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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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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. So we've been talking a lot lately about Squarespace, which is this easy to use, dragon drop intuitive way to make your own website without needing to know anything about how to actually make a website. I have done this. I literally used it to make my wedding website. I have. I'm still tinkering with it, so I'm not showing it's everyone yet. 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So go to square space dot com slash history You'll get a fourteen day free trial with no credit card necessary, and then with the offer code History, you can also get ten percent off your first purchase. That is square space dot com very helpful to my own personal wedding planning. So 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 do so at History Podcast at hostel works dot com. We're also at Facebook dot com, slash misst in history on Twitter, at mist in History at pinterest dot com, slash mist in History, and at Miston History dot tumbler dot com. We're on Instagram missed in History and you can purchase stuff you missed in History class goodies at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to visit our parents site that is house to works dot com. If you would like to visit us, you can do so at missed in history dot com for all of our back episodes, UH show notes from any of the episodes that Tracy and I have worked on over the last few years, and the occasional blog post or other helpful delight. So we encourage you to visit us at house to works dot com and missed industry dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how to works dot com