August 19, 2015 • 41 mins
As Carstair's speedboat racing career faltered, the heiress traveled the world and found other diversions, until she decided to purchase an island in the Bahamas. Then she turned Whale Cay into a kingdom of her own design.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today is our continuation of our
two parter on Joe car Stairs. And I'm not going
(00:21):
to do a lot of rehashing of part one because
part two runs very long already, So if you haven't
already listened to part one, go back and do that,
or a lot of this isn't going to have context
to make sense. But when we left off in part one,
Joe Carstairs had returned to Great Britain after a race
in the US, and she had just opened her own
boatyard and East Cows with her mechanic. Joe Harris is
(00:42):
the chief engineer. The first project for this new firm
called Sylvia after one of those friends was constructing another
competition boat. This was the Estell four. So you might
remember from the previous episode that Joe had commissioned several
other boats, all named a Spell after her mother. She
realized that her mother was actually named Evelyn, but that
(01:03):
didn't bother her really, so she continued with the naming
theme of a stell uh Tall walls went up around
the Sylvia construction yard because Joe wanted no one to
be able to see what was being built, and until June,
when a Stell four was unveiled, the press would refer
to this project with names like the Hush Hush boat,
(01:25):
and when this new thirty five ft watercraft was revealed,
it was lauded in the papers as incredibly well designed
and just incredibly beautiful. Joe took the a Stelle floor
back to Detroit for the Harmsworth Cup. This time she
set a British record during the trials of sixty four
miles an. Things were looking really good for Joe in
this race, which was great because we talked last time
(01:46):
about several unfortunate incidents in her racing career. However, then
she hit a log and damaged the engine mount on
the boat. The universe was also not done with Joe
and her team because then the a spell for slipped
off the crane that was loading it up after the race,
which caused further damage to the boat. And so it
seems that the good fortune that surrounded Joe's early voting
(02:09):
races was really dwindling, and as her celebrity grew, Joe
was also at odds with her identity and her place
in the public sphere. So at one point, while giving
an interview for a magazine in October of n Joe
told the interviewer very seriously that if anything bad ever happened,
she would save her doll, Lord Todd Wadley first, uh,
(02:32):
for his safety. Wadley, who we talked about how she
got it in the first episode. Wadley never raced with Joe.
She always had him safely kept on shore. And during
that same interview where she was sort of talking about
how Wadley was really more important than she was in
some ways, she also kind of, uh, just as an
aside pointed out another woman that was present to the
(02:55):
reporter and she said, oh, that's actually Marian Carstairs. So
she was kind of doing this weird thing where she
was deflecting attention from herself to other people and inanimate objects.
It's kind of this it's kind of a window into
how she felt about being in the press all the time.
So this timing of her apparent unease with being in
(03:17):
the public eye even as she was relishing their adoration,
also was happening at the same time as a shift
in cultural attitudes. So the post war nineteen twenties had
really celebrated Joe's brash style and her unconventional life. But
a number of events took place in the last years
of the nineteen twenties that made those same traits that
(03:37):
had previously drawn accolades instead draw suspicion. First was a
backlash to a book that was published called The Well
of Loneliness by Radcliff Hall and that was published in
In this book, which is considered to be a trailblazing
example of lesbian literature, was actually banned, and newspapers ran
(03:59):
stories and editor reels about the pestilence of sexual inversion
that had fallen upon society and how this was evidence
of it. Second, the German silent film Pandora's Box was released,
which started Louise Brooks, and that came out in so
a female character in this film named Countess Anna Geschwitz
(04:19):
had this rather vulturing approach to her sexual interest in
Brooks's character, and this continued the idea that lesbianism was
this dark and sinister force and was also really coercive.
If you are interested in learning more about like the
trends and how sexual orientation was portrayed, and film like
(04:42):
go watch The Cellula Closet because it will watch through. Yeah,
it's so good. And there's like a whole history of
of like gay men and lesbians being portrayed as these sinister,
evil forces who were praying on young people. And third,
military man going by the name of Colonel Victor Barker
(05:02):
was indicted for bankruptcy in the late nineteen twenties. But
when Colonel Barker, who had a wife, was in police custody,
officials realized that he did not have male genitalia. To them,
he was not biologically male, and so Barker was charged
with provided with providing false information on a marriage certificate
and consequently was sentenced to nine months in prison. And
(05:25):
this was huge news. It was in all the papers,
and it once again drew attention in a negative way
to any sort of sexual inversion or any sort of
fluidity on the gender spectrum. So, in addition to these
changing social perceptions of lesbianism, the Wall Street Crash of
nine put a huge damper on the party atmosphere that
(05:46):
had made Joe's unconventional life something that people were really
able and willing to accept and celebrate. So the gayety
of the Roaring twenties was officially over, and as this
tie turned, the press started to take a more negative
tone when they were covering Joe Carstairs. Reporters started to
(06:06):
point out her various foibles that didn't align with common
perceptions of femininity, and whereas she had been described as
charmingly unconventional when she had been the press's darling, at
this point, writers started to discuss how coarse she was
and how bad all of her habits were, and one
American paper called Lord Todd Wadley an absurd mannequin. For
(06:27):
the ninety Armsworth Cup, Joe once again traveled to the
United States, and this time she took two boats, a
Stealth four, which had been rebuilt, and a Stell five,
which was a new boat. She made it clear that
this third attempt at the cup would be her last
one if she did not win. The sport was really
too expensive, and she knew that not even her inheritance
(06:47):
would allow her to just keep doing it forever. She
had spent more than half a million dollars just on
the Harmsworth races, and once again the trials went incredibly well.
Joe even surpassed the speed record, which was held by
the Americans, reaching ninety four point five miles per hour
in the Estelle five. And just for context, that's the
(07:09):
American speed record, not saying that that was the world
record that the Americans held. Uh. However, on race day,
once again, things just did not go Joe's way. Both
the Astell four and the Astell five broke down and
Joe was unable to finish the race. And when she
got back to land and got out of the boat,
she told onlookers and reporters, well, you'd better get a
(07:30):
good look at me, because I am not coming over again.
And the wake of her defeat, Joe told several stories
about events that happened in their and their travels. We
don't know which, if any of these stories are true,
but they're all. They all connect through this larger narrative
that Joe told of a fortune teller who predicted them. Yeah,
after all of these bad things happened, she told people that, oh,
(07:54):
a fortune teller before I even left London, told me
these things were going to happen. Uh. And so this
alleged fortune teller told Carstairs that her rivals were going
to try to sabotage her efforts and kill her at
Harmsworth by forcing a crash, And while she had crashed
the previous year, in this instance, for boats actually didn't crash,
she had mechanical failure. The second premonition of the possibly
(08:17):
made up fortune teller warned Joe about a house fire,
and the house she was renting during her trip did
have a fire, and Lord Todd Wadley was supposedly saved
from said fire by a little boy who happened by
and saw the doll sitting like on a window ledge
and Wadley's rescuer, Joe told everyone, was amply rewarded with
all the ice cream he could consume. And news reports
(08:40):
at the time do corroborate this fire at Joe Carstar's
rented home, but she had framed the earlier one like
no one had been home, and this little boy saw
it and rescued her doll. But in fact Joe was there.
She actually helped firefighters as they worked to save other
nearby cottages. And there's no mention in any papers of
a little boy, you know, restviewing some precious item and
(09:01):
being rewarded. The third event that Joe claimed to have
been warned about by the sports and teller was a
car crash. As Joe and her group left their rented
house to head to the train station and then back
home to England, their car lost traction with the road
and spun into a ditch. Although everyone was fine. We
don't have any corroboration of this story, so we really
(09:22):
don't know if it's true or not, but we do
know that when Joe returned home from the Harmsworth Race
in nineteen thirty, having vowed to never return to that
race again, her life had really changed. So not only
was she kind of putting away that one race that
was kind of one of the big ones that she
had been pursuing, but X Garage, which will remember was
(09:43):
the chauffeur service that was run entirely by women that
she had set up with friends, had actually closed in
ninet so at the time when it closed, she was
very busy with racing. But now she went home and
she didn't have that business to keep her busy, and
two of her friends from that business, Bartie cole Claw
and Joe and Recoron had gotten married since so it
wasn't like they could easily restart the business. They were
(10:05):
busy with their new lives and and their husbands, and
so Joe raced boats in Britain for a little while,
but she really never regained the success that she had attained.
So early on we'll talk about Joe's next moves and
how she coped with this shift in her life. But
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back to Joe. After a series of racing failures punctuated
by a race there in Europe against fellow yachts woman
Virginie Herriot that Joe lost by seventeen minutes, Carstairs had
(12:14):
just had it. She actually threatened to emigrate, but instead
she set off with a friend named mAb's Jenkins and
her doll, Lord Todd Wadley, on a trip around the world.
In India in particular, was a favorite of Joe's. She
told people that she believed her father, Albert Carstairs, had
died there. She and Mab took up big game hunting,
shooting panthers and crocodiles, and they spent more than a
(12:36):
year traveling all over the globe, eventually picking up a
man from Sri Lanka as a guide and a servant
along the way. When the trip was over, Joe continued
to support her Sri Lankan friend for the rest of
his life. Yeah, I don't I didn't detail it throughout
the this outline, but I do want to point out
that one thing that is consistent in Joe Carstairs life
(12:59):
is that she really did financially take care of a
lot of her friends. Like when X Garage closed, those
women that she had been friends with that she ran
it with, she continued to give them their salary for
the rest of their lives. She would basically like any
friends that had worked for her, they pretty much earned
that salary forever, even long after they had stopped working
on whatever the project was. She really did sort of
(13:21):
take care of people with all of her money, and
once Joe and Mab had wrapped up their travels, Joe
ended up kind of being um bicontinental. She took up
living both in London and New York, and so in
London she and Ruth still shared a home together. Ruth, remember,
was her long term girlfriend that she had been with
(13:42):
for quite a while. They didn't have an exclusive relationship,
but they were very close. And then in New York,
Joe lived with another paramore, Isabel t Pell and though
Ruth and Joe had always had this open relationship, Ruth
became incredibly jealous of Isabel and left alone in London,
Ruth really developed a pretty bad drinking problem, and she
began using and abusing drugs, and the relationship between Ruth
(14:05):
and Joe really became strained and crumbled to a great degree.
And even with two homes to choose from, Joe just
really couldn't stay in one place and said she started
sailing more often than not, using her fleet to carry
her anywhere she wanted to go. She traveled to an
island five hundred miles southwest of Panama to Liok for
buried treasure, although she did not find any uh, Yeah,
(14:30):
she had lots of little adventures like that. And you
may recall our mention of the Cunard liner Berengaria in
the first episode of this two parter, and that was
the ship that carried Joe across the Atlantic when she
was traveling there for the first Harmsworth Race that she
participated in, and she had been really really impressed with
this liner, so she decided to build a smaller scale
replica of it for her own personal needs. And Joe's vessel,
(14:54):
which was named Barnia, was a fast motor cruiser that
also had every possible amenity, including a dance floor and
a full cocktail bar. At this point, it was nineteen
thirty three, and Joe's life, which really looked charmed even
with the departure of her luck from her voting career,
it's actually something of a mess. She still had a
comfortable income from her trust funds, but she hadn't paid
(15:15):
taxes in Britain or the United States at all during
the nineteen twenties. This was bad. She was in trouble.
She eventually disclosed those close to her that she was
about a hundred thousand dollars behind on her unpaid taxes.
And around this same time, Joe saw an add in
an American paper about an island that was for sale
(15:37):
in the British West Indies, which was a tax haven.
So in nineteen thirty four she bought the island of
whale Key. She left behind her failed voting career and
her tax bill, and she moved to whale Key permanently.
Everyone to add theatricality to a tale, Joe said that
whale Key had really beckoned to her. She would later
tell people this island had a particular liking for me.
(15:59):
The land, which is now called Big whale Key, is
about nine miles long and about a thousand acres in area.
There were no roads on the island when Joe bought it.
She didn't bring any cars with her and she planned
to travel on foot or by dinghy. So the Bahamas
at this point we're really experiencing an economic depression. The
end of prohibition in the US had cut off the
(16:22):
alcohol smuggling trade that had brought quite a bit of
money in through the area, and immigration laws in the
U s were tightening, so fewer people were able were
able to move from the Bahamas to a place with
more lucrative potential, that being the US. Additionally, these islands
had been repeatedly just beaten over the course of several
(16:42):
years by an array of hurricanes and tropical storms, and
on some of the more remote islands, things were really dire.
Starvation was a very real problem for the people that
lived there. Of the sixty thousand people who lived in
the Bahamas at that time, fifty thousand of them were black,
but the ruling class was white and was cluss around Nasau.
Joe car Stairs was not the first white person who
(17:04):
tried to tame Whale Key. One previous owner thought that
he would turn it into a seizel plantation hotel venture
tried to make it into a resort, but prohibitions and
had then dried up the flow of vacationers who went
there to drink. And then there was Joe. That hotel
group had been the one that sold her the island,
(17:24):
and she hired locals to help her clear a path
through the overgrown sizal to lay road, and she worked
right alongside them, though initially she felt like they had
trouble understanding and getting accustomed to this kind of labor,
and she really felt like she struggled to establish her leadership,
but according to her, the men that she was working
with on this road came around when they saw her
take a snake's head off one day while they were
(17:46):
eating lunch by simply throwing a knife at it. She
hired more workers to erect buildings. Then there were twenty
six miles of road that were laid, and soon a
store was in operation on the island. Joe paid the
men who worked for her four dollars a week that
women were paid three dollars, and Joe was seen as
a benefactor, and men and women from the other islands
(18:07):
of the Bahamas moved to Whale Key to look for work.
Before long, there were hundreds of people working to build
Joe's vision for the island. She had initially been living
temporarily in the home that was originally built by the
Sizele farmer, but it was in a really poor state,
and what she was really focused on was building a
much finer home called the Great House on another spot
(18:30):
on the island. And the Great House had a Spanish
bit less style design with a red tile roof. It
had five bedrooms, five baths, a cold room for storage, dining.
Living in kitchen areas and a massive fireplace for cool evenings.
So aside for the cat people, Joe brought a cat
with her It's a whale Key really as a measure
(18:51):
of trying to control Bourbon, and her foreman on the
Great House project making more also brought a cat because
neither of these cats were spade or neutered. Soon the
island was full of cats. Yeah, just one of those
examples of how quickly a population can happen. It's a
little invasive species kind of thing. Joe also rebuilt the
(19:13):
lighthouse that whale Key, She cleared the coconut groves, She
had the area around the Great House landscaped with vegetation,
and basically gave the entire island a makeover. A power
plant was erected, a school house, a museum which largely
seemed to be about Joe, and a greenery, and Joe
was basically building her own little world on whale Key,
(19:34):
and she then put up a wall around everything. While
she's most associated with whale Key, Joe actually bought three
other islands, bird Key, cat Key, and Devil's Key, and
she also bought parts of two others. She set up
plantations for all manner of fruits and vegetables and even
peanuts on these other islands. And while Ruth and Joe's
(19:57):
relationship had really dwindled to almost nothing at this point,
Joe did invite Ruth to come and live with her
in this new island paradise she was building, but Ruth refused.
She just did not see the appeal of living on
an island in the middle of nowhere. Uh So, instead,
Joe bought her a vacation home in Miami, and so
Ruth could go stay in Miami and then occasionally come
down to visit wale Key. Eventually about two hundred people
(20:20):
lived on Whale Key, although more had worked there during
the massive construction surge. Once Joe's Great House was complete,
visitors came at a steady pace. Joe entertained all kinds
of people, including friends who were similarly fortunate to have
inherited family money, famous actresses, even royalty. The Duke and
Duchess of Windsor stopped by in ninety one, and by
(20:43):
all accounts, Joe loved to entertain her guests. She would
either take them to see the island's many beautiful locations,
or at least on one occasion, she convinced the locals
to feign an attack on the Great House so she
could tell her friends that the natives were rioting and
that everyone in the Great House might be killed. And
she played this trick just to watch her pampered friends
(21:03):
panic and think that these wild people were going to
tear them apart. So many levels of offensiveness. Yes, it
reminds me of an amusement park near where I grew
up that was called Tweets Tweets See Railroad, where when
I was a child there would be a mock attack
(21:24):
on the train that when I was a child was
always done by quote Indians. Joe had a steady supply
of mistresses and she would eventually tire of each of them,
although she kept photos of the women that she had
been involved with. Yeah, there's actually some debate about, you know,
who was the dumper and who was the dumpy and
(21:45):
some of those relationships. Joe always claimed it had been
herd that had gotten bored and wanted to move on,
but that's not always the consistent story told across multiple
people's recollection. Uh. Just as a point of note, the
next up, we're going to discuss Joe in the context
of the culture of the Bahamas, and we kind of
gave you a taste of that with her having the
(22:06):
black residents there feigned these attacks on the Great House.
But first we're going to have a quick sponsor break.
So one of the fascinating things about the people that
Joe hired and how she treated them, uh, and it
really jumped out to me in the research, was that
she actually felt like women shouldn't have to work. And
for someone so willing to buck the expectations of gender
(22:28):
roles and do a great deal of work herself, this
really is a bit surprising. But she said that if
there weren't so many lazy men, women wouldn't have to
go to work. In one particular arena, Joe really clashed
with the customs of the resident Bahamians who lived on
Whale Key. Most of them practiced obie which is also
(22:48):
pronounced obia by some folks, which is a was a
local religion, and Joe forbade its practice. This is especially
confusing to the locals because many of them thought that
her attached meant to Lord Todd Wadley was in many
ways can similar to the sorts of things that were
practiced in their religion. They thought the doll was basically
her talisman, and some of them believed that it was
(23:10):
magical and possibly the thing that gave her so much
confidence and power. Joe, who all her people simply called
the Boss, was also excellent at sussing out problems and
knowing when people were being deceitful, which only earned her
more and more respect, and it also further this belief
that she might in fact be able to practice magic.
(23:32):
She would hear grievances from people each morning after breakfast,
she would issue judgments on the matters that were brought
to her, and once she made a decision, that was
it and it was settled. She really was the boss
of the island, and despite her own tendency to maintain
this rotating assortment of lovers, she barred any of the
island's inhabitants from having sex outside of marriage. She'd also
(23:53):
insist that all couples be married. She usually performs these
ceremonies herself. Joe would banish adulters from the island, and
she also find men who beat their wives, even after
she got notice from Nasaw that she did not have
the authority to be doing that and that collecting such
fines was illegal, but she didn't care. It was her kingdom.
(24:14):
She even had a little police force that she set
up on whale Key, and that consisted of four men
that Joe had appointed. She armed them with sawed off shotguns.
She also had a watchman who carried a machette, and
she never hesitated herself to serve as a protector of
her kingdom. In seven, Joe's long time on again, off
again lover, Ruth Baldwin, died in London after collapsing it
(24:36):
up party. The cause of her death was probably a
drug overdose. Joe immediately traveled to England via boat, of course,
and she spent the voyage drinking with her friend Tim Brooke,
who helped her manage the island and offered to make
the journey with her. Joe had arranged to have Ruth's
body embombed so she could see her when she arrived
in England. She and Lord Todd widely sat with route
(24:58):
with Ruth in a root whom that Joe had filled
with flowers, and they mourned. When Joe's visitation was over,
Ruth's body was cremated, and one of the reasons that
she spent most of that voyage drunk. Is that she
had only packed pants for the trip, and women were
not allowed in the main dining areas if they weren't
(25:19):
wearing a skirt, and so she and her friend just
were like, fine, we'll hang out in our cabin and
drink cocktails. Um. So once they returned to wale Key,
Joe built an Anglican church on the island as a
memorial to Ruth, and the Bishop of Nassau came to
dedicate it in night. The Reverend Julian Henshaw was the
minister of the church, and he was a man getting
(25:41):
into all manner of trouble, so unfortunately he kind of
upholds a lot of the stereotypes of um corrupt church officials. Uh.
And while the Nassau Bishop was likely very happy to
be rid of him, Joe genuinely seemed to love him.
Joe claimed that the tears that she shed after Ruth's
death worthy she had ever experienced in her life. She
(26:03):
also wrote poetry about loss, which she privately published in
two volumes that were commingled with work by another friend,
Helen Vulk. While the poems aren't generally considered to be
especially good, they offer insight into the very real attachment
that Joe had to Ruth, and even when they were
living largely separate lives, Lord Todd Widley, who as you
(26:24):
may recall, have been a Christmas present from Ruth to Joe,
became even more deeply treasured upon among her possessions. And
through all of this and all of the various things
that happened in her life, Joe was ruling over her kingdom.
And at this point wale Key was sort of a
small country unto itself. It had a governing body that
(26:47):
consisted of Joe and her friends, which she had assigned
to various posts of leadership. It ran like a government
in many ways. They had offices organized to handle various
needs and services, including a treasury. Joe insisted of that
everyone on the island go to church every Sunday. Babies
that were born on whale Key were brought to her
to be named and short. Whale Key had become kind
(27:08):
of a weird monarchy, and so much so that press
the press got wind of the operation and wanted to
write stories about it. Both The Saturday Evening Post and
Life Magazine put the story of whale Key and Joe's
kingdom on their covers, and they lauded her for teaching
these islanders trades and for bringing the idea of education
and self sufficiency to the Bahamas. And this bolstered whale
(27:32):
Key's image is a place of salvation for struggling islanders.
In some ways, with today's perspective, it's kind of like,
that's kind of a white person's conceited approach to it.
But it was an opportunity for people that were really struggling,
and so the population of whale Key swelled to more
than five hundred nine. Joe started the Colored League of Youth,
(27:53):
and that intended to improve the standard of living for
the residents of the Bahamas. And while her intention may
have been noble, effort was tinged with a certain conceit
of knowing what was better for the people of the
Bahamas than they themselves did. The league's charter read, the
rest of the world has a bad opinion of the
colored people of these islands. The colored people do not
(28:14):
prosper in the way that they should. They do not
seem to care or once to get on this must
be changed. So that sounds not quite horrible. But then
it went on to say that most of the Black
Bahamian population was not very bright, could not be trusted,
or we're just lazy. Yeah, there's definitely a very complex
(28:36):
dynamic at play here. Uh. This manifesto that she wrote
for the League was really filled with positive advice and
red Rick kind of urging people to try to be
smart and clever and to have self confidence and be
moral and stay healthy and practice good hygiene. But there
was also a whole secondary political agenda in play. So
Joe was subsidizing farming for members of the League in
(28:59):
an effort to make themselves sufficient, but she also wanted
to stick it to the white politicians who had made
their money from importing goods that Carstairs felt could be
grown there on the islands. But the relationship that Joe
had with the black population of her island property was
really complicated. There were some ways in which she saw
them as comrades, she also saw them as her subordinates.
(29:23):
She had this weird sort of colonialism that she set
up on whale Key. Yeah, it's kind of one of
those instances where in reading her biography it comes up
over and over, not just in this situation of race
relations in the Bahamas, but she kind of would have.
She would get in her head what she felt was
(29:44):
sort of an idealist view and she would just charge
ahead with it, even if it kind of was blindered
and didn't really take into account all of the moving parts,
and that it could be hurting the very people she
was trying to help well. And she also wrote a
manifesto in which she called those same people lazy and untrustworthy,
but she could save them. That was I'm not I'm
(30:06):
not defending her as that, but that was her mindset,
was that she was going to show them to not
be those things. Uh. But this did certainly get the
attention of Nassau's bureaucrats that she kind of wanted to
um cause trouble for This effort worked, but so much
so that she actually received a warning from the House
of Assembly of the Bahamas that she should terminate the
(30:26):
league because it was likely to only incite racial discord,
and so she withdrew the Colored League of Youth manifesto
from its government filing in nineteen forty and this was
sort of a startlingly acquiescent move, although she did continue
some of the practices on her own outside of an
officially recognized organization. However, just a year later, Joe Carstairs
(30:49):
was once again riling up the government, this time claiming
that it was to blame both for the poverty in
the islands and the high incidents of syphilis throughout the population.
The government was so furious that her very public accusations,
I mean she made these statements in the press. The
members of the government were more worried about tourism than
these very real problems, that they started threatening to deport her. Meanwhile,
(31:12):
the remaining shreds of the Colored League of Youth that
Joe had kept going through UH subsidies that basically she
was funding out of pocket, had also fallen apart, and
a new millionaire was infusing the Bahamian economy with money.
Sir Harry Oakes had arrived and he was building two
airfields on New Providence, and some of the whale Key
population actually left Joe's kingdom to work on this new project.
(31:36):
Others moved to the States when the US entered the war,
Eager to fill the empty jobs there, Joe offered the
British Navy her beloved boats Sonja two for service and
was turned down. After Pearl Harbor was bombed. She offered
it to the U. S. Navy, but her gesture was
once again turned down. What Joe really wanted to do
was to join the war effort herself, but as her
(31:58):
half brother Francis Francis told her, wrong age, wrong sex,
Joe did manage to help by running a rescue mission
or two with her boats, and in nineteen forty three
she found a way to be consistently youthful, as many
of the freighters that normally carried goods to the Bahamas
had been conscripted into war service. She set up a
(32:20):
small transport company to haul bananas, sugar, rice, and rum
from Miami, Haiti and Cuba, sort of in that circle.
But despite all of her efforts to help UH, there
were odd rumors that started circulating about her, including hints
that she was secretly a Nazi sympathizer and that she
was actually aiding U boats from wale Key, completely unfounded
(32:43):
and false, but these weird rumors just kept growing. In
Joe finally finished paying off her back taxes in nineteen
forty six, she sold her island bird key to her
half brother when she heard a year later that Frank
was selling vegetables from his land back to the workers
who grew them. She was serious, and she rated his
(33:04):
crops one night with several men and machetes to tear
it apart, which also hurt the same people she was defending,
but that didn't really seem to factor into her decision. Yeah,
that harkens back to the thing I said earlier, where
she would get these ideas in her head about what
was fair and right, and she would take action on
them that often was just as damaging as the thing
(33:25):
she felt like she was trying to fix. She also
took up flying briefly in the second half of the
nineteen forties, and it looked like it might be the
new voting for her. She really really loved it because
of course it offered her a certain freedom, but she
was stymied in this new endeavor when authorities denied her
a permit to build a private airport. As she moved
through the nineteen fifties, she continued to collect lovers, although
(33:48):
her health really started to decline. She really didn't want
to admit that anything was the matter thore so she
often ignored or denied that anything was wrong, and by
the time that I teen sixties rolled around, many of
Joe's workers had left Whale Key, and those who remained
really didn't treat her with the same level of reverence
that she had once commanded, So she just wasn't as
(34:11):
happy there, and she started to travel more and more
and spend less and less time on the island. In Nive,
she finally sold whale Key for just a little less
than one million dollars, citing the increase in drug trafficking
is the reason for the sale. This was the second
time in her life that she cried. She was heartbroken
to leave the key. She moved to Florida and that
(34:33):
from that time on she spent her summers in Sag
Harbor and water Mill, Long Island, and then she would
go to Florida during the winter months. As Joe add
and became less physically healthy, Lord Todd Wildeley took over
her dashing and rakish life, at least as she told it.
She spoke of him being friends with Jack Kennedy. She
talked about him having parties and various girlfriends and even
(34:55):
an assortment of illegitimate doll children. Yeah. Yeah. She got
progressively more eccentric as she aged, and because she wasn't
super healthy and and active, and she didn't have that
exciting life. She seemed like she filled in the gaps
in her head. She eventually invited a man named Hugh
Harrison to move in with her. That was in ninety eight,
(35:17):
and at that point she claimed she was done with women,
and Hugh stayed with her for the rest of her life,
although as a non romantic companion and also a paid helper.
He gifted her with dolls and her collection grew, but
Lord Todd Widley was always her best doll love. She
became weaker and weaker. She also made up a will,
but then she revised it almost seventy times, basically constantly
(35:41):
updating it to reflect her most recent state of friendships. Yeah,
she seemed almost to be keeping score and tallying who
needed what based on, you know, the whatever had been
going on in her life recently. I think I read
one statement that said something like for her to only
revise her will like twice in a year was a
(36:01):
really small number. She just was constantly kind of making
these revisions. Uh. And as she grew progressively more infirm
in her early nineties, you know, she was just aging
and her body wasn't as able to do the things
it had once done, and she just was getting progressively weaker.
But she really didn't want visitors. She didn't want any
friends to see her in anything less than her most
(36:23):
commanding state. She's slipped into a coma on December eighteenth
and died that night. She died with Lord Todd Widely
tucked under her arm. Joe and Lord Todd Wildly were
cremated together, and they're cremains were reunited with roots, and
all three of them were placed in a tomb by
the sea in Long Island. And that is the long,
(36:45):
two part story of Joe Carstairs, who is such a
fascinating figure to me, and because of sort of her
uh you know, her many accolades as a sportswoman, and
her incredibly ambitious set up of basically a whole kingdom
unto itself, it's really sort of surprising that she is
not more of a common name. But I would. I
(37:06):
can't think of a single person that I spoke to
you as I was preparing this, which has been over
several weeks that I've been reading her biography and talking
about it, that anybody has had any idea who she was.
I had no idea who she was when you yeah,
she's um. She was a fascinating woman. I just I
can't imagine kind of the the grit and determination of
(37:30):
someone who lives that life. And I consider myself a
fairly determined and gritty person at times, but she just
supersedes all of my inklings about what a really you know,
kind of bias for action UH focused person is. Even
if she sometimes made missteps, she just was really astounding.
(37:51):
And she's also a good example of how often we
get into a story knowing it's going to be interesting,
like racing speedboats is going to being inherently kind of
rollicking fun time probably, and then we get into this
whole other layer of a weird colonial and pretty offensive
kingdom set up in the Bahamas. Yeah, her biographer, the
(38:14):
part where she talked about he any babies being born
being brought to Joe for naming. Her main biographer mentioned
how similar this was to the UH slave plantation practice,
where babies had to be brought to the plantation owner
to be named, and so there were definitely some weird
(38:36):
race relations going on there. I was telling Tracy, like,
I really think Carstairs wanted to work for the betterment
of people, even though she had this weird racial bias
against them. Uh, it's very tricky and convoluted. It's you know,
humans are unfortunately complex. They're not really always easy, and
(38:56):
they don't always see a situation in its bigger state.
They see their view of it, and it's hard to
kind of get the wider angle. So do you also
have a listener mail? I do. This one delighted me
so much because it is a postcard from Antarctica. It's
from our listener Alex And it opens with question, what
do you call a penguin in the desert? Answer lost,
(39:19):
and alex And says, well, actually, technically Antarctica is a desert.
But thanks for all the awesome research you put into
your podcasts. I'm an avid listener here at McMurdo Station,
where I cook eggs, not penguin eggs, each morning for
the winter station population of around a hundred and forty
five people. Fun fact, this postcard is being sent out
on the second ever flight scheduled to fly to McMurdo
(39:40):
during the Antarctic winter. A few uh medical evacuations have
occurred over the years, but it has never before been
planned due to aircraft restrictions of temperatures, the effort to
maintain a nice runway, and the difficulties of landing a
plane using night vision goggles in lieu of a well
lit runway from lots of lights. Only a decade or
so ago, there was another neat advancement made in the
(40:03):
US Antarctic Program of pioneering a land route for hauling
supplies to the South Pole station with modern tractors and
radar devices for finding crevasses. This traverse crew means we
have to fly far fewer planes to maintain the research
occurring at this The poll pretty neat to once again
be going overland like Scott and Shackleton. History repeats itself.
(40:24):
Thank you so much, Alex, I love it. There are
gorgeous king penguins on the front of the postcard, and
I just love that we got a postcard from Antarctica.
I had a friend that did research at my murder
station like a million years ago, so uh, super fun.
I can't imagine living like that because I am wimpy.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(40:46):
do so at History Podcast at hostel works dot com.
We're also at Facebook dot com, slash misst in history
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can purchase stuff you missed in History class goodies at
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(41:07):
like to visit our parents site that is house to
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you can do so at missed in history dot com
for all of our back episodes, UH show notes from
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visit us at house to works dot com and missed
industry dot com for more on this and thousands of
(41:34):
other topics. Does it how to works dot com
Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today is our continuation of our
two parter on Joe car Stairs. And I'm not going
(00:21):
to do a lot of rehashing of part one because
part two runs very long already, So if you haven't
already listened to part one, go back and do that,
or a lot of this isn't going to have context
to make sense. But when we left off in part one,
Joe Carstairs had returned to Great Britain after a race
in the US, and she had just opened her own
boatyard and East Cows with her mechanic. Joe Harris is
(00:42):
the chief engineer. The first project for this new firm
called Sylvia after one of those friends was constructing another
competition boat. This was the Estell four. So you might
remember from the previous episode that Joe had commissioned several
other boats, all named a Spell after her mother. She
realized that her mother was actually named Evelyn, but that
(01:03):
didn't bother her really, so she continued with the naming
theme of a stell uh Tall walls went up around
the Sylvia construction yard because Joe wanted no one to
be able to see what was being built, and until June,
when a Stell four was unveiled, the press would refer
to this project with names like the Hush Hush boat,
(01:25):
and when this new thirty five ft watercraft was revealed,
it was lauded in the papers as incredibly well designed
and just incredibly beautiful. Joe took the a Stelle floor
back to Detroit for the Harmsworth Cup. This time she
set a British record during the trials of sixty four
miles an. Things were looking really good for Joe in
this race, which was great because we talked last time
(01:46):
about several unfortunate incidents in her racing career. However, then
she hit a log and damaged the engine mount on
the boat. The universe was also not done with Joe
and her team because then the a spell for slipped
off the crane that was loading it up after the race,
which caused further damage to the boat. And so it
seems that the good fortune that surrounded Joe's early voting
(02:09):
races was really dwindling, and as her celebrity grew, Joe
was also at odds with her identity and her place
in the public sphere. So at one point, while giving
an interview for a magazine in October of n Joe
told the interviewer very seriously that if anything bad ever happened,
she would save her doll, Lord Todd Wadley first, uh,
(02:32):
for his safety. Wadley, who we talked about how she
got it in the first episode. Wadley never raced with Joe.
She always had him safely kept on shore. And during
that same interview where she was sort of talking about
how Wadley was really more important than she was in
some ways, she also kind of, uh, just as an
aside pointed out another woman that was present to the
(02:55):
reporter and she said, oh, that's actually Marian Carstairs. So
she was kind of doing this weird thing where she
was deflecting attention from herself to other people and inanimate objects.
It's kind of this it's kind of a window into
how she felt about being in the press all the time.
So this timing of her apparent unease with being in
(03:17):
the public eye even as she was relishing their adoration,
also was happening at the same time as a shift
in cultural attitudes. So the post war nineteen twenties had
really celebrated Joe's brash style and her unconventional life. But
a number of events took place in the last years
of the nineteen twenties that made those same traits that
(03:37):
had previously drawn accolades instead draw suspicion. First was a
backlash to a book that was published called The Well
of Loneliness by Radcliff Hall and that was published in
In this book, which is considered to be a trailblazing
example of lesbian literature, was actually banned, and newspapers ran
(03:59):
stories and editor reels about the pestilence of sexual inversion
that had fallen upon society and how this was evidence
of it. Second, the German silent film Pandora's Box was released,
which started Louise Brooks, and that came out in so
a female character in this film named Countess Anna Geschwitz
(04:19):
had this rather vulturing approach to her sexual interest in
Brooks's character, and this continued the idea that lesbianism was
this dark and sinister force and was also really coercive.
If you are interested in learning more about like the
trends and how sexual orientation was portrayed, and film like
(04:42):
go watch The Cellula Closet because it will watch through. Yeah,
it's so good. And there's like a whole history of
of like gay men and lesbians being portrayed as these sinister,
evil forces who were praying on young people. And third,
military man going by the name of Colonel Victor Barker
(05:02):
was indicted for bankruptcy in the late nineteen twenties. But
when Colonel Barker, who had a wife, was in police custody,
officials realized that he did not have male genitalia. To them,
he was not biologically male, and so Barker was charged
with provided with providing false information on a marriage certificate
and consequently was sentenced to nine months in prison. And
(05:25):
this was huge news. It was in all the papers,
and it once again drew attention in a negative way
to any sort of sexual inversion or any sort of
fluidity on the gender spectrum. So, in addition to these
changing social perceptions of lesbianism, the Wall Street Crash of
nine put a huge damper on the party atmosphere that
(05:46):
had made Joe's unconventional life something that people were really
able and willing to accept and celebrate. So the gayety
of the Roaring twenties was officially over, and as this
tie turned, the press started to take a more negative
tone when they were covering Joe Carstairs. Reporters started to
(06:06):
point out her various foibles that didn't align with common
perceptions of femininity, and whereas she had been described as
charmingly unconventional when she had been the press's darling, at
this point, writers started to discuss how coarse she was
and how bad all of her habits were, and one
American paper called Lord Todd Wadley an absurd mannequin. For
(06:27):
the ninety Armsworth Cup, Joe once again traveled to the
United States, and this time she took two boats, a
Stealth four, which had been rebuilt, and a Stell five,
which was a new boat. She made it clear that
this third attempt at the cup would be her last
one if she did not win. The sport was really
too expensive, and she knew that not even her inheritance
(06:47):
would allow her to just keep doing it forever. She
had spent more than half a million dollars just on
the Harmsworth races, and once again the trials went incredibly well.
Joe even surpassed the speed record, which was held by
the Americans, reaching ninety four point five miles per hour
in the Estelle five. And just for context, that's the
(07:09):
American speed record, not saying that that was the world
record that the Americans held. Uh. However, on race day,
once again, things just did not go Joe's way. Both
the Astell four and the Astell five broke down and
Joe was unable to finish the race. And when she
got back to land and got out of the boat,
she told onlookers and reporters, well, you'd better get a
(07:30):
good look at me, because I am not coming over again.
And the wake of her defeat, Joe told several stories
about events that happened in their and their travels. We
don't know which, if any of these stories are true,
but they're all. They all connect through this larger narrative
that Joe told of a fortune teller who predicted them. Yeah,
after all of these bad things happened, she told people that, oh,
(07:54):
a fortune teller before I even left London, told me
these things were going to happen. Uh. And so this
alleged fortune teller told Carstairs that her rivals were going
to try to sabotage her efforts and kill her at
Harmsworth by forcing a crash, And while she had crashed
the previous year, in this instance, for boats actually didn't crash,
she had mechanical failure. The second premonition of the possibly
(08:17):
made up fortune teller warned Joe about a house fire,
and the house she was renting during her trip did
have a fire, and Lord Todd Wadley was supposedly saved
from said fire by a little boy who happened by
and saw the doll sitting like on a window ledge
and Wadley's rescuer, Joe told everyone, was amply rewarded with
all the ice cream he could consume. And news reports
(08:40):
at the time do corroborate this fire at Joe Carstar's
rented home, but she had framed the earlier one like
no one had been home, and this little boy saw
it and rescued her doll. But in fact Joe was there.
She actually helped firefighters as they worked to save other
nearby cottages. And there's no mention in any papers of
a little boy, you know, restviewing some precious item and
(09:01):
being rewarded. The third event that Joe claimed to have
been warned about by the sports and teller was a
car crash. As Joe and her group left their rented
house to head to the train station and then back
home to England, their car lost traction with the road
and spun into a ditch. Although everyone was fine. We
don't have any corroboration of this story, so we really
(09:22):
don't know if it's true or not, but we do
know that when Joe returned home from the Harmsworth Race
in nineteen thirty, having vowed to never return to that
race again, her life had really changed. So not only
was she kind of putting away that one race that
was kind of one of the big ones that she
had been pursuing, but X Garage, which will remember was
(09:43):
the chauffeur service that was run entirely by women that
she had set up with friends, had actually closed in
ninet so at the time when it closed, she was
very busy with racing. But now she went home and
she didn't have that business to keep her busy, and
two of her friends from that business, Bartie cole Claw
and Joe and Recoron had gotten married since so it
wasn't like they could easily restart the business. They were
(10:05):
busy with their new lives and and their husbands, and
so Joe raced boats in Britain for a little while,
but she really never regained the success that she had attained.
So early on we'll talk about Joe's next moves and
how she coped with this shift in her life. But
first we're going to take a brief moment to talk
about one of the sponsors who keeps this show going.
(10:26):
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is this easy to use, dragon drop intuitive way to
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how to actually make a website. I have done this.
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lots of beautiful designs that you can come you can
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back to Joe. After a series of racing failures punctuated
by a race there in Europe against fellow yachts woman
Virginie Herriot that Joe lost by seventeen minutes, Carstairs had
(12:14):
just had it. She actually threatened to emigrate, but instead
she set off with a friend named mAb's Jenkins and
her doll, Lord Todd Wadley, on a trip around the world.
In India in particular, was a favorite of Joe's. She
told people that she believed her father, Albert Carstairs, had
died there. She and Mab took up big game hunting,
shooting panthers and crocodiles, and they spent more than a
(12:36):
year traveling all over the globe, eventually picking up a
man from Sri Lanka as a guide and a servant
along the way. When the trip was over, Joe continued
to support her Sri Lankan friend for the rest of
his life. Yeah, I don't I didn't detail it throughout
the this outline, but I do want to point out
that one thing that is consistent in Joe Carstairs life
(12:59):
is that she really did financially take care of a
lot of her friends. Like when X Garage closed, those
women that she had been friends with that she ran
it with, she continued to give them their salary for
the rest of their lives. She would basically like any
friends that had worked for her, they pretty much earned
that salary forever, even long after they had stopped working
on whatever the project was. She really did sort of
(13:21):
take care of people with all of her money, and
once Joe and Mab had wrapped up their travels, Joe
ended up kind of being um bicontinental. She took up
living both in London and New York, and so in
London she and Ruth still shared a home together. Ruth, remember,
was her long term girlfriend that she had been with
(13:42):
for quite a while. They didn't have an exclusive relationship,
but they were very close. And then in New York,
Joe lived with another paramore, Isabel t Pell and though
Ruth and Joe had always had this open relationship, Ruth
became incredibly jealous of Isabel and left alone in London,
Ruth really developed a pretty bad drinking problem, and she
began using and abusing drugs, and the relationship between Ruth
(14:05):
and Joe really became strained and crumbled to a great degree.
And even with two homes to choose from, Joe just
really couldn't stay in one place and said she started
sailing more often than not, using her fleet to carry
her anywhere she wanted to go. She traveled to an
island five hundred miles southwest of Panama to Liok for
buried treasure, although she did not find any uh, Yeah,
(14:30):
she had lots of little adventures like that. And you
may recall our mention of the Cunard liner Berengaria in
the first episode of this two parter, and that was
the ship that carried Joe across the Atlantic when she
was traveling there for the first Harmsworth Race that she
participated in, and she had been really really impressed with
this liner, so she decided to build a smaller scale
replica of it for her own personal needs. And Joe's vessel,
(14:54):
which was named Barnia, was a fast motor cruiser that
also had every possible amenity, including a dance floor and
a full cocktail bar. At this point, it was nineteen
thirty three, and Joe's life, which really looked charmed even
with the departure of her luck from her voting career,
it's actually something of a mess. She still had a
comfortable income from her trust funds, but she hadn't paid
(15:15):
taxes in Britain or the United States at all during
the nineteen twenties. This was bad. She was in trouble.
She eventually disclosed those close to her that she was
about a hundred thousand dollars behind on her unpaid taxes.
And around this same time, Joe saw an add in
an American paper about an island that was for sale
(15:37):
in the British West Indies, which was a tax haven.
So in nineteen thirty four she bought the island of
whale Key. She left behind her failed voting career and
her tax bill, and she moved to whale Key permanently.
Everyone to add theatricality to a tale, Joe said that
whale Key had really beckoned to her. She would later
tell people this island had a particular liking for me.
(15:59):
The land, which is now called Big whale Key, is
about nine miles long and about a thousand acres in area.
There were no roads on the island when Joe bought it.
She didn't bring any cars with her and she planned
to travel on foot or by dinghy. So the Bahamas
at this point we're really experiencing an economic depression. The
end of prohibition in the US had cut off the
(16:22):
alcohol smuggling trade that had brought quite a bit of
money in through the area, and immigration laws in the
U s were tightening, so fewer people were able were
able to move from the Bahamas to a place with
more lucrative potential, that being the US. Additionally, these islands
had been repeatedly just beaten over the course of several
(16:42):
years by an array of hurricanes and tropical storms, and
on some of the more remote islands, things were really dire.
Starvation was a very real problem for the people that
lived there. Of the sixty thousand people who lived in
the Bahamas at that time, fifty thousand of them were black,
but the ruling class was white and was cluss around Nasau.
Joe car Stairs was not the first white person who
(17:04):
tried to tame Whale Key. One previous owner thought that
he would turn it into a seizel plantation hotel venture
tried to make it into a resort, but prohibitions and
had then dried up the flow of vacationers who went
there to drink. And then there was Joe. That hotel
group had been the one that sold her the island,
(17:24):
and she hired locals to help her clear a path
through the overgrown sizal to lay road, and she worked
right alongside them, though initially she felt like they had
trouble understanding and getting accustomed to this kind of labor,
and she really felt like she struggled to establish her leadership,
but according to her, the men that she was working
with on this road came around when they saw her
take a snake's head off one day while they were
(17:46):
eating lunch by simply throwing a knife at it. She
hired more workers to erect buildings. Then there were twenty
six miles of road that were laid, and soon a
store was in operation on the island. Joe paid the
men who worked for her four dollars a week that
women were paid three dollars, and Joe was seen as
a benefactor, and men and women from the other islands
(18:07):
of the Bahamas moved to Whale Key to look for work.
Before long, there were hundreds of people working to build
Joe's vision for the island. She had initially been living
temporarily in the home that was originally built by the
Sizele farmer, but it was in a really poor state,
and what she was really focused on was building a
much finer home called the Great House on another spot
(18:30):
on the island. And the Great House had a Spanish
bit less style design with a red tile roof. It
had five bedrooms, five baths, a cold room for storage, dining.
Living in kitchen areas and a massive fireplace for cool evenings.
So aside for the cat people, Joe brought a cat
with her It's a whale Key really as a measure
(18:51):
of trying to control Bourbon, and her foreman on the
Great House project making more also brought a cat because
neither of these cats were spade or neutered. Soon the
island was full of cats. Yeah, just one of those
examples of how quickly a population can happen. It's a
little invasive species kind of thing. Joe also rebuilt the
(19:13):
lighthouse that whale Key, She cleared the coconut groves, She
had the area around the Great House landscaped with vegetation,
and basically gave the entire island a makeover. A power
plant was erected, a school house, a museum which largely
seemed to be about Joe, and a greenery, and Joe
was basically building her own little world on whale Key,
(19:34):
and she then put up a wall around everything. While
she's most associated with whale Key, Joe actually bought three
other islands, bird Key, cat Key, and Devil's Key, and
she also bought parts of two others. She set up
plantations for all manner of fruits and vegetables and even
peanuts on these other islands. And while Ruth and Joe's
(19:57):
relationship had really dwindled to almost nothing at this point,
Joe did invite Ruth to come and live with her
in this new island paradise she was building, but Ruth refused.
She just did not see the appeal of living on
an island in the middle of nowhere. Uh So, instead,
Joe bought her a vacation home in Miami, and so
Ruth could go stay in Miami and then occasionally come
down to visit wale Key. Eventually about two hundred people
(20:20):
lived on Whale Key, although more had worked there during
the massive construction surge. Once Joe's Great House was complete,
visitors came at a steady pace. Joe entertained all kinds
of people, including friends who were similarly fortunate to have
inherited family money, famous actresses, even royalty. The Duke and
Duchess of Windsor stopped by in ninety one, and by
(20:43):
all accounts, Joe loved to entertain her guests. She would
either take them to see the island's many beautiful locations,
or at least on one occasion, she convinced the locals
to feign an attack on the Great House so she
could tell her friends that the natives were rioting and
that everyone in the Great House might be killed. And
she played this trick just to watch her pampered friends
(21:03):
panic and think that these wild people were going to
tear them apart. So many levels of offensiveness. Yes, it
reminds me of an amusement park near where I grew
up that was called Tweets Tweets See Railroad, where when
I was a child there would be a mock attack
(21:24):
on the train that when I was a child was
always done by quote Indians. Joe had a steady supply
of mistresses and she would eventually tire of each of them,
although she kept photos of the women that she had
been involved with. Yeah, there's actually some debate about, you know,
who was the dumper and who was the dumpy and
(21:45):
some of those relationships. Joe always claimed it had been
herd that had gotten bored and wanted to move on,
but that's not always the consistent story told across multiple
people's recollection. Uh. Just as a point of note, the
next up, we're going to discuss Joe in the context
of the culture of the Bahamas, and we kind of
gave you a taste of that with her having the
(22:06):
black residents there feigned these attacks on the Great House.
But first we're going to have a quick sponsor break.
So one of the fascinating things about the people that
Joe hired and how she treated them, uh, and it
really jumped out to me in the research, was that
she actually felt like women shouldn't have to work. And
for someone so willing to buck the expectations of gender
(22:28):
roles and do a great deal of work herself, this
really is a bit surprising. But she said that if
there weren't so many lazy men, women wouldn't have to
go to work. In one particular arena, Joe really clashed
with the customs of the resident Bahamians who lived on
Whale Key. Most of them practiced obie which is also
(22:48):
pronounced obia by some folks, which is a was a
local religion, and Joe forbade its practice. This is especially
confusing to the locals because many of them thought that
her attached meant to Lord Todd Wadley was in many
ways can similar to the sorts of things that were
practiced in their religion. They thought the doll was basically
her talisman, and some of them believed that it was
(23:10):
magical and possibly the thing that gave her so much
confidence and power. Joe, who all her people simply called
the Boss, was also excellent at sussing out problems and
knowing when people were being deceitful, which only earned her
more and more respect, and it also further this belief
that she might in fact be able to practice magic.
(23:32):
She would hear grievances from people each morning after breakfast,
she would issue judgments on the matters that were brought
to her, and once she made a decision, that was
it and it was settled. She really was the boss
of the island, and despite her own tendency to maintain
this rotating assortment of lovers, she barred any of the
island's inhabitants from having sex outside of marriage. She'd also
(23:53):
insist that all couples be married. She usually performs these
ceremonies herself. Joe would banish adulters from the island, and
she also find men who beat their wives, even after
she got notice from Nasaw that she did not have
the authority to be doing that and that collecting such
fines was illegal, but she didn't care. It was her kingdom.
(24:14):
She even had a little police force that she set
up on whale Key, and that consisted of four men
that Joe had appointed. She armed them with sawed off shotguns.
She also had a watchman who carried a machette, and
she never hesitated herself to serve as a protector of
her kingdom. In seven, Joe's long time on again, off
again lover, Ruth Baldwin, died in London after collapsing it
(24:36):
up party. The cause of her death was probably a
drug overdose. Joe immediately traveled to England via boat, of course,
and she spent the voyage drinking with her friend Tim Brooke,
who helped her manage the island and offered to make
the journey with her. Joe had arranged to have Ruth's
body embombed so she could see her when she arrived
in England. She and Lord Todd widely sat with route
(24:58):
with Ruth in a root whom that Joe had filled
with flowers, and they mourned. When Joe's visitation was over,
Ruth's body was cremated, and one of the reasons that
she spent most of that voyage drunk. Is that she
had only packed pants for the trip, and women were
not allowed in the main dining areas if they weren't
(25:19):
wearing a skirt, and so she and her friend just
were like, fine, we'll hang out in our cabin and
drink cocktails. Um. So once they returned to wale Key,
Joe built an Anglican church on the island as a
memorial to Ruth, and the Bishop of Nassau came to
dedicate it in night. The Reverend Julian Henshaw was the
minister of the church, and he was a man getting
(25:41):
into all manner of trouble, so unfortunately he kind of
upholds a lot of the stereotypes of um corrupt church officials. Uh.
And while the Nassau Bishop was likely very happy to
be rid of him, Joe genuinely seemed to love him.
Joe claimed that the tears that she shed after Ruth's
death worthy she had ever experienced in her life. She
(26:03):
also wrote poetry about loss, which she privately published in
two volumes that were commingled with work by another friend,
Helen Vulk. While the poems aren't generally considered to be
especially good, they offer insight into the very real attachment
that Joe had to Ruth, and even when they were
living largely separate lives, Lord Todd Widley, who as you
(26:24):
may recall, have been a Christmas present from Ruth to Joe,
became even more deeply treasured upon among her possessions. And
through all of this and all of the various things
that happened in her life, Joe was ruling over her kingdom.
And at this point wale Key was sort of a
small country unto itself. It had a governing body that
(26:47):
consisted of Joe and her friends, which she had assigned
to various posts of leadership. It ran like a government
in many ways. They had offices organized to handle various
needs and services, including a treasury. Joe insisted of that
everyone on the island go to church every Sunday. Babies
that were born on whale Key were brought to her
to be named and short. Whale Key had become kind
(27:08):
of a weird monarchy, and so much so that press
the press got wind of the operation and wanted to
write stories about it. Both The Saturday Evening Post and
Life Magazine put the story of whale Key and Joe's
kingdom on their covers, and they lauded her for teaching
these islanders trades and for bringing the idea of education
and self sufficiency to the Bahamas. And this bolstered whale
(27:32):
Key's image is a place of salvation for struggling islanders.
In some ways, with today's perspective, it's kind of like,
that's kind of a white person's conceited approach to it.
But it was an opportunity for people that were really struggling,
and so the population of whale Key swelled to more
than five hundred nine. Joe started the Colored League of Youth,
(27:53):
and that intended to improve the standard of living for
the residents of the Bahamas. And while her intention may
have been noble, effort was tinged with a certain conceit
of knowing what was better for the people of the
Bahamas than they themselves did. The league's charter read, the
rest of the world has a bad opinion of the
colored people of these islands. The colored people do not
(28:14):
prosper in the way that they should. They do not
seem to care or once to get on this must
be changed. So that sounds not quite horrible. But then
it went on to say that most of the Black
Bahamian population was not very bright, could not be trusted,
or we're just lazy. Yeah, there's definitely a very complex
(28:36):
dynamic at play here. Uh. This manifesto that she wrote
for the League was really filled with positive advice and
red Rick kind of urging people to try to be
smart and clever and to have self confidence and be
moral and stay healthy and practice good hygiene. But there
was also a whole secondary political agenda in play. So
Joe was subsidizing farming for members of the League in
(28:59):
an effort to make themselves sufficient, but she also wanted
to stick it to the white politicians who had made
their money from importing goods that Carstairs felt could be
grown there on the islands. But the relationship that Joe
had with the black population of her island property was
really complicated. There were some ways in which she saw
them as comrades, she also saw them as her subordinates.
(29:23):
She had this weird sort of colonialism that she set
up on whale Key. Yeah, it's kind of one of
those instances where in reading her biography it comes up
over and over, not just in this situation of race
relations in the Bahamas, but she kind of would have.
She would get in her head what she felt was
(29:44):
sort of an idealist view and she would just charge
ahead with it, even if it kind of was blindered
and didn't really take into account all of the moving parts,
and that it could be hurting the very people she
was trying to help well. And she also wrote a
manifesto in which she called those same people lazy and untrustworthy,
but she could save them. That was I'm not I'm
(30:06):
not defending her as that, but that was her mindset,
was that she was going to show them to not
be those things. Uh. But this did certainly get the
attention of Nassau's bureaucrats that she kind of wanted to
um cause trouble for This effort worked, but so much
so that she actually received a warning from the House
of Assembly of the Bahamas that she should terminate the
(30:26):
league because it was likely to only incite racial discord,
and so she withdrew the Colored League of Youth manifesto
from its government filing in nineteen forty and this was
sort of a startlingly acquiescent move, although she did continue
some of the practices on her own outside of an
officially recognized organization. However, just a year later, Joe Carstairs
(30:49):
was once again riling up the government, this time claiming
that it was to blame both for the poverty in
the islands and the high incidents of syphilis throughout the population.
The government was so furious that her very public accusations,
I mean she made these statements in the press. The
members of the government were more worried about tourism than
these very real problems, that they started threatening to deport her. Meanwhile,
(31:12):
the remaining shreds of the Colored League of Youth that
Joe had kept going through UH subsidies that basically she
was funding out of pocket, had also fallen apart, and
a new millionaire was infusing the Bahamian economy with money.
Sir Harry Oakes had arrived and he was building two
airfields on New Providence, and some of the whale Key
population actually left Joe's kingdom to work on this new project.
(31:36):
Others moved to the States when the US entered the war,
Eager to fill the empty jobs there, Joe offered the
British Navy her beloved boats Sonja two for service and
was turned down. After Pearl Harbor was bombed. She offered
it to the U. S. Navy, but her gesture was
once again turned down. What Joe really wanted to do
was to join the war effort herself, but as her
(31:58):
half brother Francis Francis told her, wrong age, wrong sex,
Joe did manage to help by running a rescue mission
or two with her boats, and in nineteen forty three
she found a way to be consistently youthful, as many
of the freighters that normally carried goods to the Bahamas
had been conscripted into war service. She set up a
(32:20):
small transport company to haul bananas, sugar, rice, and rum
from Miami, Haiti and Cuba, sort of in that circle.
But despite all of her efforts to help UH, there
were odd rumors that started circulating about her, including hints
that she was secretly a Nazi sympathizer and that she
was actually aiding U boats from wale Key, completely unfounded
(32:43):
and false, but these weird rumors just kept growing. In
Joe finally finished paying off her back taxes in nineteen
forty six, she sold her island bird key to her
half brother when she heard a year later that Frank
was selling vegetables from his land back to the workers
who grew them. She was serious, and she rated his
(33:04):
crops one night with several men and machetes to tear
it apart, which also hurt the same people she was defending,
but that didn't really seem to factor into her decision. Yeah,
that harkens back to the thing I said earlier, where
she would get these ideas in her head about what
was fair and right, and she would take action on
them that often was just as damaging as the thing
(33:25):
she felt like she was trying to fix. She also
took up flying briefly in the second half of the
nineteen forties, and it looked like it might be the
new voting for her. She really really loved it because
of course it offered her a certain freedom, but she
was stymied in this new endeavor when authorities denied her
a permit to build a private airport. As she moved
through the nineteen fifties, she continued to collect lovers, although
(33:48):
her health really started to decline. She really didn't want
to admit that anything was the matter thore so she
often ignored or denied that anything was wrong, and by
the time that I teen sixties rolled around, many of
Joe's workers had left Whale Key, and those who remained
really didn't treat her with the same level of reverence
that she had once commanded, So she just wasn't as
(34:11):
happy there, and she started to travel more and more
and spend less and less time on the island. In Nive,
she finally sold whale Key for just a little less
than one million dollars, citing the increase in drug trafficking
is the reason for the sale. This was the second
time in her life that she cried. She was heartbroken
to leave the key. She moved to Florida and that
(34:33):
from that time on she spent her summers in Sag
Harbor and water Mill, Long Island, and then she would
go to Florida during the winter months. As Joe add
and became less physically healthy, Lord Todd Wildeley took over
her dashing and rakish life, at least as she told it.
She spoke of him being friends with Jack Kennedy. She
talked about him having parties and various girlfriends and even
(34:55):
an assortment of illegitimate doll children. Yeah. Yeah. She got
progressively more eccentric as she aged, and because she wasn't
super healthy and and active, and she didn't have that
exciting life. She seemed like she filled in the gaps
in her head. She eventually invited a man named Hugh
Harrison to move in with her. That was in ninety eight,
(35:17):
and at that point she claimed she was done with women,
and Hugh stayed with her for the rest of her life,
although as a non romantic companion and also a paid helper.
He gifted her with dolls and her collection grew, but
Lord Todd Widley was always her best doll love. She
became weaker and weaker. She also made up a will,
but then she revised it almost seventy times, basically constantly
(35:41):
updating it to reflect her most recent state of friendships. Yeah,
she seemed almost to be keeping score and tallying who
needed what based on, you know, the whatever had been
going on in her life recently. I think I read
one statement that said something like for her to only
revise her will like twice in a year was a
(36:01):
really small number. She just was constantly kind of making
these revisions. Uh. And as she grew progressively more infirm
in her early nineties, you know, she was just aging
and her body wasn't as able to do the things
it had once done, and she just was getting progressively weaker.
But she really didn't want visitors. She didn't want any
friends to see her in anything less than her most
(36:23):
commanding state. She's slipped into a coma on December eighteenth
and died that night. She died with Lord Todd Widely
tucked under her arm. Joe and Lord Todd Wildly were
cremated together, and they're cremains were reunited with roots, and
all three of them were placed in a tomb by
the sea in Long Island. And that is the long,
(36:45):
two part story of Joe Carstairs, who is such a
fascinating figure to me, and because of sort of her
uh you know, her many accolades as a sportswoman, and
her incredibly ambitious set up of basically a whole kingdom
unto itself, it's really sort of surprising that she is
not more of a common name. But I would. I
(37:06):
can't think of a single person that I spoke to
you as I was preparing this, which has been over
several weeks that I've been reading her biography and talking
about it, that anybody has had any idea who she was.
I had no idea who she was when you yeah,
she's um. She was a fascinating woman. I just I
can't imagine kind of the the grit and determination of
(37:30):
someone who lives that life. And I consider myself a
fairly determined and gritty person at times, but she just
supersedes all of my inklings about what a really you know,
kind of bias for action UH focused person is. Even
if she sometimes made missteps, she just was really astounding.
(37:51):
And she's also a good example of how often we
get into a story knowing it's going to be interesting,
like racing speedboats is going to being inherently kind of
rollicking fun time probably, and then we get into this
whole other layer of a weird colonial and pretty offensive
kingdom set up in the Bahamas. Yeah, her biographer, the
(38:14):
part where she talked about he any babies being born
being brought to Joe for naming. Her main biographer mentioned
how similar this was to the UH slave plantation practice,
where babies had to be brought to the plantation owner
to be named, and so there were definitely some weird
(38:36):
race relations going on there. I was telling Tracy, like,
I really think Carstairs wanted to work for the betterment
of people, even though she had this weird racial bias
against them. Uh, it's very tricky and convoluted. It's you know,
humans are unfortunately complex. They're not really always easy, and
(38:56):
they don't always see a situation in its bigger state.
They see their view of it, and it's hard to
kind of get the wider angle. So do you also
have a listener mail? I do. This one delighted me
so much because it is a postcard from Antarctica. It's
from our listener Alex And it opens with question, what
do you call a penguin in the desert? Answer lost,
(39:19):
and alex And says, well, actually, technically Antarctica is a desert.
But thanks for all the awesome research you put into
your podcasts. I'm an avid listener here at McMurdo Station,
where I cook eggs, not penguin eggs, each morning for
the winter station population of around a hundred and forty
five people. Fun fact, this postcard is being sent out
on the second ever flight scheduled to fly to McMurdo
(39:40):
during the Antarctic winter. A few uh medical evacuations have
occurred over the years, but it has never before been
planned due to aircraft restrictions of temperatures, the effort to
maintain a nice runway, and the difficulties of landing a
plane using night vision goggles in lieu of a well
lit runway from lots of lights. Only a decade or
so ago, there was another neat advancement made in the
(40:03):
US Antarctic Program of pioneering a land route for hauling
supplies to the South Pole station with modern tractors and
radar devices for finding crevasses. This traverse crew means we
have to fly far fewer planes to maintain the research
occurring at this The poll pretty neat to once again
be going overland like Scott and Shackleton. History repeats itself.
(40:24):
Thank you so much, Alex, I love it. There are
gorgeous king penguins on the front of the postcard, and
I just love that we got a postcard from Antarctica.
I had a friend that did research at my murder
station like a million years ago, so uh, super fun.
I can't imagine living like that because I am wimpy.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(40:46):
do so at History Podcast at hostel works dot com.
We're also at Facebook dot com, slash misst in history
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(41:07):
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for all of our back episodes, UH show notes from
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(41:34):
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