Gar Wood, ‘the Grey Fox of Algonac’, was to be Joe’s great rival. He was a fearless racer and a showman, endlessly, inventively competitive. In the year he first won the Harmsworth he also raced against the Havana Special, the fastest train on the Atlantic coastline, for 1,240 miles from Miami to New York. He beat it by twenty-one minutes. The next day he set out on a 2,300-mile journey up the Hudson to Detroit. Three months later he raced his boat against an aeroplane over sixteen miles of the St Clair river, and beat it by two minutes. His supremacy on the water was absolute. For the next seven years no British racer came near him.
In 1927 Joe commissioned Sam Saunders to build her three boats with which to race against Wood, and one with which to make an attempt on the transatlantic record. The three hydroplanes, constructed in great secrecy, were designed to be the fastest craft ever to travel on water, capable of 100mph; they were reputed to be costing her £50,000. These were the boats that Joe named in memory of her mother, believing her name to be Estelle. ‘I thought I’d give her a lift,’ she said. By forgetting that her mother was called Evelyn, Joe exacted a sly revenge. It is a measure of how successfully she had cut her ties with her family that there seems to have been no one around who would know to correct the mistake.
Estelle I, at twenty-six foot by five-and-a-half foot, was shaped like a shark, neat, sleek, with an upward tilt on the blunted point of the nose. Estelle II was shorter and fatter, like a small whale. Estelle III was never completed – her design had been over-ambitious. The two finished hydroplanes were extraordinarily light, the hulls crammed tight with power. Their thin wooden shells were cases for tremendous 900hp Napier Lion engines, which had already powered record-breaking aircraft and motor cars. Both had turtle-back decks which merged seamlessly into the sides of the hulls, a design which improved the boats’ aerodynamism but meant that if overturned they would be difficult to right. Joe unveiled the two Estelles at East Cowes in June 1928. ‘Nobody really knows anything about their behaviour,’ she told the press. ‘We are venturing into a new region of speed on the water.’
In the event Estelle I proved highly volatile, and sank on her first outing on Windermere. Evidently there were problems with the smaller Estelle too, because on 22 July Carstairs pulled out of the Harmsworth. ‘I have now had an opportunity of thoroughly testing the British challengers for the Harmsworth Trophy,’ she announced. ‘After most careful consideration and review of their seaworthiness and safety of their hulls I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they will not uphold the prestige of Great Britain at this important international event. Please therefore accept withdrawal of my entry.’ A week later, though, she heard that one of Gar Wood’s boats had been damaged. Armed with the knowledge that his craft too were fallible, she could not resist renewing the challenge: she would race Estelle II at Detroit for the 1928 Harmsworth Trophy.
Joe planned to make the 3,000-mile crossing from Cowes to New York in July, at an average speed of 50 to 60mph – the previous year Charles Lindbergh had passed into legend by flying from New York to Paris in a monoplane. Joe’s new transatlantic craft, Jack Stripes, was a seventy-eight-foot cutter with a bullet-shaped bow designed to break through ocean waves. To ensure that she could withstand a collision with a whale or a submerged shipwreck, her hull was built with five laminations of Consuta copper-sewn Burmese teak and clad with a riveted double-skin of Honduras mahogany. But when Joe took Jack Stripes out on the Channel for a test run the boat proved disastrous – she was ‘bucking like an insane bronco’, Joe said. Sam Saunders sacked F. P. H. Beadle, who had designed the boats, and Joe was forced to surrender her plan to speed across the Atlantic to America.
Joe trained assiduously for the Harmsworth, not only in the water but also in the gymnasium. For two hours each day she boxed and lifted weights, putting on 10lbs in muscle. In the build-up to the race she drank no alcohol. Then, with Joe Harris, Wadley, Ruth and a group of friends, Joe Carstairs set out from Southampton in August on the Cunard liner Berengaria.
The Berengaria immediately entered Joe’s pantheon. ‘It’s my ship,’ she declared. The boat had been launched in Germany as the Imperator in 1912, and handed over to the Allies in 1920 as a part of war reparations. One of the largest ships in the world, she could carry 5,500 passengers; within her great black hull were brightly lit lounges decked out with huge fireplaces, Tudor beams, heavy wooden chairs, antlers on the walls; she was as solid as a German hunting lodge and as airy as a grand hotel.
Once Carstairs reached Detroit, she posed for the press with Wadley. A caption accompanying a picture of her in a local newspaper read: ‘A puzzler: Mannish: This picture you might accept as that of a male movie star, might you not? It isn’t. It’s an excellent likeness of Miss M. B. Carstairs, foremost motor-boat enthusiast in Britain’; another local paper ignored her plainly masculine appearance and obstinately described her as ‘the pretty English motor-boat racer’. In the same feminising spirit the press in North America insisted on referring to Joe as ‘Betty’ in their reports. Presumably this was an innocent mistake which was repeated as reporters drew on one another’s articles, but Joe loathed the nickname and claimed that journalists used it out of spite. One American reporter to whom she complained about this practice had to concede that ‘anyone who knows the young woman would quite appreciate the ineptness of the title’.
On 2 September, 150,000 spectators gathered to watch the race for the Harmsworth Trophy. An article in the Detroit Free Press described what ensued.
With the crack of the starting gun Miss Carstairs shot her boat over the line more than 300 yards in advance of her rivals and thus won the first test of the race. Riding easily and without throwing much spray the English challenger was opened up and it appeared as though Wood was in for the greatest race of his career.
Sensing the test he was being put to, Wood . . . opened up the Miss America VII . . . Its two powerful Packard motors roaring and flames shooting a foot out of the exhausts, Wood cut down the margin of the Carstairs craft and passed it just going under the bridge . . .
The English girl was making a real race of it and followed close in the wash of Wood . . . Miss Carstairs . . . made the turn and was heading up the straightaway when, without warning, her boat leaped into the air and plunged nose first into the water throwing both Miss Carstairs and her mechanic out . . .
As the patrol hurried to rescue the unfortunate crew Miss Carstairs waved that she was alright but urged them to hurry to [Joe] Harris whom they found in an almost unconscious state, paddling to keep on top of the water. Miss Carstairs was swimming and watched them lift her stricken helper into the rescue boat and then climbed in with him.
Joe Carstairs said that she would have perished had the hull been riveted together rather than sewn with copper wire: she was shot out of the boat’s side the moment it hit the riverbed. When she reached the surface she was still chewing gum. ‘Other racing boats were coming at us,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d get our heads taken off.’ Joe Harris was examined by a doctor, who found he had broken two ribs. After dinner that evening it emerged that Carstairs had cracked three of hers, but she went dancing anyway. She later claimed that her American rivals had tried to murder her by deliberately catching her boat in their wash; on other occasions she alleged that they had filled her tank with sugar.
The Detroit Free Press paid tribute to Joe Carstairs’ prowess on the water: ‘While her misfortune was disastrous and came with amazing suddenness,’ it noted, ‘Miss Carstairs gave a demonstration of piloting ability never before equalled by a woman . . . She outgeneralled Wood.’ Joe had established herself as the fastest woman on water anywhere in the world. But this, of course, was not good enough.
Since the boats built by the Saunders yard in 1928 had failed her, Joe Carstairs set up her own boatyard on the Medina river in East Cowes. She named it Sylvia, after a friend, and took on a task force of six men. Joe Harris was the chief engineer, Arthur ‘Gubby’ Gubbins the foreman, Jimmy Dexter the pain
ter of the boats and Bert Hawker the designer. The work on Joe’s next challenger for the Harmsworth was again conducted in secret – high walls were erected around the tiny boatyard, prefiguring the walls with which Joe would surround herself at Whale Cay. The craft under construction was referred to by the press as the ‘hush-hush boat’, the ‘mystery boat’ and the ‘Q boat’.
When Estelle IV was completed in June 1929 Joe took her staff out for a slap-up meal at the Victoria Tavern, a public house next to the yard, before launching the new craft in the Medina. ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said as the boat hit the water, and then, in a characteristically malapropical phrase: ‘The rest is on the knees of the gods.’ Joe had a careless, confident way with words. Once, when asked for the source of her prodigious energy, she smartly replied: ‘Effluvium – that’s what I call it. I don’t know if the word’s in the dictionary.’ Like a child, she played loosely with language, half-indifferent and half-amused by her slips and inappropriate conjunctions.
‘Miss Carstairs’ boat is one of the cleanest-designed hulls ever seen,’ reported the Manchester Chronicle, ‘with lengthy, beautiful, upswept bows.’ Yachting magazine praised this ‘beautiful boat, 35ft of glistening black hull, well proportioned and with all the elements of speed’. According to the Daily Telegraph, she was ‘the most wonderful motor boat that has ever been made’. Though graceful and streamlined, Estelle IV was a massive, sturdy craft, thirty-five foot long; Estelle II had failed, said Joe, because she was too small and light. The new boat’s keel was solid English oak, her flanks were Ecuadorean timber, painted on either side with a Union Jack. She was equipped with three Napier Lion 935hp engines, and triple propellers cut from eighty tons of steel.
Thanks to the excitement of the previous year’s Harmsworth race, three times as many people – half a million – turned up to watch in Detroit in 1929. Estelle IV averaged 64mph in the trials, a new British record. But during the race itself she handled badly and hit a log, loosening a manifold in the engine. Gar Wood triumphed again. ‘As far as competition went,’ reported Yachting, ‘this year’s widely heralded race for the British International Trophy was a dismal failure.’ To top it all, while being loaded after the race Estelle IV slipped from the crane and was damaged.
In October Joe gave an interview to Lillian Sabine of the American magazine Motor Boating. Sabine found Joe’s ‘rollicking boyishness’ appealing, and like Anthony Heckstall-Smith saw her not as an oddity but as an embodiment of modernity. ‘She has a straightforward manner,’ Sabine wrote, ‘unaffected and sincere. She is fearlessly honest – in the modern spirit. More than anyone I had ever met, Marion Carstairs seemed to me a product of her generation.’
But Joe’s manner was not entirely straightforward. Her desire for visibility was equalled by her desire for concealment, and in order to obscure herself she played ‘in the modern spirit’ with the idea of fixed identity. In this she was a true child of her time. Towards the end of the interview with Lillian Sabine she called to one of her retinue of girls, ‘Bring Lord Tod Wadley in.’ Wadley was brought, and Joe solemnly placed him in Lillian Sabine’s hand, a token of herself. ‘If anything happened,’ she said, ‘I’d save him first.’ Then, further dislocating her identity, Joe Carstairs pointed at one of the other women in the room: ‘That’s Marion Carstairs.’
Chapter Ten
An Absurd Manikin
By the late 1920s the tide was turning against the likes of Joe Carstairs. Her vaunted pluck was beginning to be seen as a rebellion against nature. In the immediate aftermath of the war, masculine women were perceived – at worst – as contemporary curiosities but in 1928 the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness irrevocably sexualised them. The heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s novel was, like Joe Carstairs, a well-to-do woman who dressed in men’s clothes; like Carstairs, she had served as an ambulance driver in France; and like Carstairs she had a female lover. The book was banned. In a notoriously intemperate leading article, the editor of the Sunday Express fulminated against homosexuality.
Bravado
I am well aware that sexual inversion and perversion are horrors which exist among us today. They flaunt themselves in public places with increasing effrontery and more insolently provocative bravado. The decadent apostles of the most hideous and loathsome vices no longer conceal their degeneracy and their degradation.
They seem to imagine that there is no limit to the patience of the English people. They appear to revel in their defiance of public opinion. They do not shun publicity. On the contrary, they seek it, and they take a delight in their flamboyant notoriety. The consequence is that this pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.
The Plague
I have seen the plague stalking shamelessly through great social assemblies. I have heard it whispered about by young men and young women who do not and cannot grasp its unutterable putrefaction. Both aspects of it are thrust upon healthy and innocent minds. The contagion cannot be escaped. It pervades our social life.
Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise or a curse in disguise that this novel forces upon our society a disagreeable task which it has hitherto shirked, the task of cleaning itself from the leprosy of these lepers, and making the air clean and wholesome once more . . .
The English people are slow to rise in their wrath and strike down the armies of evil, but when they are aroused they show no mercy, and they give no quarter to those who exploit their tolerance and their indulgence.
In the same year the first predatory lesbian – Countess Geschwitz in Pandora’s Box – was portrayed on screen. A powerful connection was made in the public mind between the ‘mannish women’ who emerged from the Great War and the masculine ‘inverts’ who had suddenly come to light.
The medical establishment had acknowledged the existence of sexual love between women in the nineteenth century, and given such women a variety of labels: they were inverts, the intermediate sex, the third sex, urnings, men trapped inside women’s bodies. By the 1920s the issue had become more vexed: in The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920) Freud attributed lesbianism to rejection by the father, raising the possibility of a psychological ‘cure’. Meanwhile the work on glands and grafting conducted by the likes of Serge Voronoff raised the possibility that sexuality was medically adjustable. ‘It is not only perfectly possible, but even probable, that maladjusted sex factors may exist in man as in moths,’ wrote Julian Huxley in 1922. ‘Several results follow, the first the distinct possibility that cases of sexual perversion may be cured by injection or grafting.’
It was feared that lesbianism was an epidemic. In 1929 a woman was imprisoned for having lived as a man, under the name Colonel Barker. ‘You have set an evil example,’ explained the judge, ‘which, were you to go unpunished, others might follow.’
Sportswomen were picked out as indulging in a dangerous, feverish excess. ‘Our girls too strenuous,’ ran the headline on an article in the Daily News in 1929. ‘Are they overdoing it at sport? Expert’s warning.’ The article cautioned that ‘Zeal is being allowed to outrun discretion, with serious physical results.’ Nominally the subject of the article was sport; but the comment reflected the growing concern about young women’s sexual promiscuity and about lesbianism in particular. ‘The trouble is “over-keenness”,’ the piece continued. ‘She “gets the fever” . . . It is a jolly life – but it may be a dangerous one.’
By 1930 a sour note was occasionally entering press reports about Carstairs, and her behaviour to reporters had become fractious. Joe may have lost her tolerance for newspapermen when Wadley was described in an American paper as an ‘absurd manikin’. Carstairs too was perceived now as a comic or sinister would-be man. Characteristics never mentioned before – her continual gum-chewing, her tattoos, her spitting, her swearing – began to surface in the articles: ‘She smokes incessantly,’ reported one, ‘not with languid feminine grace, but with the sharp decisive
gestures a man uses.’ Estelle IV had been hailed for her clean design and her beautiful bows; when Estelle V was launched in 1930 she was described as ‘powerful but ugly’. As the heady 1920s gave way to the sober 1930s, Carstairs’ verve, independence and experimentation were being interpreted as insalubrious and freakish.
Questions were raised in the press about whether racing itself was healthy: perhaps the desire for speed was a dangerous, insatiable appetite, a sign not of progress but of decadence. Joe began to cast her motorboating – and by implication her sexuality – as a compulsion rather than a choice. ‘I wouldn’t race,’ she told a reporter, ‘only I can’t help it.’ Many racers felt compelled to defend their sport in newspaper interviews and columns, pointing for example to the potential benefits to industry that the development of powerful engines might bring.
Then in June 1930 the national hero Sir Henry Segrave was killed breaking the water-speed record on Windermere. Segrave had been knighted that year after beating Gar Wood in America (in a boat designed, like Newg, by Fred Cooper) and he had planned to race for the 1930 Harmsworth, as the first British competitor other than Joe for many years. Carstairs and Segrave were friends as well as rivals, and when he died she was asked for her reaction. ‘England has lost a great man and a great champion,’ she began, conventionally enough. But then her eulogy turned defensive: ‘He was a man of abnormal nerve . . . I never liked these freak boats, such as Sir Henry Segrave had. I have said so before and I am more certain of it now . . . The Estelle boats, with which I hope to win the world’s championship, are not freaks. They are ordinary.’
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 8