"[4] 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.
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.
[14] 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.
"[15] He was an amateur carpenter of limited skill—he died after breaking his hip when a ladder he had built collapsed[16]—and a miser, refusing to send Holmes to school until she was 11 because of the cost.
[17][18] 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.
[19] 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.
"[22] 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.
[27] 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.
[34] Holmes eventually joined Irish-Canadian stockbroker William Thorold's merchant bank – Canadian and General Trust, Ltd[35] – on Lombard Street as a secretary, being paid a starting salary of £2 5s.
[36] 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.
[40][41] 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.
"[43] 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.
During the argument that resulted, Holmes quit, to deny Thorold the satisfaction of firing her,[46] 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.
Alternatively, many stockbrokers worked in what were known as "outside houses" – bona fide trading firms which specialized in products (like government and municipal bonds) which were unregulated by the LSE.
[60][61][62] Holmes later claimed that "by the accident of my presence from the start on the formation body, [the ASSD] was the first financial organization in the country officially to open the doors of finance to women on exactly the same terms as men.
[65][66] Some of the bank's directors were Jewish, which Holmes admits in her autobiography she was ignorant of until it was pointed out to her – and that she also missed the wider political context of "the writing on the wall, anti-Semitism" until nearly the outbreak of World War II.
Holmes found the "comparative indifference" of the Christian directors towards the situation striking, while the other Jewish board members were "heartbroken", and similarly unwilling to leave out of a sense of national duty; their eventual fates during the war are unknown.
[18][73] In 1923, she was invited to become a founding member of the Greater London branch of the Federation of Soroptimists – an international organisation intended to be a female counterpart to the men-only Rotary Club movement.
[80] In 1925 she appeared on the early national radio station 2LO to speak about her life as a stockbroker,[81] and she occasionally wrote columns about her professional experiences and insights which were syndicated in many of the UK's regional newspapers.
She eventually learned to enjoy media attention instead of finding it embarrassing, especially during a business trip through South and North America in 1925 which left her "feeling like the Prince of Wales.
Her reputation landed 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.
[88][28] The idealised view of the US that she had developed as a child tempered somewhat as she grew older, especially due to her perception of its business culture as overly aggressive, though she still loved the country and occasionally considered emigrating there.
[92] She was repeatedly critical of high British tax rates from the 1930s onwards, claiming that "the fastest method of converting to socialism, faster than all the preachers and lecturers could do, is to give half of the money you earn to the government.
[98][99] When Holmes returned to London in 1936 she began organising to establish a national British branch of the International Federation, using her personal and business relationships to build support and attract donations.
Lawyer and BPW activist Zonola Longstreth (who at the time was the youngest person ever to pass the Arkansas bar, aged 19)[100] traveled to the UK in 1938 and spent several weeks overseeing the creation of three London clubs for women in business.
[18]During the summer of 1938, Holmes travelled with Phillips to Budapest for the final pre-WWII conference of the International Federation (though a smaller event would still take place in 1939 in Trondheim).
[103] On the way home they stopped in Vienna, where they met with the leader of the Austrian affiliate, Marianne Beth, a "non-Aryan" who had been barred from her work as a psychologist by the Nazi regime after Anschluss – the Federation would eventually assist her and her family in escaping to the US and Canada.
[105] Holmes continued to travel to the US throughout WWII, although much less frequently; she was particularly moved by a dinner held in Los Angeles in July 1941 for refugee members that the Federation has assisted in escaping to the US.
"[123][124] She professed an admiration for "the austere God of the Old Testament," and agreed with H. G. Wells' interpretation of him in The Outline of History as a "Righteous Dealer, whose promises were kept, who failed not the humblest creditor, and called to account every spurious act.