Katherine Welford leaving for India in 1932 on the P&O liner SS Mongolia.
Male sports, such as this ‘spar-fighting’ competition, required great athletic ability.
The arrival of someone important was always marked by ceremonial – note the lascars on the mast of the ship.
A group of bachelors living together to share household expenses, such as in this one in the Mahalaxmi district of Bombay, was known as a ‘chummery’.
The five ADCs of the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, in full dress for a levée. As the only one of the close personal staff not a soldier, Henry Babington Smith (centre) wears Court uniform.
The Hon. Lilah Wingfield, just arrived in India for the Coronation Durbar of 1903, wears a dust veil over her topi to use if necessary.
The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, processing through the streets of Delhi on his way to the Coronation Durbar of 1903.
The Viceroy’s Private Secretary, Henry Babington Smith (centre, front row), with his staff.
Lady Elgin seated in a silver tonjon (portable chair), carried like a palaquin on single poles resting on the shoulders of four bearers.
When the Viceroy went on tour, an army of tents would spring up, such as this one in Jodhpur.
Picnics were popular with everyone from the Viceroy down, who is seen here (centre, next to his daughter Bessie) in the Hills in the 1890s.
Bessie Bruce and Henry Babington Smith before their engagement.
A hunt breakfast for the Bangalore hounds in 1935. Horses were a central feature of life in the Raj, whether for hunting, riding, racing or playing polo.
Marian Atkins, seen here at the seventh and final day of the Calcutta paperchase in 1934 on her horse ’Kitty’, was an assured rider.
Hounds were transported to the meet by camel cart in this part of north India in 1905.
A day at the races in Ootacamund. Jerry and Sheila Reade, with the Maharaja of Mysore standing between them.
Annette Bowen, in 1932, aged seventeen (top), in Daphne at the Royal Madras Yacht Club Regatta (centre) and with three friends at the Madras Hunt Gymkhana Races in 1935 (bottom).
Mary McLeish with her fiancé Nigel Gribbon. They had known each other for only a fortnight before they were parted; six years later he proposed to her by telephone – and was accepted.
Katherine Welford, aged twenty, at the time she went to stay with her aunt and uncle in Madras.
Jean Hilary, during a 1929 weekend with friends at Puri. She wears one of the conical straw hats worn by the bathing ‘boys’ on Puri beach, who escorted bathers into the water, helping them through the surf.
A view of Simla, showing the enormous crowds gathered to attend the wedding of Lady Elisabeth Bruce to Henry Babington Smith in September 1898.
The view from Observatory Hill, Simla, looking north-east.
Simla was famous for its amateur dramatics, as in this 1930s staging of The Gondoliers.
Something in the air in the Hills seemed to encourage the British love of dressing up, as seen here at the Viceregal Lodge in the 1890s.
A picnic in the grounds of the Residency, by the Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir, in the 1920s.
A walk in the hills.
Hut 102A in Gulmarg was rented by the Lloyd family every year and regarded as their second home.
The finals of the Gilgit polo match. These contests were fiercely fought between rival clans. Spectators who could not crowd on to walls perched in the trees.
In isolated areas cricket matches were a popular social fixture. Billy Fremlin’s father, Ralph, is on the front row, second from left, in this photograph of the Kadur Club cricket team, 1910.
Miss Florence (‘Flossie’) Ross (left), newly engaged to Lieutenant Leslie Germain Lavie of the 20th Regiment Madras Infantry (right). At twenty-seven Lavie was considered young for marriage.
Grace Trotter, the girl who got away from her ‘tainted’ heritage.
Tiger shooting from an elephant: Grace’s sister, Mabel Trotter – hatted, corseted and gloved – with G. P. Sanderson, the Superintendent of Keddahs for the Maharaja of Mysore.
A bullock cart for use on roads, drawn by the white bullocks of Mysore.
Bethea Field and her mother – always known as Madre – in their garden in Poona in 1906.
Violet Field pictured by a river at Bhola, a noted beauty spot near Meerut, in June 1914.
Bethea when she returned to India aged nineteen, just after the Great War.
Jim and Violet in their courting days. Although Jim was a genial person, he could never manage to look cheerful in front of a camera.
The ‘wrong’ Major Williams, Arthur de Coetlogon Williams, who became Bethea’s husband.
Driving in a tonga along the road to the Khyber Pass, through a rocky, desolate landscape. In 1912, the year this photograph was taken by the twenty-one-year-old Lilah Wingfield, armed sentries guarded the heights in this dangerous territory between India and Afghanistan.
Leila Blackwell mounted on a yak on an excursion from Gilgit.
Mary Lloyd in a doolie – the Gulmarg version of both pram and carrycot.
Rosemary Cotesworth and William Redpath leaving the church after their wedding in 1936.
At seventeen, Iris Butler was presented at Court and almost immediately left for India, in the autumn of 1922. It was the start of an intensely social two years.
Gervase Portal in his ‘lungee’, or parade dress turban, brilliantly coloured in emerald, gold, deep blue and scarlet which was worn with a matching cummerbund on formal occasions, including at his wedding to Iris.
Iris Butler on her wedding day in 1927. She refused to carry the bouquet her father pressed into her hands at the last minute, describing it as ‘a tightly packed bunch of vegetation packed into a ham frill’ and snatched up an ostrich feather fan instead.
Billy Fremlin on her wedding day, aged twenty-two.
Ralph Fremlin on safari, with two porters.
‘The Smoking Concert’, held in the Durbar Hall, Mercara, in 1910. Pam and Billy’s father Ralph is in the centre of the top row, their mother Maud is the third woman from the right in the centre row.
Pam Fremlin, Billy’s older sister, arriving at the Bangalore Hunt Breakfast in 1935. The Fremlin plantation was seventy miles from Bangalore.
A meet of the Bangalore Hunt at 4-Mile Old Madras Road, in August 1935. Pam Fremlin, aged twenty-one, is second from left at the back.
Sheila Hingston, just before she came out to India in September 1929. She was just eighteen.
George Blackwood Reade, always known as Jerry, who became Sheila’s husband.
Lieutenant Colonel C.A.F. Hingston, Sheila’s father. ‘Hinkie’ was the most popular doctor in Madras.
Greenwood, the house in Ootacamund that belonged to Sheila’s mother Gladys. In front are the family car and driver and beside them Gladys and the eight-year-old Sheila, on her pony, held by a syce. In the background the ayah holds Sheila’s one-year-old brother Clayton.
Gladys Hingston entertaining in Madras: (from left to right) Rosita Forbes, the glamorous and well-known traveller, Gladys Hingston, Princess Nilufer – who was married to the second Prince of Hyderabad – and Sir George Stanley,
The Opening Meet of the Ooty Hunt. Since 1894, this had been taking place at the Maharaja of Mysore’s summer palace, Fernhill, presided over by the Maharaja as official host.
The ultimate goal for any Fishing Fleet girl was of course a wedding to the man of her choice. These could be lavish social occasions, such as this one in Poona in 1905 (above); for the Elgin wedding even the cake was larger than life. It stood 5 feet 7 inches high, weighed 650lbs and took two months to make.