The Indian Civil Service, peculiarly, insisted that all ICS men remain bachelors until after the age of thirty. This made them ripe for capture by the ‘fishing-fleet’, as the boatloads of Englishwomen who came over to India to trawl for husbands in the mid- and late-nineteenth century were known. These ladies were usually the rejects of the British upper and upper-middle classes, women who were too smart or too plain to find a ‘good husband’ and were in their late teens or early twenties. Once you were deemed too old for the English marriage-market, it was either the boat to India or a
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