History On Screen: recommended costume drama series

Sex, scandal (and snippets of history) 

If Downton doesn't do it for you, then try one of my costume drama recommendations. Happy viewing!

The Jewel in the Crown (ITV 1984): 

Tension & Turmoil in British India

Until Indian Independence in 1947, unmarried British women were routinely shipped out to find an ex-pat husband in a county with three men for every one woman. Based on four novels by Paul Scott, the story starts with Daphne Manners, an innocent upper class girl whose romance with an Indian leads to tragic consequences. Full of mem sahibs chugging chota pegs (whisky), madness and marital infidelity, this is a colourful, yet serious portrait of the close of British rule in India.

A Harlot's Progress (Channel 4, 2006)

Vice and Virtue

Hogarth's 'The Harlot's Progress' series of prints are brought to life. The artist follows a young prostitute as she's decoyed into the trade, rises to become a courtesan, and dies penniless and syphilitic. The mucky realities of eighteenth century made vividly real.

Lilies (BBC, 2007) 

Bright Young (Working Class) Things

Three sisters struggle to escape the drab back streets of post-First World War Liverpool. Postwoman Ruby goes into the corset trade after losing her job to a returning soldier; servant May embarks on an affair with her employer; and religious Iris wanders into a disastrous marriage to an ex-soldier. With the characters coping with wartime trauma and plot lines including a gay brother and alcoholic father, this is a vibrant, but often dark, and always absorbing working class drama. 

Other cracking costume dramas

The House of Eliott (BBC, 1991-1994):

Impoverished middle class sisters start a fashion house in 20s London. A classic.

The Crimson Petal and the White (2011)
Re-telling of Jane Eyre. Back street prostitute Sugar is disguised as a governess by a rich businessman whose wife is descending into madness.

Aristocrats (BBC 1999)
Sex, political wrangling & lashings of scandal - the stories of the Lennox sisters, based on Stella Tillyard's excellent biography.

Small Island (BBC 2008)
The lives of snobbish Jamaican Hortense and unhappily married Queenie intersect in grimy post-war London. 

The Devil's Whore (Channel 4, 2008)
A romp through the English Civil War era as Royalist aristocrat Angelica Fanshawe turns prostitute and revolutionary.

Berkeley Square (BBC, 1998)
Baby-doping, illegitimacy and amorous employers - a nanny's life isn't all fairy tale in Edwardian London!

Three books I wish someone would adapt for TV

West End Girls by Barbara Tate
The memoir of Barbara Tate, a budding artist, who escaped suburbia for 50s Soho and a job as a prostitute's maid for charismatic Mae.


Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
My favourite historical novel. A scheming heroine unprincipled enough to rival Becky Sharp climbs the social ladder in Restoration England. Fascinating, detailed and wicked!

Twopence to Cross the Mersey, by Helen Forrester
The first in Helen Forrester's series of memoirs of poverty in wartime Liverpool. Root for downtrodden teenage Helen, bespectacled and shy, as she dreams of love.

And if you've enjoyed this piece, please share your own favourites in the comment box below!

The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj

Anne de Courcy's new book reveals the stories of the British spinsters who headed to India to catch a husband 

In 1834 16-year-old cadet Edward Sellon noted in his diary that now stationed in India, he had “commenced a regular course of fucking with native women”. In the early days of British rule in India young civil servants and soldiers like Edward had Indian mistresses or even wives. Mixed marriages were encouraged to improve British-Indian relations. But the new censorious Governor General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, instigated a series of reforms in the 1780s which steadily divided Indians and British. The children of British men and Indian wives were forbidden from being educated in England and banned from jobs with the East India Company. 

Soon, sexual relations, let alone marriage, with native women was anathema to the British community - to the sexual frustration of East India Company employees, most of whom who had to remain single until over 30. Back in England, one in three women aged 25-35 were unmarried from 1851-1911, and parents of young women lingering on the shelf began to realise that India, with three British men for every one woman was an ideal husband-hunting ground.

'India, with three British men for every one woman was an ideal husband-hunting ground.'  

Dubbed the 'Fishing Fleet', the women who set sail faced severe seasickness and discomfort, especially in the early days of smaller ships and long queasy months at sea. So many of them departed that the East India Company started charging a £200 bond to ensure that these women could support themselves after arrival, and to deter 'adventuresses'. They did not always succeed. Some fled scandal, like Violet Hanson whose marriage to a homosexual man had been annulled, while Grace Trotter concealed her 'shameful' Indian blood to marry a high up civil servant and become a Lady. 

Most women were unprepared for the culture shock awaiting them. Desiree Hart recalled her arrival in Bombay: “At last I was cleared by the doctors and immigration officials and descended the gangway clutching my small luggage to find myself surrounded by hordes of beggars showing stumps where hands and feet should have been.” Once safely with relatives or friends, the girls had to acclimatise to oppressive heat. Their skin might redden with a fiery prickly heat rash, like “sitting on thorns,” especially if they obeyed medical advice (given to both sexes until the early 1900s) to wear flannel underwear at all times. In sweltering temperatures, women wore tightly laced corsets, stockings and petticoats under high-necked, long-sleeved dresses until well into the 20th century.

'Women wore corsets and stockings under high-necked, long-sleeved dresses until well into the 20th century'

De Courcy uncovers the equally stifling protocol at work in the Raj; the formal exchanges of cards and stilted visits, where people were seated according to strict precedence. But as the Fishing Fleet girls soon discovered they were permitted plenty of pleasures unavailable to them in England, for instance, it was quite permissible for a young woman to down a 'chota peg' of whiskey on an evening. Women staying in the large stations and cantonments, plunged into a social whirl of clubs and gymkhanas, sports and dances. One young deb in 1930s Madras found “sheer pleasure and interest” in the “social pattern of dancing, riding, swimming, and picnics, Mah Jongg, and amateur theatricals, choir singing" and above all "plenty of friends of both sexes for the first time.” 

While some of the Fleet bagged a husband at sea, others landed one within a week or two of arriving in the country. Suitors flocked to meet the new influx of women off the boat and were scrutinised in turn. The top prize was a '£300-a-year' East India Company man, (later the Indian Civil Service), followed by an army officer or merchant. Against this exotic background girls enjoyed being competed over by multiple suitors. Honor Penrose got engaged during an elephant ride. Her fiance later confessed that he 'was a rotten dancer and thought if he waited until they reached civilisation and he proposed to her after treading on her toes in a foxtrot she might have refused him'.

“The thought of becoming pregnant was held over our heads like a flaming sword”

Few indulged in more than a few chaste kisses. Shy Bessie Bruce, the daughter of Viceroy Lord Elgin, enjoyed a tentative courtship by her father's aide-de-camp Henry Babington Smith, who won her heart by giving her botany lessons. De Courcy firmly argues that Victorian sexual morality held sway for British ex pats long after the old queen was in her grave. Even in the 1920s, a great deal of sexually ignorant young women believed that kissing could make them conceive. “The thought of becoming pregnant was held over our heads like a flaming sword,” recalled one. 

After marriage, as well as the risk of sickness and natural disasters (snakes, floods, riots, earthquakes, landslides to name a few) there was also the danger of boredom for young couples based in remote areas. For many, de Courcy explains, marital life came as a shock. Servants did all domestic work and with their children sent to be educated in India (believed to be healthier for them), wives had time on their hands. "One after one, the babies grow into companionable children; one after one England claims them, till the mother's heart and house are left unto her desolate," wrote Maud Diver. If their husband died - as many did - there was no shortage of replacements and de Courcy mentions widows being proposed to on the steps of the church after husband's burial. 

Not all the Fishing Fleet were successful, and some sailed sadly home. As as a poem from the Illustrated Weekly mocked in 1936, they went 'back to Putney and Byfleet/...Bond Street Beauty sadly worn/Through drinking cocktails night and morn'. I wonder what became of them...

The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (2012).