Juliet Townsend

A courtly man hunt

From the early 19th century to the first half of the 20th, unmarried women travelled to India to escape Britain  and find a husband, writes Juliet Townsend

In ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ Henry Newbolt describes a young man’s voyage to service in India:

He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam. He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw; He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home. He saw the flag she flew.

And, with any luck, as ‘the moon made a silver path over the smooth sea’, he would find himself on the boat deck with his arm round the shoulders of an attractive girl and the prospect of an enjoyable shipboard romance ahead. The playfully nicknamed ‘Fishing Fleet’ was at sea with its cargo of girls in search of a husband in India or Ceylon, and men returning from leave in England on the lookout for a wife. It was not surprising that the opening salvoes in this campaign were often fired on the journey out: some disembarked in Colombo or Bombay already engaged and tied the knot only days after arrival.

The Fishing Fleet originated in the days of the East India Company, when carefully selected potential wives would be sent out for the Company’s employees, those who failed to find a match being sent home under the rather unkind title of ‘returned empties’. Anne de Courcy follows the fortunes of the girls of the Fishing Fleet over 150 years, from the early 1800s to the outbreak of the second world war. What happened to them when they had landed their man is perhaps the most interesting side of this lively and well researched book. To all of them, escaping from the narrow world they knew, and travelling thousands of miles to an exotic and unfamiliar destination, it must have seemed a great adventure. As Thomas Hood wrote on their behalf in 1842:

My heart is full — my trucks as well; My mind and caps made up, My corsets shap’d by Mrs Bell, Are promised ere I sup.

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