The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj

I really enjoyed this book. It was something I had wondered about. Having met several Army Wives in the 80s - and heard stories of multiple postings over as many years ( and the stories that went with them) and met Army “Brats” - those who had been sent to boarding school at 5&6 so Mum could go with Dad. Holidays in far off postings. Or not. Some even went to finishing school in Switzerland- which by the 80s morphed into Chalet girls - so you could cook then ski. Many girls STILL want to marry into the Army, but officer & above in Cavalry etc. The whole “fleet” thing has just changed and moved with time and circumstance. Those in the upper echelons of the Forces need a partner who understand the demands of the job. There are still those who have been trained over generations for just that job - if they want it. This book was a tiny glimpse into a life that no longer exits. It seemed to exist like an exotic hothouse flower that needed extravagant care, when the care ran out, the flower died.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Until I stumbled across the Amazon page for it I had no idea that women would actually volunteer to face danger, sickness, terrible heat and years of bad hair days just to nab a husband. In the early years during the mid 1800's the East India company paid the women to come to India whether they found husbands or not. Later, when the British Government took over, ladies or their families paid considerable fees for the women to sail to India to, hopefully, win the husband lottery.I agree with those who say that the chapter topics are awkward and make the book seem disjointed. It might have been better to arrange the book chronologically. There were women I hoped to hear more about later, but were never mentioned again. What happened to the woman who had polio? Did she find a husband?Would I read any book just because it's written by Anne de Courcy. No. But will definitely read more about India during the time period of the Fishing Fleet.

I found this book interesting and informative, if a bit repetitive. However, I do have a caveat. These young brides were consistently described as intrepid, "chin up and bear it all" types. There was no mention of any young woman who gave up, left her husband and went home to England. I don't believe this didn't happen. The conditions in India could be extremely trying. Though the country was beautiful, there was much hardship to bear. The weather, illness, bugs and rats, loneliness; all this must have defeated at least some young women, but we didn't hear of this. Ms. de Coucy writes only of the brave girls who managed to forge some kind of life in the Raj. I would have liked to learn a bit about the other side. Still, I would recommend this book for its vivid descriptions of India during the time of the Raj and what life was like for those who made a life there.

This very uneven book lacks focus as the author tries to narrate the experiences of a large number of British girls in search of husbands. India was the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire and many young officers and civil servants sought fame and fortune there. Given the shortage of marriageable men in England following World War I, seeking a husband in India was the logical thing to do for daughters of the aristocracy. Hardship was commonplace, however, what with snakes, insects, searing heat, humidity, a lack of medical care, and a host of other difficulties both physical and psychological. One has to admire these women who braved a lot of tough stuff all in the name of (hoped for) love and marriage. The book is worth reading if you enjoy British history, but be prepared for occasional tedium.

Much too long, and the first half of the book contains detailed information that a good editor would have cut. I read half of the book and then gave up. Later, friends who made it to the end told me I should have continued because the really significant and important information was near the end. I read the frivolous part about the young women arriving in India, going to parties and wearing significant jewelry, whereas (evidently) the last few chapters dealt with their making homes in lonely rural outposts. But even this new information wasn't enough to encourage me to finish the book.

Reading into the the middle of the book I was concerned there might be a test. So many ranks and pecking orders! Another reason people fled and started the United State of America. Less order to keep track of, so your brain is freed up to think of many other things.Entertaining and satisfying to know women have so many more choices these days. But for the spunky gal, sailing to India would be an adventure maybe better than the man she found to spend her life with.Thick with facts but sweetly greased by interesting stories and characters.

This book is an easy read and often cites primary sources, (letters, diaries) but not at an insufferable length. It is told almost entirely from the perspective of women and recognizes how society constrained their roles, but not their spirits.

Fascinating story of the young women who ventured out to India in the years of the Raj to find husbands among the foreign service, British army, and plantation owners. Based on first-hand accounts of their experiences, the book evokes a vibrant picture of life in the days of the British Empire, warts and all. If you are curious about that period of history and are willing to see it entirely from the colonial viewpoint rather than that of the locals, you'll enjoy this book. Anne de Courcy is not the world's best writer, but she manages to stay out of the story and let the real people tell it.

Although husband hunting in colonial British India is an incredibly interesting and alluring subject, sadly this book does not present the information in a clear and concise way.The best feature of this book are the colourful and intoxicating descriptions which vividly display the flavour of British India. From the shimmering jewels and fairy tale palaces of the maharajas, the danger and peril of snakes, leeches, cockroaches and monsoon rains to the remote mountain and jungle outposts some colonials lived in - de Courcy does make you feel that you are in nineteenth century India with the British.Sadly, the scatter-gun way the stories are told is confusing and frustrating - there is no continuity. Each chapter contains many different stories of young women and families who came to India looking for a husband - sometimes these are a few sentences, sometimes many pages. But the chronology is broken as some stories are started in one chapter and continued much later in the book. This is too confusing and disjointed.On the face of it, the division of the chapters seems a sensible idea. Chapter titles include "The Voyage Out", "Love At Sea", "Brits and Indians" and "The Climate", but although the titles and stories give the reader a flavour of each topic, there is not much continuity in each chapter as it jumps from women to women, story to story.A better idea might have been to divide the chapters according to the stories of the husband-hunting women, describing their life stories chronologically from start to finish.A much better book on a similar topic is William Dalrymple's "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India" which covers one story from start to finish. A quick synopsis of this memorable book is: "James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of Hyderabad when he met Khair un-Nissa – ‘Most Excellent among Women’ – the great-niece of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad. He fell in love with her and overcame many obstacles to marry her, converting to Islam and, according to Indian sources, becoming a double-agent working against the East India Company."

I bought this book for obvious reasons - my mother (born Ooticamund 1908, living in Ceylon with her family in the mid 20's, met & married my father who visited in an RN Warship) was one of the kind of people written about. Her own mother's family went back at least two generations in India and all met and married similar families out there. Obviously, with quite a lot of background, I found it riveting, loved the pictures and thought the style elegant and informed. I wasn't concerned about the piecemeal nature of the memoirs, and thought them well marshalled and edited.I only forebore from giving it 5 stars because I can hear my mother's snort from beyond the grave. She was very precise about the "Fishing Fleet"; they were girls who were sent out to India from England to Indian based relatives to find a husband. As distinct from "country-born" girls, who may (by my mother's, but not in her mother's time) be sent back to England to be educated, and who then returned to live with their families. The author seemed to use the epithet for all who met and married in India, including girls from Indian based families.It also delightfully emphasised the tremendous importance of brothers in this whole operation - my mother often told me how important it was that her brother was there to introduce her to brother officers and chaperone her.We used to laugh that my parents were reverse fishing fleet - she lived there and my father sailed out and met her in India, although they were married in England and she never lived in India or Ceylon again after her marriage to a Naval Officer. Undoubtedly a partial review, but I loved it and will look out Anne de Courcy's other books (some of which I have heard of, but not yet read).

This book has a lot of interesting stories and detail but is, for me, ultimately disappointing.It does well in telling the story of British women's experience in India; how they came to be there, how they found husbands (because there was no other way for women to live in India), and how they coped with life. The 'fishing fleet' of the title was the name given to the groups of young women arriving in India every year, who were eagerly sought by eligible bachelors, as there were always far more single men than women. It also does a good job of detailing the unreality of British life in India; far more restricted and rigid than life back home.That said, I was disappointed that most of the stories and detail come from the end of the Raj period - mostly from the First World War onwards. I would have liked more about the earlier period. I also feel that there is a lot of duplication and repetition, which at times led me to lose interest. If you have not read much about the British in India, then this is well worth a read; but if you already have some knowledge, then this may not add much

This book fascinated me so much I decided to read more on the subject. I started with one of my favourite novels, Olivia by O. Douglas (Thos. Nelson & Son, first published 1913 as "Olivia in India.") Everything in it seemed to confirm de Courcy's view of India under the Raj. Then I reached a description of the ritual of calling cards and thought, "this sounds exactly as de Courcy described it." Reaching for de Courcy, I looked up "calling cards" in the index and was directed to pp.94-96 where I was astonished to find O. Douglas quoted almost verbatim. Which would be fine if the quotation was attributed to her and her novel. However, de Courcy describes it thus: "When Olive Douglas paid calls in 1913 she went out with a list in her hand...As she wrote, 'if the lady is not receiving, etc....'".Now, there was no such person as Olive Douglas. Olivia was a character in a novel and her surname is never mentioned. O. Douglas was the pen name of Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan and a popular novelist in her own right. The events described in "Olivia" are accepted as being autobiographical for Anna Buchan paid just such a visit to India as she makes Olivia do. This explanation would have been much more convincing than inventing a supposedly real person called Olive Douglas. I wonder now how many other characters she invented for the sake of the story. O. Douglas's book is not even mentioned in the bibliography. A creditable researcher and scholar would acknowledge her sources truthfully. This has shaken my faith in the accuracy of de Courcy's writing.

The Fishing Fleetby Anne de CourcyFascinating material, the Fishing Fleet by Anne de Courcy is clearly well researched but the structure of the book made it difficult to keep track of the people featured. It is arranged in 'topics' and the same people crop up in different sections (by which time you have forgotten what you have already read about them as there are so many). I found it hard and too long in this form. Despite my initial enthusiasm to read the book I reached a point where I was looking forward to finishing it.The 'story' can be told in a few sentences-so many young men went to India in the service of the army and/or the British Raj that they left a vacuum back home. With admirable courage, young women made the journey to India, sometimes alone, sometimes as young as sixteen, in search of husbands.If the writer had outlined the situation and then chosen a few personal stories to tell, or turned it into a novel, it would have been much more entertaining.It read as if, having done lots of research she could not bear to leave anything out and sadly it became tedious.It is worth reading, as a piece of social history, but for me, it was bitty and rambling and it needed editing down quite drastically.

I brought this for a friend but have read it earlier myself. An interesting description of life for the young women who went to India in the hope of marrying and their lives both while unmarried and wives in India. A description of the hardships (climate, insects remote postings) and pleasures (parties, pomp and summer stations_ of life for British in the Raj. Although it covers the whole period of the Raj the focus is on the later days. Several interesting life stories.

This is an interesting book of social history, covering the lot of women in the days of the British rule of India. Often born in India, despatched 'home' to England to be educated, before returning to India to rejoin their families and/or to find a husband, many of these young womens' lives mixed privileged existences with seperation from loved ones and often a degree of physical hardship.Especially in the earlier days the journeys to India were arduous, but often romance between girls of the fishing fleet and returning officers and administrators began on board ship. The worst thing for a girl was not to find a husband and to have to return 'empty' to England. The competition for English wives, given the extreme disapproval of mixed maraiges which grew in the highly stratified social hierarchy of the Raj, was intense, and many girls had several suitors to choose from and recieved proposals after very few meetings.These were different days - ignorance of the 'facts of life' for some upper middle class English girls was near total up to, and sometimes beyond, their wedding nights, but this was a also society which was riddled with overt rascism, sexism, and the assumptions of the right of a tiny minority to rule.The book is delivered more or less chronologicaly, contains numerous anedocodes, and is well illustrated with photographs of the people involved. It makes for entertaining and enjoyable reading

This book starts off so well but soon becomes very disjointed and repetitive. There are a lot of people mentioned but the author jumps about all over the place as if she feels she needs to tell us everything at once, rather like an excited child telling it's mum all about their day in one sentence without a breath! It is overlong and could do with some rigorous editing and I'm afraid I never finished it. I read it as it was a choice of the book group I belong to, one person rated it well but the rest of us were underwhelmed by it. It probably would have been better if she had concentrated on fewer of the women and gone into more detail about their lives, as a lot of times I got interested in their stories only to be left wondering what happened to them after they got married, or not, as the case may be.

A very interesting and factual account of the travels and lives of the young women who sailed out to India in the days of the Raj, in search of adventure but mainly to look for husbands among the young men who had gone to work and serve in the Army and the Indian Civil Service. Although their initial experiences were coloured by exciting rounds of parties, dinners, dances and exotic entertainments, once they had found themselves a husband their lives often became harsher realities which, in many cases, turned to tragedy in the difficult conditions they often had to endure. I found it a somewhat dry account in places, but it certainly gave an insight into the days when the British ruled India and the lives of those who went to live and work there.

Anne de Courcy's book details some of the most unpleasant features of the British Empire, in terms of the segregation and rigid class system that was encouraged in the later stages of the Empire in India.However,it is easy to forget that the British'caste system' possibly in some sense overlaid and reflected the underlying caste system that had been prevalent amongst the native peoples in India for centuries.This book also illustrates some of the difficulties of life in India for an alien species such as British men and women,who were vulnerable to disease and lacked the medical equipment to resist the numerous microbes flourishing in the tropics which were not found in their native land.'Alive at dinner,dead by breakfast'was not an uncommon occurrence,and child mortality was particularly high.The lack of social interaction with native peoples and isolation into a narrow, privileged and almost theatrical community of foreigners whose life involved so much outward display could not be sustained.Why then,did women undertake to go to India for husbands?Lack of education and female employment opportunities, a shortage of young men-especially after the First World War-all these factors feature in a world that changed forever after the Second World War,the independence of India,and the loss of the British Empire.The book succeeds in showing how it was;if it has a weakness it is that it perhaps lacks a cohesive flow as a history of its time-seeming to move from person to person in a butterfly fashion.

A really good read about a fascinating subject. Anne de Courcy clearly did extensive research and it has paid off. The sheer boredom of women's lives in India hadn't occured to me before and yet they managed well. The men, although very bright, seemed to be only really interested in riding, polo and tiger hunting. Class was all-important, particularly amongst the wives for whom precedence at social events was their main interest. The British class system was only matched by India's caste structure, which may be one of the reasons the Raj survived for so long. Victorian values and morals appeared to have lasted until the 1939/45 war. Strongly recommended.

As my mother went out to India on the 'Fishing Fleet' I was interested in the book and was not disappointed. I think it painted an accurate picture of what it was like for young women to travel to India in search of a husband and of the kind of life they lived: how the hardships and loneliness were compensated for by the social life. However, I don't think that the picture of the relationship between the British and the Indians was entirely accurate. From my recollection, there was very little conflict or resentment and we had many Indian friends. The book was written very much from a 21st century viewpoint and with no real first-hand knowledge. I think that readers should counteract this book with M.M. Kaye's autobiography which describes the 'India' that I remember from my childhood.

A really interesting collection of recollections of life in India from a female perspective. It jumps around a lot in terms of dates but it has some amazing tales and anecdotes of what life was like - it isn't just about the 'husband hunting' . For anyone whose ancestors lived in India I think it is a must read to bring to life what life was like although it is very much from the perspective of the upper classes you still get a feel for the heat and hardships as well as the less attractive reality of the British occupation.

Excellently researched and packed full of the little details that go towards building up a picture of empire from a ladies point of view. I think I would have preferred it in a more chronological format - the narrative covered 3 centuries (a formidable period) but the stories were interspersed - one minute 1920's, and then back to the 1740's so it was a bit difficult to pick out the social development during the period. A fabulous read nontheless and a tribute to the ladies who set off to foreign shores, unwitting and unknowing. Some of their diary snippets were hillarious and others oh so tragic. Glad I read it.

A very good book about India. However, the subject is not conpletely developed. The author shows only a fragment of a wider picture. A sufficient bibliography does provide more indormation.