & Mason, London’s most expensive and prestigious grocer. Launching the proceedings, the Governor and his wife, Sir George and Lady Beatrix Stanley,* would drive down the Straight, in an open carriage, behind mounted bodyguards magnificent in their colourful uniforms.
‘Sometimes we would go to the Adyar Club for drinks on the terrace that overlooked the Adyar River. It was a large white colonial building with lovely grounds, a lawn that sloped down to the river and lights in the trees – a very romantic place. There was a big veranda where people sat and had dinner – if you were having drinks there and a young man asked you to dine, you went back and changed into a long dress. There was a ballroom inside where dances were held twice a week. We often stayed for a late supper, or if we’d been dancing all night, for a breakfast of kippers, sent from the UK, at three or four in the morning. Then we’d go home about six.’
Another diversion was a weekend at the seaside. From Calcutta this meant Puri, staying either at an hotel or at one of the guest houses or hostels built by various of the companies and businesses based in Calcutta. Here beach ‘boys’ (some were in their sixties) in conical straw hats patrolled the shore to escort bathers into the sea – entering was difficult because of the surf. Others came round with ‘tiffin boxes’ slung from their shoulders, offering food for lunch. Jean Hilary, taken there by friends, wrote of the relaxed freedom of that weekend in 1929. ‘We wore no stockings! only kicks, petticoat and dress.’
As most young women would notice pretty quickly, there was little mixing with Indians, apart from the servants in every bungalow. Indeed, it was possible for many Englishwomen – in particular for regimental wives, where the social life of the community took place almost entirely within that community – never to meet anyone Indian except their own servants and those of their friends. (Even here, potential difficulties could emerge. ‘Before dinner my ayah brushed my hair. It had got very dirty but it had somehow not occurred to me that I could let those skinny little black hands actually touch me but after a bit I got used to the idea and acquiesced and felt no repugnance as I thought I should have done,’ wrote Lilah Wingfield on 29 November 1911).
Today, it seems extraordinary that an impassable gulf existed between the two races; and that sophisticated, intelligent, well-educated Indians, descended from a civilisation far older than that of their overlords, should have been so snubbed. At the same time, advantage was taken of their innate good manners: if some grand personage – a governor, a viceroy – wanted a tiger shoot, it was expected that the chosen maharaja would lay one on.
Long gone was the time when it was accepted that many East India Company men and soldiers took Indian wives; with the Raj came the barrier most forcibly expressed by Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.’ It was an elitism fostered by what was seen as the need to emphasise the difference between the rulers and the ruled, underlining what was then the sincerely held belief that belonging to the British Empire – which then held sway over three-fifths of the earth’s surface – was the best possible fate for any nation, race or creed.
Men in the ICS did, of course, work with Indians to a certain extent and were well aware that posts filled by Indians would increase. But, as Edward Wakefield wrote ironically: ‘It was unthinkable that European women should have to receive medical attention from an Indian doctor.’ It was the same socially, no matter how grand the Indian. When Beatrice Baker became a friend of a good-looking, charming Indian prince her mother quickly saw him off.
Some of the girls who went out to join their parents were called Raj debutantes. For others the outlook was less hopeful. The fashion-conscious Ruby Madden, youthful, blooming and determined that she would not remain in India (its effect on her complexion was already being noted), described an encounter with two of them. After tea in their dressing gowns she and her aunt dressed for a drive. ‘I wore my crash [coarse linen] skirt green silk blouse and hat with blue silk and white ruffle and we started off in the victoria at 5.00 o’clock. We went shopping, then I was introduced to two girls, quite nice but rather worn and old-looking. They are husband-hunting, I believe, and it looks as if it didn’t agree with them.’
The most beautiful girls were known as Week Queens: girls asked to all the ‘Weeks’ of the cold-weather season – Calcutta Week, Lahore Week, Meerut Week, Rawalpindi Week, Delhi Week, each with horse shows, polo, gymkhanas, tent-pegging contests, tennis tournaments, dances, dinners, fancy dress balls and cocktail parties every night. These Weeks were the highlight of the cold-weather season, with Delhi Week – once Delhi had replaced Calcutta as the capital in 1911* – the culmination and peak. Here, civet cats rustled in the thatch of bungalows and hyenas howled at night and Urdu – the ‘language of the camp’ invented by the Moghuls for their multi-racial armies – was still the speech. There was always a New Year’s Day parade with cavalry and infantry marching and galloping across dusty parade grounds.
To entertain as many as possible during the Week there was a huge viceregal garden party – ‘sweet peas and roses, delphiniums and carnations, hibiscus and jasmine, grew in every garden,’ wrote M.M. Kaye, the daughter of the Deputy Chief Censor, Sir Cecil Kaye, in 1927. There was also a ball at Viceroy House and a fancy dress ball at the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club, with a band playing tunes like You just You, You’re the Cream in my Coffee, You were Meant for Me, Wonderful You, with supper after eight dances, mostly assorted foxtrots and waltzes (spelt valses).
On New Year’s Day every station had its parade, with uniforms at their smartest, buttons gleaming in the sun, the band playing and complicated manoeuvres performed, all in honour of the King-Emperor. Everyone turned out to watch this spectacle. ‘Went to the New Year’s Parade,’ ran the youthful Claudine Gratton’s diary for 1937. ‘Michael came in to drinks and we all acted the goat, and he lay down on the sofa with his head on my bosom, the angel. In the afternoon slept in the garden.’ In the evening was the inevitable film. ‘Went to see Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone and Robert Taylor in The Gorgeous Hussy. Very good and rather sad.’
For Katherine Welford, New Year’s Day held more than the parade. It was the day the Burma Shell agents came from all over South India to pay their respects to her uncle. ‘We were up very early (after seeing the New Year in) to receive them. We stood on the wide veranda and one by one the agents salaamed and placed beautiful garlands round our necks. I still have one of these, made with fine gold thread.
‘They brought presents, cases of champagne, tropical fruits and Elizabeth Arden cosmetics for my aunt. It was a company rule that only presents that could be consumed were to be accepted. Uncle Maurice told me that one year he was given a silver salver with his crest engraved on it, not one but several, making a design all over it. Of course, it had to be returned.’
Not all the Fishing Fleet girls, however young and pretty, met a future husband. Katherine herself, who arrived with about twenty others, commented that only three of them became engaged during that cold-weather season. ‘I met stacks of young men,’ she said. ‘It was marvellous. After a visit to the Hills I returned to Madras for eight days – and went out with eight different men. I almost lost my heart – but I felt I was too young to settle down.’