Just Finished Reading: The Fishing Fleet – Husband Hunting in the Raj by Anne De Courcy (FP: 2012)

It made perfect sense. Not just to the women themselves, but to their mothers, their friends, to the Indian Civil Service and to the early East India Company. After all, India being what it was, even in the very early days before the Raj as such existed, it was inevitable that it would attract the best and the brightest, the cream of the English Public School system, the elite of Imperial society. These men who ran the jewel in the crown of the Empire where often posted for years on end without any chance of taking leave so when, oh when, would they have time to find and attract a suitable woman? What could be more logical to encourage, even facilitate, the travel of young eligible women to go to India in the expectation of acquiring a well-placed husband – one with impeccable credentials and excellent prospects? Rather inevitably some wag called these girls and young women the ‘fishing fleet’ and the name stuck. Equally inevitably those who failed to find a husband and sailed back to England still unhappily single where known (semi-officially) as ‘returned empties’ which was not exactly a flattering term.

So they came, year after year, decade after decade, through two World Wars, to look for a mate, to marry well, to have children and to survive (hopefully) the many dangers inherent in a country far different that the home nation. Fever, snakes, drought and monsoon, rebellion and uprising, plague, tigers, poor sanitation, medical staff tens of miles away over dangerously winding roads and seemingly an endless number of other dangers awaited those who made the trip. The author, using access to private diaries and correspondence, paints a picture of the exotic, the frightening, the exhilarating and the often boring times had by the generations who made the effort to make their home in a truly alien environment. As expected this was pretty much the lifestyles of the rich and shameless – the working class tending not to leave much in the way of written evidence of their existence and the white working class tended to be thin on the ground (outside the army) in a country teaming with potential local servants and labourers. That being the case much of the material in the book came from the lives of the upper echelons which did make it, at least for me, rather less interesting than this otherwise very good volume could have been. I’m not a huge fan of the privileged classes (to say the least) and I must have rolled my eyes many times to yet another description of a posh frock worn to yet another dinner party surrounded by military and diplomatic types.

Despite those reservations this book is full of insight into a comparatively strange (if reasonable) phenomena and has numerous little nuggets of stories scattered through it. One that made me laugh out loud was a tale of a newlywed having dinner at her new husband’s residence when a rat scampered across the floor. Without pausing to explain he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead and then carried on his conversation as if nothing had happened – welcome to India indeed! I did think that this made a nice companion volume to Singled Out reviewed here recently as it went into much more detail about one aspect of how women after WW1 coped with the lack of men. Interesting, full of often fascinating detail (even with too much emphasis of clothes!) this was a readable piece of cultural history that, until I picked up this book, I was completely unaware of. Recommended.