Gabrielle’s garage
Another tale for Women’s History Month: pioneering garage owner Gabrielle Borthwick, mechanic and mystic.
“The Ladies’ Automobile Workshops”, announces a 1915 advert in, of all places, the Church League for Women’s Suffrage paper. “Ladies trained by ladies. All branches of motoring taught.”
The principal of this Mayfair establishment was the Honourable Gabrielle Borthwick, “motoring expert”. Women who could afford the fees could not only take driving lessons, but learn to maintain and work on cars for themselves, either for self-sufficiency or as a career. The Workshops could also advise on car purchases, arrange car sales or supply you with a car and female chauffeur.
This would be quite remarkable today and it is even more suprising seeing an advert over a century old for such a thing. In 1915, women’s voting rights were still a full three years in the future for a few and more than a decade away for the majority.
By 1918, the focus of the Workshops became training women to work as ambulance drivers in war zones, with a driving course costing five guineas. The Westminster Gazette in 1923 described its “splendid work during the war in teaching hundreds of girls the mechanism and driving of cars.”
The garage also trained some men during wartime.
After the Armistice, the workshops started up again in earnest. Demand for women drivers and mechanics had lessened due to new laws sidelining female employees in favour of returning men, but new students continued to enrol and the garage continued to have customers. It also diversified. By 1923, Gabrielle’s establishment included a restaurant, the Tudor, plus hotel rooms for travellers and chauffeurs. Through the garage and school, she was involved in the setting up of a Union of Women Motor Drivers, to represent women’s interests in professional motoring.
Gabrielle Borthwick herself was an even more unlikely figure. The eldest daughter of a baron who could not inherit a title, she was 49 years old in 1915. Despite a couple of seasons as a debutante in her youth, she seemed uninterested in snaring a husband and spent long periods with her mother, travelling in Italy and often staying in Florence.
Motoring was only one of her interests, which tended towards the occult and were even more of a surprise in a woman as forward-thinking and seemingly modern as Gabrielle. She was a member of societies for both archaeology and the preservation of British folk tales, as well as a practitioner of the Pelman system of brain and memory training. Her parents and one of her sisters all shared these interests.
In 1891, she was admitted as a member of the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was an organisation that might today be described as pagan, attempting to recreate the “practical magic” of ancient civilisations such as the Egyptians. In common with Masonic lodges, there were different degrees of membership. Gabrielle reached the second “grade”, which would have allowed her to take part in “practical magic”, had she so wished. The occult magician Aleister Crowley was a member, although it is not clear whether he and Gabrielle ever met. We do not know either whether she was involved in the practical side of the Temple.
This unlikely venue proved to be a source of business connections among like-minded women. It was officially disbanded due to disagreements in its leadership in about 1900, but its members clearly stuck together for longer. Lady Gertrude Crawford, a partner in the garage after the war, had been a Golden Dawn acolyte, as had Cleone Benest, also known as “Miss C Griff”, who went into business with both Gabrielle and Gertrude. Cleone was the founder of the Stainless Steel and Non-Corrosive Metals Company, which produced small metal goods and made a point of employing women. Cleone had previously run a a garage of her own quite near to Gabrielle’s.
Gertrude Crawford had been a munitions worker during the war and was a skilled lathe operator; a member of the Worshipful Company of Turners. The three-woman board ran the company for three years before it folded in 1925.
Gabrielle continued to run her garage and associated businesses, becoming an RAC agent. This lasted until 1927, when the garage went into receivership and closed.
As ever, she was drawn to groups and associations and seemed to enjoy working with other women. The Women’s Automobile and Sports Association was founded in 1929 and she was one of its early directors. This club was set up to promote motoring for women and also to bring together sportswomen from different disciplines, including motor boating, golf and tennis. Lady Irene Carisbrooke was the first president.
Its first event was a London to Exeter motor trial for cars and motorcycles in October 1929. Gabrielle had her only active experience of motorsport as passenger to Mrs Mary Carleton, although she was not allowed to give any mechanical input at all.
Earlier in the year, she was linked with the Alpha Club, an organisation for professional women. The Daily Mirror reported that she was due to host a party for the club in May. She had panicked when no-one arrived, before realising that she had got ahead of herself and the event was due to happen a week later.
Another WASA member, the aviatrix Lady Mary Bailey, was part of the Alpha Club and spoke at another of its meetings in 1929.
Party mix-ups aside, Gabrielle managed to steer clear of public scandal, despite her profile and non-traditional path through life.
The Golden Dawn was a secretive organisation not widely documented in the popular press, so her membership remained discreet. Pelmanism was more socially acceptable and was quite fashionable, so there was no need for privacy there.
Lesbianism was also becoming socially acceptable in private and in certain circles, but was certainly not something discussed publicly. Gabrielle never spoke about her sexual preferences or love life, but the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan suggested in her memoirs that she was attracted to women. Mabel herself certainly was and she was rather smitten with Gabrielle.
Same-sex attraction is no longer scandalous, but Far Right political views are more so than ever. We know very little about Gabrielle’s own personal politics and she associated happily with Left-leaning philanthropists like Adeline Bourne, a founder of the Alpha Club, or Barbara Drake, the noted trade unionist who worked alongside her in the Union of Women Motor Drivers. It may have been a purely business arrangement that led to the Tudor restaurant being hired by the British Fascisti in 1924. The event turned into a major disagreement and the leaders of the BF were charged with “conspiring against the peace of the realm.” Gabrielle does not appear to have been implicated directly.
She died in 1952, aged 86, the last of her siblings to go. Gertrude Crawford and most of her friends had pre-deceased her.
(Image by Bassano)
