The Fishing Fleet Read online

  What was left of the Fishing Fleet moved on to the mofussil (outlying districts) to scoop up husbands from the bunch of unmarried officials, soldiers, planters and businessmen who lived far from the great centres and, with less opportunity to find brides, were likely to be less choosy. With such a multitude of wife-seekers, a young woman had to be very plain or over-particular not to acquire a mate.

  The demand for wives was so great that a woman who lost her husband had no difficulty in replacing him. There are accounts of widows being proposed to on the steps of the church after the burial of husbands. Marriage was undertaken at such speed, and illnesses were so often fatal that, according to one authority, there were even cases where a wife would affiance herself to a suitor as her husband lay desperately sick.

  Stuart Corbett, who secured Charlotte Britten – at twenty-one, two years his senior – was the eldest of thirteen children born to the only son of Lady Augusta and the Reverend Corbett. He had entered the Honourable East India Company’s service at the age of sixteen and although his prospects were good he was naturally a little nervous as to how his family would take the news that he was tying himself for life to a girl older than himself whom he had only known for a few months. ‘My dear Louisa,’ he wrote to his sister at home in the Rectory near Sheffield a month before his wedding:

  ‘I have now a great piece of news to tell you I don’t [know] wether you will think it good or bad but I am going to be married in the middle of next month. I know you will think me mad but these things will happen, my wedding day is to be on the 13th March 1822 when I shall be married to Miss Charlotte Britten who I am sure you will like as she has a very excellent Temper, and is much superior in every respect to the generallity of the young ladies you meet in this country, and has a great stock of good sence.

  ‘One of her sisters who came out at the same time she did, is going home again in the same ship with this letter as the Country does not agree with her and she does not like it near as much as being at home.’ Mary, who had celebrated her seventeenth birthday on board the Lowther Castle, decided that she did not like either India or its climate and came back to England as a ‘returned empty’ as quickly as she could (a few years later she too married).

  A letter from Stuart to his brother, an officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, stationed at Brighton, spent less time on his proposed nuptials than on the birds his brother wanted him to send. ‘I . . . have to inform you that I intend to be married on the 13th of this month to Miss Charlotte Britten, you may perhaps some day or other fall in with her father who lives at Forest Hill in Kent. I am sorry I cannot send you any parrots or monkeys by this ship, as the Captain says they drink water and will not take charge of them. I can get you five or six different sorts of Parrots some not larger than a Bullfinch quite green except a small red spek on the breast but I am affraid I shall be never able to find any one who will take sufficent care of them on the voyage home.’

  Stuart, like many young men of his generation, was to serve forty years without a break, during which period, unusually, he never once had a day’s sick leave. Charlotte, whom he married in 1822, and who never returned to England, predeceased him, dying in India eighteen years later. Stuart finally came home on leave in 1859, returned to India three years later, and was appointed to the Divisional Command of Benares. Two years later he died, in the country where he and so many others had spent most of their lives.

  INTRODUCTION

  The origins of the ‘Fishing Fleet’ go back to the days when the Honourable East India Company was establishing its trading domain. Sometimes these girls were adventuresses, sometimes they were sent out by the East India Company, sometimes they were gently born but without family or financial support; an example is the sixteen-year-old Margaret Maskelyne, born in October 1735, one of the orphaned children of Edmund and Elizabeth Maskelyne. One of her brothers,* Edmund, in the East India Company, was stationed at Madras, and when he showed his close friend Robert Clive a miniature of Margaret, Clive became so enamoured of her beauty that Edmund urged her to come out to Madras. She did so, sailing with several other young women on the tiny Godolphin, a ship of less than 500 tons. By the time she arrived, Clive (later Lord Clive of Plassey or, as he was more popularly known, Clive of India) had become a military hero and amassed a fortune. After a six-month courtship, the couple were married at Madras on 18 February 1753.

  As the reputation of India as a place where even the plainest could find a mate grew, so did the number of young women travelling out there. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Fishing Fleet no longer consisted only of girls sent out by the East India Company but of others as well, sent by their families (sometimes against their will) in the hope of making a good match. In England, a land where women outnumbered marriageable men, a girl without beauty, money or grand relations had little hope of this; in India, she was showered with immediate proposals.

  Even so, few can have acted quite as speedily as Lieutenant Michael Edward Smith, of the Sutherland (78th) Highlanders. He went on leave to Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills in August 1847 and on the first Sunday after his arrival saw a young woman in church whom he greatly admired. There and then he decided to marry her if he could. In just over a fortnight he had managed to meet the pretty stranger at a ball – she was staying with her sister, the wife of an officer in a regiment stationed there – proposed, been accepted and married (on 8 September), so that by the time his three weeks’ leave was up he was able to take his bride back to his regiment.

  After the Indian Mutiny in 1857 the running of India was taken over by the British Government and on 1 November 1858 the Raj was born, at a durbar in Allahbad presided over by the first Viceroy, as the Sovereign’s representative in India would be henceforth known. ‘We have resolved to take upon ourselves the Government of India, heretofore administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company,’ declared the Queen’s Proclamation, read in all the chief towns.

  An Indian Civil Service was installed, for which entrants had initially to pass the same examinations as the Home Civil Service, followed by further education in the laws and customs of the country they were going to govern. Regiments of the British Army were sent out on tours of duty; the Indian regiments originally raised by the East India Company now swore their loyalty to the Crown – as did the planters and businessmen who had settled in India, Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) and Burma.

  With the founding of the Raj, the number of single young women making their way out to India began to increase steadily. When the Suez Canal was opened in November 1869 by the Empress Eugenie (it had been built by the French), the journey time from London to Bombay was cut from months to weeks. The gateway to India was open – and women flooded through, usually at the beginning of the cold weather.

  Although the practice of despatching young women to India for the benefit of men working there had ceased, the name Fishing Fleet stuck, attaching itself to the young girls and women who continued to go out to India in sizeable numbers – as a glance at the passenger list of the Kaiser I Hind, sailing from London to Calcutta on 12 October 1893, confirms. Reading down the list of names, past Mrs Wright, Mrs Simpson, the infant and ayah (Indian nanny), you come to Miss Max, Miss Cowell, Miss Blyth, Miss Graham . . . a long sequence of unmarried women, down to Miss Sandys and Miss Good.

  There were compelling demographic and social reasons for a girl to try her luck in this huge, exotic country.

  It was an era when for a woman marriage was the desired and only goal, giving her status, financial security, children, a household and a pleasant life among her peers. Without marriage, pointed out the academic Rita Kranidis, a woman’s life and her future prospects were as nothing.

  If she did not marry, she became (unless very rich) that sad figure: the Victorian spinster, living on the charity of some relation or earning a pittance and despised both by those she worked for and their servants. For middle-class women, the only occupations that were socially acceptable were ac
ting as a companion to some rich, lonely and usually difficult elderly woman, or teaching, usually as a governess (in the 1850s there were over 25,000 governesses in employment). For such women, on an annual salary of only £10–£40, there was no possibility of saving for old age, and of course no pension. And by the late 1860s, even this unrewarding profession was under threat: the new secondary schools for women were turning out young women much better qualified for teaching than those with the superficial education that was all the average young ‘gentlewoman’ received.

  Yet though social life, indeed the whole fabric of society, was based on the assumption that all women would marry, many did not. From 1851 to 1911 approximately one in three of all women aged twenty-five to thirty-five was unmarried; and between fifteen and 19 per cent of women aged thirty-five to forty-five were unmarried. The 1851 census made clear that in a population of around eighteen million roughly 750,000 women would remain single, a number that by the time of the 1861 census had roughly doubled.

  Suddenly, it seemed, there were spinsters everywhere. Adding to their difficulties was the then general belief that a girl had to marry or at least become engaged by the time she was twenty or so. The dread words ‘old maid’ could be applied as early as twenty-five.

  These women came to be referred to as ‘superfluous women’ or ‘redundant women’ and concern for them was widespread. Society after society was formed for the purpose of assisting them to emigrate to the newly founded colonies, where there was a corresponding shortage of women – but of women prepared to buckle down to the hardships and exigencies of pioneer life, which few with any pretensions to gentility were willing or able to do.

  Some tried to help themselves through the increasing number of lonely-hearts columns. ‘A young lady, aged 22, the orphan daughter of a country gentleman, of old family, would like to marry. She is a capital housekeeper; can ride and drive a pair; is musical and dresses exquisitely; and wants someone awfully jolly. No clergymen, doctors or learned men need apply, but an easy-going kind of fellow, with a fairish amount of brains, would suit admirably.’* Advertisements like these appeared in the rash of ‘marriage’ journals that were launched in the 1880s,* but they did not address the central problem of too few men to go round.

  The plight of the gently born, softly brought up middle-class woman, in particular, exercised both the Government and the popular imagination: because of her class, most forms of labour were ‘banned’; because of her lack of education she was ill-equipped to support herself; because of her lack of independence she could not, like her brothers, seek her fortune overseas – and because so many of these brothers did, her pool of potential husbands was correspondingly smaller.

  In 1890 one study by Clara Collett compared the numbers of unmarried women between thirty-five and forty-six (i.e., those considered to be irredeemably single) in Kensington with those in Hackney. Among the Kensingtonian ‘servant-keeping classes’ (those with an income of £150 or more) there were thirty-six unmarried women to thirty married ones in this age group, but only nine to seventy-six among the working class of Hackney. Small wonder that the enterprising decided to chance it in India, where men outnumbered women by roughly four to one.

  One reason for these unmarried women was the attitude of Victorian society. Women had few rights: they could not vote, sue, own property, take charge of their own money or have a job. Indeed, should this have been possible, they would not have been equipped for it. The Victorian young lady learned only the accomplishments considered suitable for her position – dancing, singing, sketching and how to sit up straight, with needlework to fill in the endless evening hours. Education,* as such, was the province of the male – as, indeed, was virtually everything of importance.

  The man who married this sheltered, cosseted creature was expected to provide her with a household – house, furniture, clothing, servants, carriage and, of course, the food and drink necessary to maintain her, the other adults in the house and the numerous children she was expected to bear.

  For the men these young women would hope to marry, this burden was often impossible. Younger sons with no prospects, or the sons of parents in straitened circumstances, simply could not afford the expense of a wife. Some of them sailed to Britain’s expanding Empire (thus further depleting the pool of available men at home) because here, with luck, they would make their fortunes or at the least be able to live at a standard they could not possibly afford in England. The case of the seven sons (out of thirteen children born between 1860 and 1883) of the Reverend James Du Boulay and his wife Alice is typical. ‘The eldest boy became a surgeon,’ wrote the Reverend James’s grandson, Professor Robin Du Boulay, ‘but, at a time of poor prospects at home and widening opportunities in the empire, the others looked overseas.’

  Other young men with an income too low for marriage stayed at home, living as bachelors. Filling the gap left by their lack of access to one of the obvious benefits of matrimony were numerous prostitutes. There were so many that it was considered inadvisable for a respectable woman to walk alone even by day in Piccadilly, Regent Street, the Strand or Leicester Square: if she did, she risked not only being scandalised by streetwalkers but also mistaken for one herself and accosted. One leading authority claims that there were about 55,000 prostitutes (in a population of around two million) working London’s streets, bars and theatres in 1841 – or to put it another way, there was one prostitute for every twelve adult males.

  This high ratio was largely due to the fact that women would often go into prostitution simply because it was very profitable, the hours were good and the other options available for any kind of gainful toil were limited. There was factory work, but conditions were so bad that it killed many. To be a governess a woman had to be ‘respectable’ and educated. Domestic work was low-paid and, unless in a large house, a dull, relentless grind. Among the very poor, prostitution was regarded as just another, and better-paid, way of earning a living; often, it was something that a woman would dip in and out of according to need. Those living in near-starvation could not afford the luxury of morality.

  Another, unspoken reason was that of (male) sexual satisfaction. The image of Victorian married women was that of pure, virtuous mothers and wives, the sweet, untouchable guardians of morality whose distaste for sex led to this explosive increase in the number of prostitutes. The famous Dr Acton, author of a seminal work on male sexuality,* published in 1857, that influenced medical thinking for decades, believed that ‘there are many females who never feel any sexual excitement whatever . . . as a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.’ And even that great early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, urged* that ‘chastity must more universally prevail’ – even in marriage, declaring that: ‘A master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion.’

  Husbands were urged to show restraint towards these innocent, ethereal beings, whereas no such considerations obtained with paid sex. It was the difference between an approach to the Virgin Mary and a romp with Mary Magdalen (indeed, Victorian prostitutes were often known as magdalens).

  Although diaries and letters of the period have shown, in contradiction to the general view of the era, that many Victorian women had similar attitudes to sexual enjoyment as women today, these documents were necessarily private. Then, such matters were never discussed. Thus most women, it was thought, were not troubled by sexual feeling of any kind, suffering sex only as a prelude to the sizeable family that they were expected to bear, an example set by the Queen herself. What no one would have known was the gusto with which the Queen approached her own marriage bed, disclosed only years later in her own diaries. It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century that sexual pleasure became ‘acceptable’ for women as for men, and then only within the context of conjugal love – Marie Stopes’s explosive book th
at tackled the subject, published in 1918, was entitled Married Love; indeed, until the Second World War many young women went to their marriage beds in complete ignorance.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, more and more men turned their faces outward and soon the words ‘Empire builder’ passed into the language. Originating with the trading posts and overseas colonies established in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these possessions expanded to become, at its height, the largest empire in history. By the time of the Raj, Britain controlled colonies, was unchallenged and unchallengeable at sea and held a dominant position in world trade. To run this empire of around 10,000,000 square miles, more and more settlers, merchants, lawgivers, soldiers and administrators were needed.

  India in particular was a goal: schools like the United Services College, Westward Ho! (on which Kipling based Stalky & Co.), sprang up, their alumni as a matter of course joining some branch of Government service – the Indian Civil Service, the Forestry Service, the Police – or, with Kipling’s Great Game at its height in the 1880s and 1890s, the Army. By the time the Raj ended, on 15 August 1947, many English families had lived in India for generations, with brothers, sons and grandsons conceiving of no other life.

  Out to meet and marry them sailed the Fishing Fleet. Some of these girls were returning to join their families after being educated in England, others were going to stay with sisters, cousins, aunts or friends whose husbands worked or were stationed in India, to enjoy its lively social life and extraordinary and magical atmosphere – or to find a husband. Because of the lengthy journey there and back, and the distances to traverse in India itself, such visits usually lasted several months and often a year or more. Although their stories cover the whole span of the Raj, most of the ones in this book focus on the twentieth century – the last flowering of British India before the country gained its independence in 1947.