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Beatrice Gordon Holmes became the first female stockbroker, head of her own finance company, founder president of Business and Professional Women UK Ltd and a formidable force in the women’s movement. Her early life, however, provided her with a less than auspicious start to her illustrious career. With her twin brother and two other siblings Beatrice spent most of her childhood in City Road, East London. She recalled how she lived in a poor household ruled by ‘the masculine tradition’ and did not attend school until the age of 11. Even then, her father, an Irish doctor, often removed her from school whenever money was tight. At nineteen she landed her first office job and was sacked for incompetence within a fortnight. Her next post, as a typist on £1 a week working for a Danish firm exporting eggs, lasted eight years and taught her everything she needed to know about basic business practice. In 1904 she became a founding committee member of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, but found it hard to ‘organize’ the membership, many of whom were young women from ‘nice homes’ who ‘regarded organization as synonymous with trade unionism.’

At around the same time Beatrice joined the suffragettes, which she believed ‘helped to make the women of my generation. It gave us pride of sex, helped to stop the everlasting apology within us for being women, taught us to value ourselves and our abilities, and taught us to fight for those valuations in terms of pay and responsibility, public and private.’

Twenty years later she sent Mrs Pankhurst an anonymous gift of a small annuity, which she paid in cash every six months until the suffragette leader died.

Beatrice’s next post, with Irish Canadian William Thorolds financial issuing house, lasted another eight years. She gradually earned the trust and respect of her brilliant but volatile, egocentric boss. In 1914 he left her in charge of the whole business with just a few girl typists and office boys when he and all the male staff and directors joined up. During the war Beatrice sold hundreds of thousands of War Loans and kept the business going ‘with sufficient success, so that in 1918 every man had his job to come back to at a better salary than when he left’. Thorold was less appreciative of her efforts on his return, and after Holmes collapsed with appendicitis they rowed and parted company. With Mr Turner, the company secretary she had worked since 1912, Beatrice successfully raised enough capital from the City to start their own company in 1921. Seven years later Holmes and Turner took over Thorold’s company, ‘lock, stock and barrel, goodwill, name, clientel, everything.’ By 1929 they employed 140 people and, having survived the 1929-31 slump that saw three main competitors collapse, were ranked the leading Outside House in 1936. Backed by the Board of Trade, they helped form the Association of Stock and Share dealers in 1938. Turner considered his partnership with Holmes ideal – their complementary qualifications enabling them to operate efficiently in their respective spheres to build a sound and profitable business.’ In addition, ‘My Corporation’ as Holmes called it in her autobiography, handled government and municipal and investment securities; acted as financial advisors to banks; and helped finance public health services, gas and electricity companies, chemical and engineering works in many different countries.

Beatrice listed her personal business talents as: being trained to be accurate with figures and ‘see’ a total balance at a glance (but confessed to being baffled by balance sheets); being good at creative and constructive work and an excellent ‘salesman (of things, people and causes)’. She also considered herself a shrewd judge of business character. Lastly she believed she had a ‘strong commercial sense’ which kept dramatic impulses in check; ensured that she did not speak without considering how to deal with the consequences and always viewed ‘enemies’ as potential assets to be dealt with dispassionately and then discarded. On the disadvantages of her sex she explained that ‘people think business women must be handicapped because they are not always dining and wining and clubbing in the old-fashioned masculine style. But I think it was another business woman, Miss Alice Head, of Good Housekeeping fame, who stated in her reminiscences that she always insists on keeping business and social occasions very distinct. I agree. Do your business in your office with the parties round a table, and leave courtesies and compliments out of that picture.’

Beatrice noted later that when she had set up the tiny Association of Clerks and Typists in 1904, it was the only type of organization that could have been set up at that time because there were so few professional women. She found herself ‘a lone figure in the City’ for many years until asked to join the Greater London branch of the Federation of Soroptimists in 1923. The Federation had begun in America – a country she had visited frequently on her travels. She was surprised however, and ‘very interested and impressed to note how many women directors of business houses there were. Names I had known and had taken for granted were men’s names, were now revealed to be women’s. I noticed with admiration that many of these women had large staffs and handled their staffs admirably. If I had ever had a tendency after my successful years in the City to regard myself as something unique, joining the Soroptimists stopped it.’

New members were required to stand up and speak about their careers, which Beatrice duly did, unaware that reporters were present. That night “Woman stockbroker tells her Secrets” was all over the newspaper placards and she was besieged by the press for weeks. Her reputation and news coverage spread oversees - she was interviewed and photographed throughout a trip to South America. She used her fame to insist on equal status as a British Director of a Hungarian Bank at meetings in Budapest, the first female to sit on a Hungarian banking board. The Budapest papers delightedly announced the arrival of a “British blue-eyed woman Bank Director” causing much envy among other Hungarian banks.

In 1936 Beatrice’s lifelong affection for American organizations and despair at their financial inability to subsidise a branch in Britain, lead her to increase her involvement in the American National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Cubs Inc. She became Finance Chairman to the International Federation and used her British Soroptomist friends to help raise money. It took another two years, however, to defeat ‘the ingrained inferiority complex of British women’ and set up the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1938. Beatrice was offered the Chairmanship of the Federation – her first job as ‘Chair’ despite the numerous Boards and Committees she had sat on. In a speech to her members Beatrice made clear her conviction that professional women had a distinctive contribution to make to the world of business and to wider society. She declared: ‘Our faith is that business and professional women have something new to contribute. The trained woman as a class is just 30 years old. She comes as an outsider ... She represents a new source of power, an unexplored field of thought. She brings what the world has been waiting for, an entirely new perspective on old problems.’

Well aware of her pioneering status, Beatrice Gordon Holmes’ wrote her aptly titled autobiography, In Love with Life: A Pioneer Woman’s Story, which was published in 1944. She dedicated the book to Dr Helen Boyle, her long term companion and partner (from 1918), who set up the Lady Chichester Hospital for Nervous Disorders. Beatrice remained a lifelong supporter of this and other initiatives to improve mental health. She suffered from periodic depression and self-doubt herself – which she ascribed to her difficult childhood relationships with her ‘co-dependent’ mother and her morose, violent tempered father. Nevertheless, she overcame both and worked her way out of poverty, to become a dynamic and extremely successful businesswoman, using her success to support others by setting up vital networking societies for other professional women. Although her work and support for women’s movements were her central focus she did have other interests. She travelled extremely widely - she took great joy in all her over overseas adventures whether for business or pleasure, she read voraciously and loved wearing luxurious fashionable clothes.

Beatrice died in a London nursing home in November 1951. In her obituary The Times declared that with her death ‘the City loses a prominent figure and the women’s movement an inspiring leader.’ It recorded her meteoric rise in earnings from £1 a week to £5000, how her status had meant that she was the only woman to appear before the Bodkin Committee in 1936 and that she helped found the Association of stock and Share Dealers. It also described her as the ‘inspiration and strength behind the International Federation of Business and Professional Women and described in detail how she founded the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s British Clubs of Britain and Northern Ireland. The website of the modern BPW UK today describes their founder president as ‘one of the most outstanding financiers of her generation.’