Queer Places:
Ladies' Automobile Workshops, Brick St, Mayfair, London W1J 7DH, UK
106 Ebury St, Belgravia, London SW1W 9QD
Wickhurst House, Wickhurst Ln, Broadbridge Heath, Horsham RH12
Ravenstone Castle, Newton Stewart DG8 8DS, UK
Villa di Bellosguardo, Via Roti Michelozzi, 2, 50125 Firenze FI
Lady Gabrielle Margaret Ariana Borthwick (June 30, 1866 – February 27, 1952) ran the Ladies' Automobile Workshops in Brick Street, London. She was also a theosophist. She was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn at its Isis-Urania temple in London, in July 1891. She chose the Latin motto Sine metu. She passed the exams was initiated into the GD’s inner order, the 2nd Order, on 8 July 1897. As a member of the 2nd Order she will have been able to begin doing practical magic; but she wasn’t able to be as active as she might have liked as she lived abroad for most of the year at this time.
The Borthwick
family were Scottish. Gabrielle was the eldest child of Cunninghame Borthwick
(1813-1885), who was either
the 16th or the 19th Baron Borthwick,
and
Harriet Alice Day (1834–1917 (m. 1865)).
The barony of Borthwick had lain
dormant since the death of a Baron Borthwick in 1772 without any obvious
heirs. Cunninghame Borthwick’s father, Patrick Borthwick, had claimed the
dormant peerage in 1816. Cunninghame’s
elder brother Archibald took up the claim when Patrick died; and when
Archibald died in his turn in 1867, the baton passed to Cunninghame as
Patrick’s younger son. Cunninghame went
into the matter with a great deal more energy and determination than either
his father or his brother: he spent a great deal of time and money petitioning
the House of Lords to agree that he was the true baron, against the claims
being made by two other members of the clan.
After four years of effort by Cunninghame, the House of Lords’
Privileges Committee finally agreed with him, and he was declared the 16th
Baron Borthwick on 5 May 1870.
Cunninghame
bought a
landed estate
in 1870.
It was on the Machars peninsula in what was then the county of
Wigtownshire (it’s now in Dumfries and Galloway).
The land came complete with
a castle, Ravenstone Castle, some parts of which dated back to the 15th-century.
The Borthwick barony was a Scottish one, and not all Scottish peers had
a right to sit in the House of Lords.
For
10 years after becoming the 16th Baron, Cunninghame worked for the
Conservative Party in Scotland and joined the right clubs in London to build
up a circle of useful acquaintances, and in 1880 he was elected as what was
called a ‘representative peer’ for Scotland, and took up one of their seats in
the House of Lords.
Patrick
Borthwick was appointed the first manager of the National Bank of Scotland,
when it was founded in Edinburgh, with a salary (enormous for those days) of
£1000 per year. He married Ariana
Corbett, daughter of Cunninghame Corbett of Tolcross and Glasgow, in 1804.
Patrick and
Ariana’s second son Cunninghame was born in 1813.
By the mid-1830s he was working as an actuary in the family accountancy
business in Edinburgh. However,
his father and his younger brother died
around 1840 and although the business in Edinburgh may have continued, at some
point in the 1840s Cunninghame had cut loose from it.
He moved to London and become a partner in the stockbroking firm of
Dowling and Borthwick of 75 Old Broad Street.
The partnership with Dionysius Wilfred Dowling was ended by mutual
agreement in 1853. For the next 20 or so
years he was a partner in another stockbroking firm, Borthwick, Wark and
Company of Bartholomew House, Bartholomew Lane (also in the City).
Cunninghame’s daily involvement with Borthwick, Wark and Company ceased
in 1877 but the firm continued in business, keeping the full name, and after
Cunninghame’s death his son Archibald joined it as a partner.
Cunninghame Borthwick married
Harriet Alice Day in 1865. Harriet - who
was over 20 years Cunninghame’s junior - was the daughter of Thomas Hermitage
Day, whose family ran a bank in Rochester Kent. The
bank doesn’t seem to have survived long after T.H.
Day’s death in 1869. One of
Harriet’s brothers became a clergyman, the other two joined the army. Between
1865 and 1880 the Borthwicks lived most of the year in various houses in
fashionable and expensive Mayfair; and after 1870 there was the estate in
Scotland where they could spend summers and Christmas.
Cunninghame and Harriet had five
children, one son and
four daughters.
In the 1881 census they and their
daughters were at their Mayfair house, where their household included a
butler, footman, cook, a lady’s maid, the daughters’ governess, two
housemaids, two nursemaids and a kitchen maid. Even
as a widow, Harriet Borthwick was able to maintain a high standard of living;
on the day of the 1891
census she was living at 14 Seymour Street, and could afford to employ a
governess for her youngest daughter, a butler, footman, cook, two housemaids
and a kitchen maid.
Gabrielle
Margaret Ariana Borthwick was the eldest of the five children growing up in
the Borthwicks’ lavishly-funded household.
She was born on 30 June 1866.
The heir Archibald was born in 1867; Alice in 1868; Violet in 1871; and
Mary in 1876.
Archibald was sent
away to school; but Gabrielle and her sisters were educated by governesses.
In March
1884, Harriet Borthwick went with her daughter to Buckingham Palace to
introduce the Honourable Gabrielle Borthwick to the Princess of Wales (who was
standing in, as she normally did these days, for Queen Victoria).
Gabrielle had been through
two ‘seasons’ when, on the day before Christmas, 1885, Cunninghame Borthwick
died.
Alice had her first ‘season’ in
1888; Violet her’s in 1890 and Mary her’s in 1894.
Archibald was introduced to the Prince of Wales by the Earl of Orkney
during a levee - the male equivalent of the women-only ‘drawing-room’- in
1889. Alice, Violet and Mary
married, Gabrielle never married.
She was friend with
a group of wealthy ex-pats
who spent all or part of their year in Florence.
Among them
Walburga Paget, widow of the
English diplomat Augustus Berkeley Paget; and
Mabel Dodge Luhan, an
American banker’s daughter.
Walburga
Paget knew a great variety of people.
Everybody from Cosima Wagner through Indian brahmins to Wilfred Scawen Blunt
spent time as her guests in Florence.
She was interested in spiritualism and was also a member of the Theosophical
Society. It may have been through the TS
in London that Walburga Paget got to know Gabrielle Borthwick - Walburga’s
daughter was married to an Englishman and Walburga visited her very often
during the London ‘season’. By June
1900, Gabrielle and Walburga Paget were well enough acquainted for Walburga to
write to a friend that, “Miss Bayly with red hair and Gabrielle Borthwick with
black, both handsome, are staying with me”.
Gabrielle was her guest at Villa Bellosguardo
(a 13th century villa once owned by poet Guido Cavalvanti).
In November 1900, Violet was the last of Harriet’s other daughters to
get married. With that marriage
Harriet decided that her social duties were finally done, as far as they could
be, and for the next few years she spent her winters in Florence.
It was Gabrielle’s duty, as her only unmarried daughter, to go with
her.
In her memoirs,
Mabel Dodge Luhan
suggested
that she and Gabrielle
Borthwick had a lesbian relationship.
Mabel Dodge Luhan arrived in
Florence in 1905, moved into the Villa Curonia, and with Walburga Paget’s help
quickly got herself established among the ex-pats.
Here’s how Mabel describes Gabrielle: “Plump and pretty, though her
skin was so gray”. Mabel says that
Gabrielle, “used to sniff something from a little bottle, and then her
child-like, deep-set gray eyes would lighten up a little.”
Mabel admits
in her memoir that she was strongly attracted to Gabrielle from the start; and
she means sexually. Before long she was
inviting Gabrielle to stay at her villa.
These visits seem to have taken place in a hot-house atmosphere of the sort
that ends in tears. Mabel likes to feel
that everyone she meets is sexually attracted to her; but she describes her
son’s nanny, Marguerite, as having feelings towards Mabel that were certainly
possessive, if not sexual, and sufficiently out-of-control as to be obvious to
others in the house. She says that
Gabrielle was one of several women-friends of Mabel’s who “made Marguerite
suffer” over it, but goes further in Gabrielle’s case, describing how “her own
[Gabrielle’s] muscles dimpled, reflecting the titillation of her being at
someone else’s pain”.
Writing her
memoir in the 1930s, Mabel hadn’t had second thoughts about Gabrielle’s
sexuality - she still believed Gabrielle was a lesbian, and grouped her with
women she knew in Florence whom Mabel thought of as never having any men in
their lives, the group’s leader being
Violet Paget, who dressed as a man and preferred to be known as Vernon
Lee. Mabel includes in it
Mary Berenson,
married to
Bernard Berenson.
Gabrielle, Archibald and Mary were
all interested in that area where archaeology, antiquarianism and folk history
all meet. Archibald was a member of the
Glasgow Archaeological Society; Mary’s first book was a selection of folk
tales from Lancashire; and in the years before the first World War Gabrielle
was a member of the Gypsy Lore Society. Gabrielle
and her mother were the only members of the family who joined the London Lodge
of the Theosophical Society. They
had joined it by August 1885, when the Sinnetts - Alfred Percy and Patience -
came to stay with the Borthwicks at Ravenstone.
In his autobiography, Alfred noted that he found Gabrielle’s mother
“not altogether an easy person to get on with” but Gabrielle became a close
friend of both Sinnetts. Gabrielle kept
up her membership of London Lodge until Patience died, in November 1908.
When the time came for Patience’s friends to pay their subscriptions
for 1909, Gabrielle and her mother were amongst several who decided they
didn’t want to continue in the TS now she was gone; but Gabrielle was still in
touch with Alfred Sinnett as late as 1912.
Another member of London Lodge in its early years (but not later) was
George Wyld. Gabrielle will have
known him too, as a friend and business acquaintance of Cunninghame Borthwick.
In 1915 the Times described Gabrielle as having many
years’ experience as a car driver.
Georgine Classen’s research for her book Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists
has established that Gabrielle went into business as a woman garage proprietor
at some time before the first World War, firstly in Slough, later in Northwood
in west London. Late in 1915
Gabrielle rented a garage at 8 Brick Street, a side-alley off Piccadilly.
On 11 December 1915, Gabrielle was
mentioned by name and her garage featured by the Times in an article called
‘Increasing demand for women drivers’.
A series of adverts for the garage at Brick Street appeared in the Times in
January and February 1916, just as the first conscription laws were passed.
In 1918
Gabrielle advertised her courses again, this time focusing on ambulance
driving. A course of 10 lessons
would cost 5 guineas.
Later coverage of Gabrielle’s
courses said that some of the women she’d taught had gone to drive ambulances
in France and Serbia, but they were also needed in the UK.
Georgine Classen feels that
charging 5 guineas meant that learning driving and maintenance with Gabrielle
was not for the hard-up; but by 1918 enough women had found the money for her
to rent a second garage in Kinnerton Street Knightsbridge; which means that by
this time she must have had a second tutor.
By the time
World War 1 began, Gabrielle was taking part in the formation of a trade union
for women, the Society of Women Motor Drivers, founded to fight women’s corner
in the battle to be taken seriously in the motoring trade and have the same
rights as its male workers. Another of
the Society’s founder members was Barbara
Drake, social campaigner
and wife of Bernard Drake who was a nephew of Beatrice Webb.
In June
1910 Gabrielle’s sister Violet died aged 38; and then Archibald died at
the age of only 43.
Archibald and his
wife, Susanna MacTaggart Stewart, had not produced a male heir to the barony
Cunninghame. The barony went into abeyance again on
Archibald’s death and remains dormant to this day.
Harriet Borthwick died at
Sevenoaks in Kent, on 17 February 1917.
Gabrielle was the chief mourner when she was buried.
Gabrielle’s brother-in-law Harold Chaloner Dowdall (husband of
Gabrielle’s sister Mary) managed to attend - he was the executor of Harriet’s
Will; Harriet’s brother Francis Day and his wife and daughter were there; and
Archibald’s widow Susanna who was now Countess of Euston.
In January 1916 Susanna had married Alfred Fitzroy, heir of the 7th
duke of Grafton; he was a brother of TS and GD member Lady Eleanor Harbord.
Gabrielle became involved
with the Pelman system of mental training;
in April 1920 she chaired an
evening meeting at the Pelman Institute at 4 Bloomsbury Street, during which a
lecture on how it worked was given by a senior employee, who took questions
from the audience afterwards.
By the
early 1920s Gabrielle’s business had branched out into the running of a
restaurant and a hostel. She had
acquired a business partner, Lady Gertrude
Crawford.
Lady Gertrude Crawford (1868-1937)
had been born Lady Gertrude Eleanor Molyneux; she was the daughter of the 4th
Earl of Sefton. Both her
father and her grandfather the third earl had been enthusiastic ‘turners’ -
they used a lathe to make things out of ivory and wood - and Lady Gertrude’s
father had started her off in the craft by buying her a lathe when she was two.
She inherited both his talent and
his enthusiasm and continued to do ‘turning’ work all her life, exhibiting her
work, winning awards and being made a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of
Master Turners in 1907; although she
never took payment for her work.
Lady Gertrude married Captain John
Halket Crawford in 1905.
They lived mostly in London, where Crawford was stationed.
In 1924,
Gabrielle and Lady Gertrude expanded their business yet again, opening an
estate agency. But taking on yet another
outlet was a step too far, in very difficult economic times, and later that
year a receiver was appointed to take control of Borthwick Garages Ltd after a
court order against Gabrielle’s firm had been obtained by one of its
creditors. Gabrielle and Lady
Gertrude seem to have been able to fight off bankruptcy that time but the
firm’s financial situation didn’t improve and at the beginning of 1927,
another set of bankruptcy proceedings began and this time Borthwick Garages
Ltd shut up shop for good. Lady Gertrude
held an exhibition of her turning work at Leighton House in 1929 where, for
the first time, some of the exhibits were for sale.
Gabrielle and Lady Gertrude
committed themselves to another company run by a woman. Cleone
de Heveningham Benest was from a well-known Channel Islands family, though
she herself was born in London. Cleone
had a certificate in motor engineering.
In 1915, she too was
running a garage for women, in Dover Street Piccadilly, a short walk away from
Gabrielle’s own garage; though later in the war she was employed by Vickers as
an inspector of aircraft. In 1922 or
1923, Cleone had founded the Stainless and Non-Corrosive Metals Company Ltd,
based in Birmingham, to make high-quality household goods. Cleone
herself was chairman and managing director, and a list of shareholders in the
firm shows that the overwhelming majority of them were women. At
the beginning of 1924, Cleone was planning an expansion of the firm’s range of
products and wanted to move to bigger premises. As
part of the fund-raising effort she sold 100 shares from her original holding
of 1000: 50 to Lady Gertrude, and 50 to Gabrielle. Lady
Gertrude and Gabrielle joined the Company’s board of directors; though Cleone
remained its chairman. It seems, though,
that the Company over-reached itself: at a meeting in December 1925, the
shareholders agreed that as it couldn’t pay its current debts, it should be
wound up. Even in this crisis, though,
the preponderance of women involved with the Company continued: the liquidator
was a woman, Florence Durant of 230 Rotton Park Road Edgbaston.
In
1929 Gabrielle
got involved with the Women’s Automobile and Sports Association, which was
founded to organise and promote sports events for women competitors.
Its first headquarters were at the St Ermin’s Hotel Westminster and it
had negotiated a deal whereby its members could have rooms there, presumably
at a discount. Later it had enough
funds to lease its own headquarters building, at 17 Buckingham Palace Gardens.
It held its annual dinners at the Savoy Hotel.
When it decided to hold a motor rally to raise funds for George V’s
jubilee, in 1935, it was able to hire the very exclusive Hurlingham Club as
the venue. WASA’s
first president was
Irene
Mountbatten, the Marchioness of Carisbrooke; formerly Lady Irene Denison,
a relation of GD member Albertina Herbert.
Its second was
Ermine Oliphant-Murray, Viscountess Elibank.
WASA’s secretary was the author
Edith Waldemar Leverton.
Gabrielle was an active member of WASA from the beginning.
At one of its first meetings she was elected chairman of its executive
committee and she continued in that role until the second World War.
Although it
held other events from time to time, WASA’s main function was to organise
cross-country trials for vehicles whose drivers were mostly women.
The trials were mostly for cars though one or two, especially in WASA’s
early days, were for motorbikes. The
first trial was held in 1929, from Slough to Exeter and back again, and from
that year until 1939 there were three trials a year, noted for their good
organisation and the level of challenge presented to the drivers and
navigators. The one held on a circuit
around Llandrindod Wells was regarded as particularly tough.
Lord Wakefield of Hythe was persuaded to donate a trophy for the
trials’ overall winner, which was presented at the annual dinner.
WASA also took part in motor-racing at Brooklands and at Montlhery in
France.
During the
1920s and probably until the second World War, Gabrielle was still living in
London, at 106 Ebury Street.
She had a place in the country for when she could spare a
weekend: a house called Wickhurst, in Broadbridge Heath just outside Horsham.
By her death it had become her main residence.
Lady Gertrude
Crawford died in 1937 at her house near Lymington in Hampshire.
Gabrielle’s sister Mary died a few months before the 1939 Register was
taken; and her sister Alice died only a few weeks before it, leaving Gabrielle
the last survivor of Cunninghame and Harriet’s children, though the oldest.
On the day of the 1939 Register - 29 September 1939 - Gabrielle was at
Wickhurst. With her were two women.
They were both widows, Mrs
Evelyn C. White, and Mrs
Mary B. Carleton.
Mrs Carleton was born in 1886. Gabrielle
and Mrs White both told the Register official that they had no occupation, but
Mrs Carleton told him or her she was a company director.
Gabrielle died, at Wickhurst, on 10 October 1952, leaving personal belongings valued at about £10,000. A few months later some jewellery Gabrielle had owned was sent for sale at Christie’s by her executors.
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