Beatrice Gordon Holmes

In 1903, 19-year-old Holmes landed her first job, as a business secretary – though she was fired within two weeks for "incompetence". She quickly found a new job as a typist for a Danish egg export firm, earning £1 per week;[8] over the following years she eventually earned as much as £4 per week, while developing the business skills that enabled her later successes. In 1904 she became a founding committee member of the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists (which formed part of APEX in 1940, which in turn merged into GMB in 1989), but found it difficult to organize her peers, many of whom were younger women from comfortable backgrounds, working part-time, who viewed trade unionism with skepticism.[4][3]

In 1911, Holmes joined Irish-Canadian stockbroker William Thorold's firm. She and Thorold had a tense working relationship – she quickly proved a skilled and insightful trader, but found Thorold an emotionally unpredictable boss. When the First World War began in 1914, and almost every male manager and employee enlisted, Thorold entrusted the firm to Holmes. The business thrived under her stewardship, becoming a specialist in brokering war bonds. When Thorold and her other male colleagues returned from the front in 1918, they found that profits (and their wages) were higher than when they had left, with Holmes herself earning around £500 per week. Her bitterness at being forced back into a subordinate position caused immediate tensions between Thorold and Holmes; when Holmes, suffering from severe appendicitis, collapsed at work, Thorold used it as a pretext to dismiss her.[3]

Undeterred, Holmes partnered with Thorold's company secretary, Richard Sefton Turner, to raise £10,000 in capital from elsewhere in the City and establish their own stockbroking firm together in 1921, with a staff of two typists in a small two-room office. By 1928, Holmes and Turner were successful enough to enact their revenge and buy out Thorold's firm. By 1929, as their rivals struggled to survive the crash, their firm employed 140 people, and by 1930 Holmes was reportedly earning as much as £5,000 per year (roughly equivalent to £330,000 in 2020), making Holmes one of the wealthiest self-made women of the era.

Women were not allowed to become members of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) until 1973,[9] and British regional stock exchanges similarly barred women as members until well into the 20th century. However, at least as far back as Amy Bell in 1886, some female stockbrokers had evaded this issue by relying upon male exchange members as intermediaries for trades, often informally. Alternatively, many stockbrokers in general worked in what were known as "outside houses" – bona fide trading firms which nevertheless operated at a similar remove from the formal structures of the LSE, either by trading through intermediaries or by specializing in products (like government and municipal bonds) which could be traded outside exchanges. By 1936, Holmes and Turner's firm was ranked the largest "outside house" in the City of London.[3]

Such was Holmes' stature in the City that she was the only woman called before Parliament's Bodkin Committee in 1936, which investigated how to better regulate the financial sector. In 1939, she was one of the founders of the Association of Stock and Share Dealers, the first professional body for finance professionals in London, recognized by the government, who either could not (or chose not to) become members of the LSE.[2][10] Holmes would work tirelessly until the late-1940s, when she began to step back from her professional and social commitments as her health began to fade.

Holmes became a suffragette around the time she left school and began working as a typist, and her early trade unionism – as a co-founder of the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists – was inspired by her belief that women needed to organize economically as well as politically. She believed that the women's suffrage movement, "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." She was a great admirer of Emmeline Pankhurst in particular, and anonymously gifted the suffragette leader a recurring "small sum" of money every six months from 1924 until Pankhurst's death in 1928.[3]

In 1923, once Holmes had become established as a stockbroker and entrepreneur in her own right, she was invited to become a founding member of the Greater London branch of the Federation of Soroptimists. After a journalist reported on a speech she gave to an early meeting about her experiences as a stockbroker, Holmes briefly became an object of media fascination, with photographers and journalists doorstepping her and pestering her for interviews. Such was the rarity of a woman stockbroker that the media would regularly "rediscover" Holmes over the next decade, especially when she toured North and South America, with further flurries of attention. Speaking in 1941, Holmes said that she eventually became used to the occasional intense interest of the media, and that it had given her "a swollen head – but that is not always a bad thing for a business or professional woman."[11]

After these early reports reached Budapest, Holmes was invited to become the first woman to sit on the board of a Hungarian bank.[3] Most of the bank's directors were Jewish; as anti-Jewish sentiment rose across Europe during the 1930s, Holmes and Turner financially supported legal challenges to protect the bank (as well as other Jewish-owned businesses they had relationships with) in the German and Hungarian courts – with Turner even traveling to Germany with an interpreter in 1935 to testify in one case. These attempts were ultimately unsuccessful at preventing Jewish employees being fired, and Jewish-owned businesses being seized and their assets liquidated.[4]

After joining the Soroptimists, Holmes began to frequently travel to the United States and other countries for work, and to network with other women in business – her reputation landing her the nicknames "The General" and "Miss John D. Rockefeller" among her Wall Street peers. She also bore a striking resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt (who was born only a few days after Holmes in 1884), and was often mistaken for the First Lady.[12][8] She admired American business culture for what she perceived as its dynamism, as well as its greater social mobility for women compared to the UK. In her autobiography, she wrote that she was "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."

Lena Madesin Phillips, a Kentucky lawyer and women's rights activist, founded the Business and Professional Women's Foundation (BPW) in 1919 to campaign and lobby on behalf of American working women. Beginning in 1928, Phillips went on a series of tours in an effort to inspire leading women in European business to form their own sister organizations. This culminated in the foundation of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women in Geneva in 1930, with Phillips as its first president and the BPW as a member chapter. Holmes, who admired the BPW's work, became involved in the International Federation in the mid-1930s. She was invited to join its board as treasurer in 1936, and in 1937 she attended the BPW's annual convention in the US.

Lawyer and BPW activist Zonola Longstreth (who had, several years earlier, become the youngest person ever to pass the bar in Arkansas, at 19[13]) traveled to the UK in 1938 and spent several weeks overseeing the creation of three London clubs for women in business. Longstreth's trip culminated in a meeting on 12 November 1938 of around 40 prominent British businesswomen at the Washington Hotel in London, where the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (now known as Business & Professional Women UK[14]) was officially formed. Holmes was elected its founding president, and served in that role until 1947.[15] In her first speech to the members, she said:

"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."[3]

Holmes was known as "G.H." to younger members, who were fond of her positive attitude; Dorothy V. Hall's 1964 history of BPW UK, Making Things Happen,[16] takes its title from Holmes once saying that, "all things will happen in time, but we can make them happen sooner."[17] By the mid-1930s, Hall writes, Holmes was one of the most well-known and recognizable people in London finance:

"[Holmes] was a woman of commanding stature, tall, erect, and stately. More of a personage than a person, her dynamism was immediately obvious. Her height and very presence made her a conspicuous figure wherever she went and one could almost say that people made way before her ... In the City of London she was a well-known figure, habitually dressed in a cream tailored suit, cream stockings and shoes, with gaily coloured hat and blouse, the latter adorned with a long string of matching beads. As she walked through the city streets, she was spoken of by all and sundry as 'that remarkable woman in the white suit'."[16]