Gordon Holmes (30 September 1884 – 21 November 1951) was a British stockbroker, suffragette, trade unionist, and author. From the end of World War I until her retirement in the 1940s she was one of the most successful City financiers of her generation, well-known both for her entrepreneurial acumen and for her advocacy for women in business.
Though she was sometimes credited as the United Kingdom's "first woman stockbroker" during her lifetime, she was preceded by Amy Bell by at least 20 years.
Early life Beatrice Gordon Holmes was born on 30 September 1884 with her fraternal twin in London. She, her twin, two other brothers, and her parents lived in a small flat at 266 City Road. In her autobiography, she described her "modest outlook on life" as originating "partly due to poverty, and partly due to the impact and crushing effect of being the only girl among three brothers and a father all brought up in the masculine tradition... Those were the days, the 1880s and 90s, when men were not merely the masters of their own households, but the tyrants of their own households." They moved to a house in Kew when Holmes was nine months old – even briefly employing a household staff of a butler and maid – but were forced to return to their old flat on City Road three years later due to the family's constant financial difficulties. The family remained in the area through Holmes' childhood, as their father had an office on City Road; by the time of the 1901 census the family had moved a few doors down the road to No. 314.
While Homes' childhood was largely one of relative poverty, both sides of the family had histories of wealth. Her father, William Gordon Holmes, was a Dublin-born ear and throat specialist who began his career as a ship's doctor, and who worked for a time as an assistant to Morell Mackenzie. Holmes claimed that her father was descended from a noble Irish family which had been granted Ardee Castle by Oliver Cromwell in the 15th century, but "the entail was cut in my father's childhood, and with it went the last meagre remnant of property and unearned income."
Holmes' South African mother, Maria Thérèse Coqui, was born in Natal. Her Boer mother, Anna, was a member of the prominent van Breda family, while Maria's German-born father, Adolph Coqui, was a successful merchant and financier who had emigrated to Natal sometime around 1840; as well as his many colonial business interests (such as sitting on the board of the Natal Central Railway Company), he also served on the colony's Legislative Council in the 1850s. They moved to London around 1860, just before two of Adolph's companies—the Cotton Plantation Company of Natal and the Natal Investment Company—collapsed during the economic crash of 1866; Adolph personally lost £60,000 was left debilitated by a stroke on the same day. Anna spent the next "four or five" years traveling the world with her "invalid husband" until the family's cash savings of £5,000 were exhausted, whereupon she tried (and failed) to make a living running a boarding house out of the family's large home on Bedford Street in Bloomsbury, before she and her husband returned to South Africa again for good in the 1890s. Holmes claimed that the bulk of Adolph's surviving post-crash assets were lost when Anna (who possessed an "abysmal ignorance of business") burned his financial records during a stay in Ceylon, after becoming tired of carrying them around in a heavy iron lockbox.
William Gordon Holmes had an intense dislike of actual medical practice, and greatly preferred to focus on research – Holmes described him as a man with "academic brains, morose disposition, and violent temper," who "disliked almost everything and everyone, but he liked cats." He was an amateur carpenter of limited skill—he died after breaking his hip when a ladder he had built collapsed—and a miser, refusing to send Holmes to school until she was 11 because of the cost. She was a talented pupil, but most of her early education was delivered at home by her mother. However, her father was also an "inveterate" reader, and Holmes credited his subscription to Harper's Magazine – and his love for American fiction—for partly seeding her lifelong interest in both literature and the United States.
The circumstances of her upbringing left Holmes "shy, gauche, unsocial"; she described herself as, "a tomboy, vigorous and vital of lung and limb," although it took her until adulthood to find pride in her "powerful and characterful hands", "very large" and "unsightly mouth", and "impressive presence," which were the subjects of frequent criticism from her mother, siblings, and others. After leaving school in 1903, Holmes borrowed four guineas from her father so she could take a shorthand and typing course at a local college – she never paid him back. When she was 23 she also received lessons in mathematics and science for two years, "equivalent to a university education," from an uncle who was a "brilliant amateur scientist." Many years later Holmes discovered he was living in destitution in Vancouver, and she attempted to "pay back" by getting a London publisher to print his autobiography; despite a good review in the Times Literary Supplement, it was not successful.
At some point in her teens Holmes wrote a novel, From One Man's Hand To Another, which was eventually published in 1907 by T. Fisher Unwin as part of its "First Novel Library" series. Holmes used her grandmother's maiden name for her pen name, "G. H. Breda". Inspired by Olive Schreiner's 1883 feminist novel The Story Of An African Farm, the plot involves the "Bohemian occupants" of a London artist's studio. It received a mediocre review in the 4 May 1907 issue of The Aethenaeum: the "original" setting and "strange" cast of characters were "by no means deficient in charm" - and there was evidence that "the writer should do better work hereafter" – but nevertheless the characters often have "extraordinary misunderstandings with regards to matter of fact," and the heroine's "transcendent mental endowments and power of fascination for the opposite sex we are compelled, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, to take mainly on trust." Holmes never published any other fiction, though she would write occasional newspaper columns about her professional experiences in later life.
Career
Finance In 1903, 19-year-old Holmes landed her first job, as a business secretary – though she was fired within two weeks for being "incompetent". She quickly found a new job earning £1 per week as a typist in the newly opened London offices of Odense Aegforretning, a Danish firm exporting eggs to the UK. Her boss was Mr Ravens, "a quiet Danish gentleman – hard as steel under his exterior," whom Holmes called her, "first and lifelong business friend." Over the following eight years she developed a number of new business skills, but Ravens never paid her more than £2 per week. In 1911, she used her savings to pay for a second-class cabin for herself and her mother on the RMS Baltic, for a month-long holiday to the US – the first of many trips to the country she would make throughout her life. She began seeking a new job with higher pay on her return, but found it difficult to be taken seriously as a woman seeking a well-remunerated professional career.
Holmes eventually joined Irish-Canadian stockbroker William Thorold's merchant bank – Canadian and General Trust, Ltd – on Lombard Street as a secretary, being paid a starting salary of £2 5s. As she had no experience of finance, Thorold gave her a copy of Stocks & Shares by Hartley Withers to read over the weekend before her first day – later writing, "and with that book I began my financial career." Holmes and Thorold had a volatile working relationship; while she admired Thorold's "erratic brilliance" as a broker – "about the most brilliant mind I ever met" – and intellectually thrived under his exacting mentorship, he was also considered "the most difficult man in the City to work for ... a cold-blooded, completely selfish egocentric streaked with sentimentality," with "a temper he never attempted to control." His firm had a notoriously high staff turnover rate; Holmes claimed, "The first 5 1/2 [years] were among the most stimulating of my business life, and the other 3 years were plain unmitigated hell." During her first few months at the firm Holmes overhauled its record-keeping system, and quickly established herself as Thorold's indispensable right-hand woman; however, he still told Holmes that "women are incapable of understanding financial matters," and that "your only limitations are the limitations of the female mind" – statements which Holmes took great pleasure in repeating to journalists in later years, aware that it reflected badly on (the then-retired) Thorold.
When the First World War began in 1914, Thorold returned to Canada and almost all the male employees – from the directors downwards – enlisted, leaving Holmes behind as the most senior member of staff. The business thrived under her stewardship, brokering "hundred of thousands of pounds" of war bonds, and by 1918 the men who returned from the front found their salaries were higher than when they left. Holmes later referred to this period as, "the romantic years, the golden years, in which everything was new and fascinating – and terrifying." She found little trouble working as a woman in the City in this period, although she was "only too well aware of how unusual it all was"; since she avoided her birth name, Beatrice, and preferred to be known as "Gordon Holmes" professionally and socially, men often expressed shock on first meeting her or hearing her voice over the phone.
Holmes kept Thorold informed of her activities throughout the war, and the firm's success – without his direct influence – caused him to become even more emotionally erratic; when he returned to London in 1917 he berated Holmes for what he perceived as poor decision-making, but at the same time also acquiesced to her request to more than double her pay from "under £4 per week" to £500 per year. Their working relationship never regained stability after the war. In 1918, Holmes collapsed at work while suffering from both appendicitis "and the enormous pressure of working with Thorold's personality, standing between him and his staff ... who had worked with me with very great loyalty while I had been in sole charge." During the argument that resulted, Holmes quit, to deny Thorold the satisfaction of firing her, however, her persistent anxieties about struggling to find a new job and falling back into poverty meant that she returned to work for him, "bitterly," after only a few months. By 1919 Holmes was earning £1,000 per year, but was still deeply unhappy.