Walter and Aloha Wanderwell with one of their Ford cars, likely in Japan, 1925.Supplied
Dumaresq de Pencier is the exhibit and project coordinator for the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa, Ont.
She parked her car on the Sphinx. She smuggled Russian gold out of Vladivostok. She briefly kept a clouded leopard as a pet. She scandalized the world by regularly wearing trousers and carrying a revolver. She was Canadian, but most Canadians these days don’t know the name, Idris Hall, or her celebrity alter-ego, Aloha Wanderwell.
For a bored teenager stuck in a French boarding school in 1922, it would have seemed like the road trip of a lifetime.
Idris Welsh was born on October 13, 1906 in Winnipeg, to Margaret Hedley and Robert Welsh. Her mother married Herbert Hall three years later, and so Idris Hall spent the first part of her childhood on the gravel beaches of North Vancouver. When she was 8 years old, the family moved to France.
At 16, she was energetic, independent-minded and chafing under the classroom schedule of a finishing school in Nice. One evening, she cut classes to see a lecture by Captain Walter Wanderwell, who was attempting to circumnavigate the world by automobile. Hall had been writing stories of globe-trotting adventure in her private journals for years.
Wanderwell’s spectacular tales floored her. While she was getting his autograph, Hall was delighted when the Captain invited her to apply to an advertisement he’d posted in the Paris Herald. It read:
“BRAINS, BEAUTY– AND BREECHES
World Tour Offer for a Lucky Young Woman
A good-looking, brainy young woman who is as clever a journalist as her appearance is attractive is wanted.
Moreover, she must forswear skirts – and incidentally marriage – for at least two years and be prepared to “rough” it in Asia and Africa, and wherever else Wanderwell takes her in his “Flivver”, an all-stock Ford car.”
Within days, Hall was selling Wanderwell postcards and memorabilia at lectures and press conferences, performing in his stage show, and helping the Captain prepare for the pan-European leg of his “drive around the world.”
Wanderwell’s impeccable credentials, including photos of him shaking hands with U.S. President Warren Harding, and the badges of dozens of international auto clubs affixed to his Ford, convinced Hall’s mother to allow her daughter to embark on the expedition.
Wanderwell, born Valerian Pieczynski, was actually a German-Polish con-man who’d done prison time for espionage during the First World War. Hall learned this early on, but didn’t seem to mind. Slightly sordid past aside, he and a constantly-rotating entourage of journalists, mechanics, auto advertisers, filmmakers and interested hangers-on were all genuine in their travel goals.
Tall for her age, a strong swimmer and dancer; fond of slingshots, fluent in French and German and – unusually for the time – with a bit of driving experience, Hall fit right in. She adopted the stage name “Aloha Wanderwell” as presenting herself as the Captain’s younger sister would avoid questions of impropriety.
“Aloha’s” subsequent career reads like something out of Indiana Jones. Between 1922 and 1927, she was Capt. Wanderwell’s travelling companion on a series of road trips that circled the world three times over. The exact highlights of Aloha’s journeys are as astonishing as they are historically uncertain. Most stories of her exploits were either recorded by her or by newspapers looking to capitalize on the sensationalism of her life.
She was almost certainly the first woman to drive solo across India, at the age of only 17. She was probably appointed an honourary colonel in the Soviet Red Army. There’s no doubt she was one of the first women to ever drive an automobile in Japan and she may have met Prince Regent (later Emperor) Hirohito, as she claims in her autobiography.
She did embark on a floatplane expedition up the Amazon, though rumours that she was hunting a lost city of gold were almost certainly spread by her for advertising. Tales that she joined and fought in the French Foreign Legion in West Africa are unverifiable, as are dozens of other equally wild claims. Aloha served as driver, translator, mechanic and filmmaker, producing a collection of spectacular travel and cultural documentaries.
Many of them remain in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was lifelong friends with movie-making power couple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who boosted her career long after her brand of silent-film documentarian-ism was out of fashion.
Aloha and Walter Wanderwell soon abandoned their cover story, and were married in 1925. Their tumultuous liaison was marked by passionate and sometimes violent fights (usually over his womanizing), months apart spent globe-trotting and filmmaking, and equally passionate reunions. The two finally separated for good in 1931.
The Captain was dramatically murdered by an unknown assailant on his yacht a year later; Aloha was initially a suspect, but had an alibi. Her husband’s death and the storm of media controversy that surrounded the drawn-out investigation dampened but did not end Aloha’s wanderlust.
She married pilot Walter Baker in 1933, continuing her film-making career, and eventually branching out into radio and print journalism. After a trip across Oceania, Southeast Asia and North Africa in the late 1930s, her globetrotting was largely at an end.
She and Baker eventually moved to his hometown in Wyoming, opening up a motel called the Lazy-U, which is perhaps most famous as one of novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s regular haunts in the 1950s.
The couple later settled into a quiet retirement in California, where Aloha, Idris Hall nee Welsh, passed away in 1996, largely forgotten by the world.