The joint winner of the previous year’s race, John Edward de Johnston-Noad, recalled meeting Joe at the 1925 Duke of York’s. Tall, dark-skinned, with a rakish moustache and a Gallic nose, Johnston-Noad always wore a monocle, often a beret and occasionally a tasselled woollen hat. He styled himself Count of Montenegro. Johnston-Noad took to Joe. She was a ‘small, dumpy twenty-four-year-old tom-boy’, he observed, ‘who wore short, clipped hair and dressed like a man . . . The actress Gwen Farrar was only one of [her] many lady friends. I shall always remember Carstairs’ tough-faced secretary “Fatty” Baldwin – otherwise known as Ruth – cheerleading an ever-changing bevy of attractive girl supporters – each of them smartly dressed and given their own motor car.’ This last observation may be slightly exaggerated: nowhere else is it claimed that Joe had a fleet of girlfriends with motor cars. But she was certainly generous, and may well have given cars – as emblems of herself, and as vehicles of independence – to some of her friends.
Johnston-Noad had the honour of piloting the Duke of York, the future George VI, around the Thames while the other contenders were warming up for the trials in 1925. The Duke asked to be introduced to the river girl. As they approached Joe Carstairs’ craft, which had temporarily halted, she wheeled round furiously, alarmed that she might be disqualified if anyone came to her aid. ‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t you bloody well come near me!’ The Duke turned to Johnston-Noad in bewilderment. ‘W-w-what’s wrong with her, Mr Johnston-Noad?’ ‘Er, ignition trouble, I believe, Your Royal Highness,’ he replied. ‘She’s changing her plugs.’
Johnston-Noad was born, like Joe, in 1900, and his career as a motorboat racer had been preceded by a childhood even more peculiar than hers. His life serves as a counterpoint to Joe’s: their family histories were similar, so was their behaviour in the 1920s; but after the motorboating days they took very different courses. Johnston-Noad was the man Joe could have been but – thankfully – wasn’t.
‘I was rebellious from the day that I was born,’ Johnny Johnston-Noad wrote in his unpublished memoirs, ‘nobody wanted me.’ Like Carstairs, he blurred cause and effect: he was not rebellious because he was rejected, he suggested, but rejected because he was rebellious.
Johnston-Noad’s memoirs are so bizarre that parts of them are difficult to credit. He, like Joe, made a myth of himself. He claimed that his mother, the daughter of the King of Montenegro, was murdered immediately after his birth. His father, he explained, was a Scottish engineer who had made millions in the nitrate mines of Chile and then dabbled in the political intrigues of the mountainous Serbo-Croat state of Montenegro. The King ennobled him in gratitude for his support and allowed him to marry his daughter. But enemies of the Crown killed the princess moments after she delivered her son. Johnston-Noad was not sure that his father, who he believed had connections with the terrorist group the Black Hand Gang, was not himself the murderer.
The boy was brought up by nannies in Paris and Nice; he complained that he was dressed, in the fashion of the day, as a little girl. His father took as his second wife a French countess who loathed her stepson – she made a wax effigy of him, claimed Johnston-Noad, into which she stuck pins – and soon Johnny was dispatched to England as a ward of court. On the crossing a stranger pushed him overboard. He was rescued, but throughout his childhood lived in fear of being murdered by Montenegrans. When it seemed he was being watched he moved from one set of guardians to another, and eventually he changed his name from Howard-Johnston to Johnston-Noad to confuse his enemies.
At first he was cold and miserable in England, and didn’t bother to eat. ‘Then I joined the Scouts and became a choirboy,’ he recalled, ‘and that sort of pulled me together. Then I went out fornicating – that helped me a bit more!’ His father was killed in a mining disaster in South America in 1919; Johnny claimed he had met him only twice.
Johnston-Noad began racing boats in 1921. He also took up flying and raced cars, on and off the track – the walls of his house were hung at one point with fifty-two summonses for speeding. Like Joe, he was as wild and free in his sexual life as he was on the road and on the sea. In his recollections, motor cars and sex were closely related. ‘I have treated every car as a mistress,’ he said. The cars were symbols and instruments of sexual freedom. Johnston-Noad owned several Bentleys and designed his own Rolls-Royce with a ‘fornication seat’ in the back. And though he was married – his wife raced in the minor motorboat contests – he had scores of affairs. When Johnston-Noad’s girlfriends came to watch him race, he said, they wore underwear in his colours, black and blue. He described the world he moved in as a ‘sporting society . . . sporting in action with cars and boats and sporting in their attitude to life. Everyone was mad. It was a case in those days of not caring and a lot of excessive courage.’
The stories Johnny Johnston-Noad and Joe Carstairs told about their childhoods had much in common: the money mined from metal and oil, the wicked step-parent, the murdered mother, the fleeting father. They both raced away from these unhappy scenes, and countered their abandonment with rebellion – in cars, in boats, in bed.
At the end of the 1920s, though, their stories diverged. Johnston-Noad’s unstable nature led him to trouble in the less tolerant 1930s, and into a seedier world. After being bankrupted in the 1929 stock market crash he perpetrated a series of financial scams and was imprisoned in a French jail and three English prisons. By 1952 not even Johnston-Noad’s defence lawyer could find much to recommend his client: in court he described him as ‘an egotistical megalomaniac who saw life through the romantic spectacles of the hero of a cheap novelette’. Johnny Johnston-Noad was convicted of involvement in a jewel heist masterminded by his second wife, the master-criminal ‘The Black Orchid’; she and her lover killed themselves in a suicide pact while on the run from the police.
Johnston-Noad was acquitted, though, of firing two pistol-shots at his mistress during one of his ‘bottle parties’ and of running a brothel in New Bond Street. And his neighbours near Egham, Surrey, failed to curtail the frolics at his riverside house Fornication Cottage in the late 1930s; they objected in particular to the occasions on which Johnston-Noad and his friends would chase a naked fat woman around the lawn, smacking her on the bottom with paddles.
Chapter Seven
Hullo! My Dear Fellow
At the end of 1925 Joe Carstairs underwent her definitive rebirth. She and Ruth Baldwin – the ‘tough-faced secretary’ Johnston-Noad had observed – took a skiing holiday to Rosegg, in the Swiss Alps, and on Christmas Day Ruth gave Joe a man-doll. Carstairs traded her life for his.
The doll, a stuffed leather manikin just over a foot high, was manufactured in Germany by the celebrated toymakers Steiff. His limbs were firm and jointed at the body, so the arms and legs could be turned this way and that in alert and expressive poses. His head was round, a neat ear on either side. His eyes were black beads, like shining currants, set wide in innocence and topped with short, lightly arched eyebrows. The soft leather flesh of the face was contoured – the cheeks, the forehead and the chin lifted gently, the nose rose like a button. Beneath the nose, turning up as if to cup it, was a small dark smile, the smile a child would draw, snugly stitched into the leather.
As the doll grew older, his face was to blacken, crack and peel; the stitches binding his head together like a football became dirty and tough, forming the mark of a cross against his face. But his eyes still shone and his smile stuck fast. Joe Carstairs dressed her doll in suits and uniforms. He was a homunculus, a tiny man with the face of a boy. Joe called him Lord Tod Wadley, as if he were a waddling toddler and a peer of the realm together. He was as pure as a lamb, as worldly as a rake, as omniscient as a god.
Ruth Baldwin was the girlfriend Joe loved above all others. Yet there is little trace of her now. Like Dolly Wilde – and like Joe herself in many ways – Ruth performed for the day rather than produced for posterity. Her photographs show what she looked like: tall, long-legged, wide in the
shoulders, with a big moon face, bold, naughty eyes and thick auburn hair. Her tombstone tells when she was born (17 February 1905), her full name (Catherine Ruth Baldwin) and the date of her death (31 August 1937). Her nicknames were Bobby and – according to Johnston-Noad at any rate – Fatty. She was said to be of Irish stock, like Dolly Wilde, and American by birth. When Joe died, there was one man still alive who had known Ruth, but he was too old and ill to want to talk about her; friends said he had been responsible in the 1930s for fetching her home from bars. All of Joe’s friends had heard of Ruth: ‘She was wild,’ they said. ‘She was such fun. Ruth, she was really wild.’ The stories they passed on about her were, like Ruth, brief and bright.
Ruth took drugs. She drank – she replaced her kitchen with a bar. She was, according to Joe, ‘fabulously strong’. She was promiscuous and possessive. She freely spent Joe’s money. She ate raw chops in the middle of the night. She liked to take her pet Pekinese to the pub and feed him brandy. She taught Joe that: ‘The world is one’s oyster if taken at will.’ She was a heady, stormy woman, and it seems that her public wildness was matched by a private wilderness.
Through her association with Dolly Wilde, Joe had brushed shoulders during the war with the lesbian literary circle in Paris. Dolly was still living in Paris in the 1920s, and among the women also attending Natalie Barney’s salons was the writer Djuna Barnes. Until 1927, Djuna Barnes lived with a woman named Thelma Wood, and in 1936 she fictionalised their affair in the odd novel Nightwood. The ménage Barnes describes is in some respects similar to that of Joe Carstairs, Ruth Baldwin and Lord Tod Wadley.
In Nightwood, the narrator reflects on the significance of the doll given to her by her girlfriend, Robin. ‘When a woman gives [a doll] to a woman,’ she writes, ‘it’s the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane . . . Sometimes, if [Robin] got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room, in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us – “our child” – high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it: and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now under now over.’ The fiction was based in fact: after parting from Thelma Wood in 1927, Djuna Barnes kept their broken doll by her until she died. (Dolly Wilde herself appears as a kind of doll broken by rage in another of Djuna Barnes’ works, Ladies Almanack (1928), a parody of Parisian salon society: Barnes casts Dolly as the drug-addicted lesbian Doll Furious.)
Carstairs’ family, too, comprised two women and a doll. Joe, like the narrator of Nightwood, was the keeper of the doll. Ruth, like the narrator’s lover, was drunk, reckless, raging. Although Joe never said that Ruth damaged Wadley, she did in later years express a terror of her girlfriends trying to hurt him. And like the doll in Nightwood Wadley was a mock-child, a sacred and profane earnest of the two women’s love. Yet, unlike the Nightwood doll, he was not a fragile substitute for a real child: he was infinitely better. Lord Tod Wadley was not made of china but of leather – his flesh was tougher than human skin. Wadley was a boast rather than an apology. He was the stuff of defiance and comedy.
Joe Carstairs could not bear the idea of having a child. ‘I’d never have a baby for anything in the world.’ A girlfriend once suggested adoption and Joe ran from the room virtually screaming with horror. It is easy enough to take her at her word – after all, girls were so disturbing to her that she scarcely acknowledged their existence, and the role of the perpetual boy was her own. A real boy-child would first have usurped her and then – in growing to adulthood – undone her dream that boyhood could last for ever. The boy Wadley, though, could be her companion and her model in perpetuity. And her belief in him was itself living proof of her childlike spirit.
In Nightwood too, the doll is not just the child two women cannot have but the child they long to be. Djuna Barnes depicts homosexuality as a transcendent immaturity, embodied in the doll: ‘The last doll . . . is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! . . . The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the doll.’
Joe and Ruth lived together at a house Joe bought for £3,000 in Mulberry Walk, off the King’s Road in Chelsea. The house had thick brick walls covered in grapes and inset with little windows like portholes on to the street, while inside it was bright with skylights. It was at once as spacious and enclosed as an ocean liner. There were huge living-rooms and bedrooms equipped with bunks – Joe lived upstairs, Ruth down. Joe’s floors were laid with battleship linoleum. A charwoman – ‘old fat Mrs Peacock’ – did the cooking and a maid lived in a room off the stairs between Joe’s apartment and Ruth’s.
Behind the house was a small, walled garden with a pond. A few penguins shuffled around the garden for a while; these were eventually donated to London Zoo on account of their unpleasant smell. From then on, Joe was given toy penguins as presents, a practice which persisted until the end of her life: china penguins, feathered penguins, plastic penguins, wooden penguins, furry penguins, marble penguins. The signs of mortality and decay were repulsive to her. ‘I prefer inanimate objects,’ she said.
By the front door of 5 Mulberry Walk, Joe mounted a plaque which read: ‘Marion Barbara Carstairs and Lord Tod Wadley’. The plaque played with the idea that it might be more acceptable that Miss Carstairs be partnered by a fictional aristocrat than a live girl. Tradesmen, Joe said, occasionally called asking for Lord Tod, and once a man turned up at the door claiming to have served with Wadley in France during the Great War.
Many of the growing band of motorboat, car and aircraft racers carried mascots with them for luck. Sometimes Carstairs referred to Wadley as her mascot, but he was far too precious to take out on the water. While she took risks with herself, she would take none with him. Nevertheless, Wadley worked like a charm. In his first year, Joe triumphed in Newg.
Tens of thousands of people lined the Thames to watch the 1926 Duke of York’s Trophy, which had attracted the strongest international gathering of any race since the war: three British boats (including Newg and Johnston-Noad’s Miss Betty), two from America, two from France, one from Canada and one from Germany. ‘Babe’ Barnato had supplied a supercharged engine for Newg, and he piloted her in the first round; then Joe took over. In the early stages of the race nearly all the hydroplanes packed up, with problems ranging from driftwood damage to ignition failure, and by the final heat only two remained – Newg, piloted by Joe, and Sigrid IV, piloted by Herr Krueger. In the closing moments the German boat too fell by the wayside, its connecting rod having broken. Then Newg’s propeller was caught by a submerged rope. It seemed no one was going to complete the course. But Joe managed to cut the rope free and win the race. ‘Shingled Girl Beats German’ ran the Daily Mail headline the next day.
That season Joe won the Royal Motor Yacht Club International Race, the Daily Telegraph Cup, the Bestise Cup and the Lucina Cup. On Lake Windermere she secured the one-and-a-half-litre-class world record – 54.97mph. She commissioned a further one-and-a-half-litre boat from Sam Saunders which, in gratitude, she dubbed Leumas, the letters of his name in reverse.
Joe was the most celebrated female motorboat racer in Britain, as fast and as brave as any man. She was thrilled by the attention her victories brought. ‘I loved an audience,’ she recalled. ‘I loved people to come up and say, “Give me your autograph.” I was a nasty little piece. With an audience, it’s amazing what I can do.’
Wadley provided a perpetual audience for Joe’s exploits, as she did for his. He was the archetypal Bright Young Thing. His suits were tailored, li
ke Joe’s, in Savile Row, his leather shoes imported from Italy; he had a sealskin coat trimmed with fur. In 1929 a friend dummied up a magazine feature in which Wadley was pictured yachting, riding, taking cocktails, writing a novel and sitting for a studio portrait. In one photograph he is depicted reclining among foliage, spectacles perched on the top of his head, empty bottles strewn about him and an open book lying by his side. Beneath runs the caption: ‘I am a thorough student, and when I feel I must have solitude, I take a day in the country – with my books.’ Another caption reads: ‘ “Hullo! My dear fellow”: Lord Tod Wadley greets a friend.’
‘Like other members of the Bright Young Set,’ explains the text, ‘he is an all-round sportsman and yachtsman; he also rides and motors. He understands the charm of a really good cocktail, and realises that one cannot be a Success in Society these days without some literary achievement. It is an open secret that he is writing a novel – and that when the book finally appears it will create a sensation by its outspoken analysis of modern Society.’ (Olivia Wyndham, who took the pictures for this dummy magazine page, later moved to New York, where she lived with a black woman in Harlem.)
Wadley is not the only doll to feature in photographs from the 1920s – there are snapshots of Joe Carstairs and her friends in Cannes, in Hampshire, in Switzerland holding dolls aloft, perching them on walls, sitting with them among the rocks. Joe did not keep or remember any of these dolls; nor did she ever mention the dolls of her childhood. As a little girl she must have had girl-dolls – elaborate, decorated creatures, with china faces, stiff bodies and lacy layers of clothing. But Joe’s desire for a boy-doll – perhaps for the sailor boys and soldiers with which her baby brother played – overcame the memory of all but Wadley.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 6