Marion Barbara Joe Carstairs

Joe Carstairs put women behind the wheel as employees as well as competitors. In 1920 she and three other women established the X Garage in London, a chauffeur business whose workforce drew on women demobilized from wartime transport service. Historic England records touring holidays and journeys to parties among its services. Commercial driving converted skills acquired in war into paid work. The business also made women’s command of vehicles conspicuous in civilian life. [1,2]

Born in 1900, Carstairs inherited substantial wealth. That money helped make ambitious projects possible, while her wartime service supplied a different kind of experience. She drove ambulances in France and subsequently served with the Women’s Legion Mechanical Transport Section in Dublin. The National Portrait Gallery records this progression alongside the London business. Her later reputation as an eccentric heiress should not erase the work through which she learned and exercised mechanical competence.

Racing became her most visible achievement. She began competing in powerboats in the 1920s and acquired the public description of the fastest woman on water. The National Lottery Heritage Fund connects her Isle of Wight activity with boats commissioned from Sammy Saunders and directs researchers to the Carstairs Collection at the Classic Boat Museum. Race results, craft specifications, and accounts of failures as well as wins will be necessary for an exact competitive history. A celebratory nickname cannot supply that history by itself. [2,3]

Her clothing and public presentation challenged conventional expectations of women. Historic England describes masculine attire and openly lesbian attachments, while also discussing her relevance to present-day histories of gender nonconformity. Those interpretive possibilities can coexist without assigning Carstairs a fixed modern identity she did not herself use. The record should retain her chosen name and her own words where their original context can be established.

Dolly Wilde was an early intimate connection. EPIC explicitly describes the fellow ambulance drivers and Paris housemates as lovers. The National Portrait Gallery separately identifies Ruth Baldwin as Carstairs’s partner in Chelsea, while the Heritage Fund includes Marlene Dietrich among her partners. These are individual attachments with different source histories. They should not be flattened into a list of famous names, nor should a visitor to her later island automatically become a lover. Her route to Natalie Clifford Barney runs through Dolly; no direct Carstairs–Barney affair is established here. [2–4]

In 1934 Carstairs bought Whale Cay in the Bahamas. The National Portrait Gallery describes infrastructure and an agricultural enterprise there, and the publisher of Kate Summerscale’s biography presents the island as a major later chapter. Ownership raises further questions about labor, authority, and the people who lived and worked on the island. Their accounts are essential before a biography adopts the picturesque language of a private kingdom. Her freedom to organize a place depended on resources and on other people’s work. [2,5]

Mystic Seaport Museum also records privately printed poetry in 1940 and 1941, with subjects including homosexuality, feminism, hurricanes, and loss. Those books extend her historical record beyond sport and island ownership. The museum suggests that a poem about a woman’s death may concern Ruth Baldwin; that identification remains an interpretation to test against the actual text and its date.

Carstairs illuminates a world where inheritance, transport, sport, and intimate life could overlap. She enlarged some opportunities for women and lived conspicuously outside prevailing gender expectations. A rigorous account must also examine how wealth shaped those opportunities and her power over others. The Constellation gains from following Dolly’s lover into this independent history, rather than leaving Carstairs as an accessory to a Parisian salon. [1–5]