Did the Fishing Fleet girls have any real influence on the conduct of affairs in this vast country that was home to so many of them during the time of the Raj?
The short answer is no. The Raj was entirely run by men, in the kind of hierarchical fashion that precluded a sudden leap to the top by a man of outstanding brilliance who might normally have been considered an outsider. Ramsay MacDonald, for instance, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer who was virtually self-educated, became Prime Minister of England whereas he would never have been considered as Viceroy. It is true that for the first sixty years of the Raj there was no woman in the British Government either – the first to take her seat, Nancy Astor,* was only elected in 1919 when her husband was elevated to the peerage, and after that women only gradually began to filter into Parliament – but it is inconceivable to think of a woman becoming an ICS District Officer or the Magistrate of a cantonment. In the Raj, the role of the British female was as wife, helpmeet and mother.
Here came one hideous caveat peculiar to the Raj, causing a wretchedness impossible to over-estimate. ‘Separation is the dark cloud which hangs over an Indian existence; husbands and wives, mothers and children, forced asunder, perhaps at the very time when union is most delightful, and living (how maimed and sad a life!) in the absence of all that is best-beloved,’ wrote H.S. Cunningham in The Chronicles of Dustypore.
To be a Fishing Fleet girl who married into the Raj was to face this appalling, inescapable burden: separation from either husband or children, sent home at a tender age to England for their education. ‘Early or late the cruel wrench must come – the crueller, the longer deferred,’ wrote Maud Diver. ‘One after one the babies grow into companionable children; one after one England claims them, till the mother’s heart and house are left unto her desolate.’ Quite apart from separation, in many cases, from the land where she was born.
Only the rich – and there were few of those in the service of the Raj – could afford the cost of constant sea passages back and forth to spend holidays with the children and ameliorate this anguish (until the last few years of the Raj, flying was almost unknown).*
Sending children home meant that they would not be classed as ‘domiciled’. This was an important distinction, especially in the early days of the Raj, stemming from Lord Cornwallis’s edict in the late eighteenth century that reduced those British born in India – even if of pure English blood – to a status below that of native-born Englishmen.
Even in the twentieth century there were echoes of this: when Jim Acheson said at a dinner party in 1914 that he liked a certain commissariat colonel from Army headquarters in Simla, adding that with a name like Moriarty he must be Irish, he evoked the response from a fellow diner: ‘You mean a Mussoorie Irishman, don’t you, Mr Acheson?’ At first Jim did not understand but later realised that the poor man was regarded as being not ‘quite quite’ because he belonged to the domiciled community.
Snobbishness is one of the justified criticisms that has always been hurled at the Anglo-Indian wife, a snobbishness based on petty distinctions of manner, birth or behaviour. Along with the dedication that left India, after independence, with an enviable infrastructure, a democratic Government and a common language came a concern with social matters that reflected – indeed, outdid – that at home.
‘If I were asked what struck me as the chief concern of English social life in India, I should answer: “to seek Precedence and ensure it.” . . . Precedence is the focal point of India’s social nonsense, convulses the home and has even, it is said, convulsed the government,’ said Yvonne Fitzroy who, as Private Secretary to the Vicereine, saw India from the top of the heap. The effect of this preoccupation was more stifling than that of the home-grown variety, in part because of the lack of alternative concerns but chiefly because, in England, talent, intelligence and beauty were powerful social coinage that added mobility and leaven to the status quo. But in the hierarchy of the Raj position was fixed, according to service, rank and seniority in an unalterable grading, like so many butterflies on pins, within which there was room for petty nuances that could be painful and damaging. Was a man in a ‘good’ regiment? In ‘trade’ as opposed to a ‘profession’? If in the ICS had he caught the approving eye of Government? The young Fishing Fleet bride, moulded by the attitudes and customs of the ‘mems’ higher up in the pecking order, might adopt this unattractive way of thinking.
Yet these were the same girls prepared to have a baby alone in a bungalow fifty miles from the nearest doctor, to suffer the cruel deaths of sometimes several in succession of their children, to up sticks and move house for the thirtieth time in succession without a murmur, to offer hospitality cheerfully and unstintingly to friends of friends of friends.
For other Fishing Fleet girls, India meant loneliness, living perhaps on an isolated plantation, the only excitement a weekly dance at the club fifteen miles away. They coped with it, as they coped with almost everything the country threw at them – the vagaries of the climate, illnesses or a perpetual feeling of being ‘below par’, the feeling of desperation if the longed-for mail did not bring a letter.
For still others, the stultifying boredom of small-town society was the chief memory brought back to England after a husband’s retirement. ‘If there is a hell for me it’ll be an endless day in a club in the North Indian state of Assam; a day of staring through dazzling white dust at men galloping about on polo grounds; of sitting in sterile circles drinking gin with their wives; of bouncing stickily round an unsprung dance floor, clutched to their soggy shirts, of finally being driven home at night by one of them peering woozily over the wheel, tipping old villagers in bullock carts into the ditch. I spent thirty years on a tea plantation enduring such days and nights.’ So wrote Iris Macfarlane after she left India in 1936.
‘Seldom in history have women been subjected at one and the same time to so many discomforts, so much monotony, and so many temptations,’ summed up John Masters. Yet plenty of them managed to extract the maximum advantage from their situation. ‘Many things were unforgettable about our life at Ramkolah [close to the borders of Nepal], particularly our rides home through the sunsets, dew replacing the dust, the sky aflame with vivid colours until it turned suddenly to deep blue,’ recalled Betsey Macdonald. ‘We would smell the pungent smoke rising from the village fires as we trotted by, the exotic scents from the shrubs and flowers as we returned to our garden.’
Rumer Godden, at her happiest in India, characterised its appeal as ‘the honey smell of the fuzz-buzz flowers, of thorn trees in the sun, and the smell of open drains and urine, of coconut oil on shining black human hair, of mustard cooking oil and the blue smoke from cow dung used as fuel; it was a smell redolent of the sun, more alive and vivid than anything in the West . . .’.
Some felt its magic all their lives, enthralled by the beauty and grace of the people, the landscape that ranged from steamy jungle to the glittering, ethereal purity of the high Himalayas and the wild creatures, the elephants, grey langurs, and above all the birds – friendly little bulbuls with red and yellow rumps, green parrots, golden orioles that flashed from tree to tree, hoopoes in their Art Deco plumage of orange, black and white, Paradise flycatchers with tails like long white streamers. As Veronica Bamfield put it: ‘I was one of the lucky few on whom India lays a dark, jewelled hand, the warmth of whose touch never grows cold to those who have felt it.’
Many did what they could to take part in the life of the country or to help those around them. Their scope was limited as Government policy was to interfere as little as possible with the habits and customs of ‘the natives’. Plenty helped with simple medication, Army wives concerned themselves with the welfare of the wives and children of their husbands’ soldiers, still others taught. Flora Annie Steele,* appointed Inspectress of Girls’ Schools in the Punjab, campaigned successfully against the selling of degrees at the Punjab University; Anne Wilson made a serious study of Indian music; Violet Acheson was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal for Public Service in India.
Most prescient, perhaps, was Anne Wilson, writing (at the end of her camping tour) in 1895, in sentiments that expressed not only her realisation of the possible impermanence of British rule but also the idealism that inspired the best of the Raj: ‘When a century or two have gone, will all traces of those tents and their occupants have disappeared? . . . Or will our rule in India be permanent, if not in its present form, at least in its effects? Will it gradually confer on this immense population, numbering a quarter of the inhabitants of the globe, not only greater material prosperity and greater knowledge but a higher intellectual, moral and religious standard, and so permanently raise a mighty people in the scale of humanity?
‘Should this be the result of all our labours spent in India – as assuredly it will, if only we fulfil our trust – they will not have been spent in vain, and history will acknowledge the truth of the saying that India is the brightest jewel in England’s crown.’