During the 1920s and 1930s, there was something of a craze for fake memoirs and biographies. Harold Nicholson's 1927 Some People is probably the best-known - and best-written - of these spoofs, although Cecil Beaton also produced a couple of amusing examples and there was also the Lady Addle series which was republished about ten years ago. Usually the imaginary subject was an ancient dowager or a member of some exiled middle-European royal family cheerily recalling happier times when money, and servants, were more plentiful.
So extraordinary is the story it tells, Kate Summerscale's book reads like a belated instance of this genre, particularly given the consistently grainy quality of the photographs included. In an introductory note, she says her first introduction to "Joe" Carstairs came in late 1993 when she worked on the obituaries desk at the Daily Telegraph and had to write a few lines on the deceased. What she discovered - and, given the character of the Telegraph's notices, was unable to use - whetted her appetite to learn more about Carstairs and eventually led to this book. Marion Barbara Carstairs was born in 1900 in Mayfair, the daughter of an ill-suited couple who separated soon after her birth. Her mother, an American heiress, married three more husbands, the last of these a French surgeon of Russian extraction called Serge Voronoff with whom she worked on a series of experiments involving pulped animal testicles. The mysterious Colonel Albert Carstairs appears to have played little part in his daughter's life; she claimed to have met him only a handful of times, on the last of which he mistook her for a man and offered her a cigar. The major was by no means the only person to be confused about Marion Carstairs's gender. She soon abandoned women's clothing, except when absolutely necessary, and preferred to be known as Joe. One of the photographs included by Kate Summerscale shows Joe's impressive collection of tattoos, while another depicts her wearing a small, but very convincing, moustache.
Her close-cropped hair and fondness for trousers may also have encouraged the widespread misunderstanding that she was a boy; in old age, one of her fond memories was of being propositioned in Berlin by an elderly man who imagined he was speaking to someone of his own sex. She must have felt a degree of sympathy for him, since Joe Carstairs throughout her life was a promiscuous lesbian who kept pictures of at least 120 former lovers. She married, but only because this was a prerequisite of coming into her inheritance and immediately after the ceremony walked out on her husband, a French count who had only agreed to the wedding because he was short of cash. Her money, allied to an inordinate sense of fearlessness, allowed her greater freedom than was usually the case during the earlier part of this century. So, during the 1920s, she took up motorboat racing at a time when it was an exclusively male sport, created a yard at Cowes to build her own vessels, and won a succession of awards. Then, in 1934, she chose to leave England, probably because she owed so much back tax, and bought a small island in the Bahamas. Over an eventual population of 500, she ruled here as a benign despot, transforming what had been a fairly barren wasteland into a profitable farming concern.
Whale Cay, as the island was called, subsequently returned to desuetude after she sold it in 1975. Explaining her grief at leaving the place, she commented "It felt like a woman had died." Indisputably a highly intelligent and disciplined person, Joe Carstairs was also something of a monster, accustomed to getting her own way if only because she had more money than anyone else. She seems to have been almost incapable of emotional warmth and reserved her greatest passion for a doll she called Lord Tod Wadley. Her closest companion for almost seventy years, he was cremated and buried with Joe Carstairs. This is the final bizarre detail given in what has to be the most unusual biography produced in 1997.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times columnist