FANY

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FANY - The Women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
by Beth Brook

An introduction to FANY
The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) was formed in 1907, by Captain Edward Baker, as an independent voluntary women’s organisation. It was the first British women’s voluntary organisation to be arranged along military lines and to be sent out to serve in the First World War. All its members were originally mounted on horseback and provided specialist first aid and emergency medical care to wounded soldiers on the battlefield before they could be evacuated to field hospitals.

The organisation took its title ‘Yeomanry’ from the fact it was a mounted unit. Women who joined the FANY were trained not only in first aid but signalling and drilling in cavalry movements. To join the FANY, members paid a joining fee, as well as paying for their own uniforms, first aid kits, riding school fees and the care of a horse. This meant that only reasonably wealthy women were enrolled.

“During the First World War, FANYs ran field hospitals, drove ambulances and set up soup kitchens and troop canteens, often under highly dangerous conditions. By the Armistice, they had been awarded many decorations for bravery, including 17 Military Medals, 1 Légion d'Honneur and 27 Croix de Guerre. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Corps was called upon to form the nucleus of the Motor Driver Companies of the Auxiliary Transport Service (ATS). Another section was attached to the Polish Army, and a Kenyan unit formed in 1935 also joined the war effort. A spirit of independence led yet others to join the FANY in the Special Operations Executive. These women worked on coding and signals, acted as conductors for agents and provided administration and technical support for the Special Training Schools. Their work was top secret and often highly skilled. Members operated in several theatres of war, including North Africa, Italy, India and the Far East.”
http://www.fany.org.uk/our-history/

Women into war
FANY members had to overcome prejudice because of their gender; they were women entering into war, riding horses or driving ambulances and wearing uniforms. Although nursing was seen as a feminine role, these other activities were seen very much as the domain of the male, particularly in public life. For many in the British establishment and in British society, FANY represented women moving into the sphere of the masculine. In the context of the suffragette movements in the early twentieth century, any notion of female militarism was particularly poignant. The transgression of gender roles was seen as a paradox and a threat.

The resilience and bravery of FANY members and the prejudice they faced, particularly in the early years of their existence, was shown time and time again. Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the British authorities turned down FANY’s offer of services to provide emergency medical care to wounded soldiers, despite positive recommendations from within the Army. In spite of this, FANY members travelled out to France in October 1914 intent on providing an ambulance and hospital service for the Belgian Army and for the French. Soon after signing up to the FANY in 1915, Mary Baxter Ellis (see below) was stoned in the street when she returned in her khaki uniform to her Northumbrian home town to meet her father.

“Women’s entry into this masculine space of war in any role other than that of nurse, that submissive angel of mercy, threatened the foundation of wartime gender construction with its division into masculine military forces and feminine home front. Women’s entrance into war, especially women in an organization bent on maintaining its independence and providing ambulance support, provoked anxiety because it might lead to sexual immorality and the potential masculinisation of women, not to mention a case for their full citizenship.” (p.55, Janet Lee, War Girls)

FANY and lesbianism
FANY members were cautious about such social and cultural conflicts and its effect on the collective identity and reputation of the organisation. Members built networks and allegiances with the military establishment which would justify and strengthen the notion of decency and respectability of the organisation. These efforts extended to avoiding accusations of lesbianism or members being ‘inverts’.

As Janet Lee states, “given the high need for FANY ‘respectability’ this question of lesbianism is of course completely silent in all FANY accounts of their war service, although one assumes that there were romantic relationships among them…. It behoved the FANY to construct the narratives of their lives and experiences together with great care to avoid censorship and disapproval. Indeed, the heterosexually oriented stories of FANY fun, as already mentioned, were most likely constructed in part to avoid accusations of their being ‘mannish lesbians’.” (p. 213, Janet Lee, War Girls)

Being a part of the FANY involved women living, working and playing together. It established close and intimate friendships among some members. War and service also allowed for the suspension of the traditional expectations of domestic responsibility and marriage for women. This would have allowed women to develop friendships and relationships outside of traditional spheres of existence and frames of reference.

One illustration of the effect this had on the professional and social bonds between FANY members was their use of male nicknames for each other, such as Mary Baxter Ellis and Marjorie Kingston Walker, otherwise known to other FANYs as ‘Dick’ and ‘Tony’. Dick and Tony had a particularly close bond and friendship.

‘Dick’ and ‘Tony’
Mary Baxter Ellis succeeded Lillian Franklin in the position of Commandant of the FANY in 1932. Baxter Ellis had signed up to the FANY in August 1915 and had seen active service during the First World War in France and Belgium. During the Second World War, as the FANY provided the Motor Transport Companies of the Auxiliary Transport Service, Baxter Ellis became Deputy Director of the ATS in 1943. Baxter Ellis’s Second-in- Command was Marjorie Kingston Walker.

Mary ‘Dick’ Baxter Ellis and Marjorie ‘Tony’ Kingston Walker had a very close friendship and partnership. As described by Irene Ward in FANY Invicta, “‘Dick’ and ‘Tony’ to their numerous friends made a wonderful pair and the close harmony in which they worked was a big factor in the growth and happiness of the Corps.” (p97) The pair retired together in 1947 and “inseparable as ever, went off to the country to breed cocker spaniels and paint in water colours. They were to die within a couple of months of each other twenty years later.” P.117 (Popham). Whether their relationship was homosexual or not – which from the current evidence is not clear – hardly matters. That they found companionship in one another in their profession and in life is a touching aspect in the history of the FANY, of the history of women and war and of LGBT history.

FANY and its legacy
One of the problems of lesbian history is that it is so often hidden and evidence is rare and difficult to find, particularly the personal stories in the written record. There are a number of reasons for this. Often at this time invisibility was deemed a necessity, such as the FANY's efforts for 'respectability' and legitimacy with the establishment. For the historian this means that we have to partake in more extensive research to uncover what is beneath the surface. Although the effort to find primary material might prove more problematic when researching LGBT history, the rich and diverse discoveries that can be revealed in the records certainly makes the effort feel worthwhile.

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry played an important role in women’s history and, arguably, for LGBT history too. The organisation was not principally straight or lesbian, neither was it primarily masculine or feminine. There were, however, certainly elements of both. The benefit now is that, from a historical perspective, we can celebrate all the elements it embodied and all the characteristics and communities it enveloped. These factors comprised to form a significant and valuable movement in the First World War, which brought real relief and assistance to the suffering. In the long term, FANY has contributed to a significant and valuable aspect of women’s social and cultural history.

Bibliography and sources
● Janet Lee, War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the First World War, Manchester University Press, 2005.
● http://www.fany.org.uk/our-history/
● Mary Baxter Ellis – Obituary in The Times, 29 April 1968
● Irene Ward, FANY Invicta, Hutchinson, 1955
● Hugh Popham, The FANY in Peace and War, Pen and Sword Books, 2002.

Files On Film
The recent Files On Film competition, held by the National Archives, asked aspiring filmmakers to create short films, inspired by a selection of diverse documents from the national collection.

A 3 minute film by Coral Manton, The investigation of alleged unnatural relationships amongst service women, was highly commended.
Film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydnxEFfZOdE

Lecture notes from 1960:
http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/air-2-13859.pdf

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Black Sheep

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The Black Sheep of the Family
Compiled by Chris Park

Fred Barnes (1885-1938) was an English music hall singer. Although popular on stage, Barnes became infamous for his erratic private life and was often named in frequent controversies reported by the press. (1)

A "wavy-haired, blue-eyed Adonis", fond of pink-and-white makeup and his pet marmoset, he had been inspired to take the stage by Vesta Tilley (see Male Impersonators - In the Music Halls and Beyond!) and the original Burlington Bertie. But by 1907, he was bored. Inspired by his father, a Birmingham butcher who despaired of his theatrical son, Barnes wrote a new song, The Black Sheep of the Family, about the "queer, queer world we live in". The song had its first outing on a Monday night at the Empire; the crowd of 1,500 loved it, and Barnes - who later joked that he had written the song in a fit of pique at being repeatedly given a tricky "first turn" billing - was soon promoted to the star slot. (2)
 
Music Hall historian W Macqueen-Pope says that Barnes “had a good voice, good looks, an easy manner and was always well dressed.” (3) Theodore Felstead describes him as “[a] man with first-class melodies and the voice to sing them.” (4) Among his better songs were There’s A Friend In Every Milestone, The Same Old Park, On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep and, of course, The Black Sheep Of The Family.

In an intolerant time, Barnes was unabashedly open about preferring the company of other men. His openness led to him being shunned, even by his friends in the music hall business.

His fondness for alcohol caused him trouble, at least once leading to a charge of drink driving (for which he was imprisoned for a month and fined) and rendered him unfit to perform on several occasions and by the mid 1930s he had all but dropped out of sight.

Eventually, suffering from tuberculosis, he went to live with John Senior, friend and manager, in a small flat at Southend-on-Sea where on 23 October 1938 he was found dead from the effects of gas poisoning. (5)




 
 

Notes:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Barnes_%28performer%29
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/jan/28/theatre2
3. W MacQueen-Pope, The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall (London: WH Allen, 1950), p. 393.
4. S. Theodore Felstead, Stars Who Made the Halls: A Hundred Years of English Humour, Harmony and Hilarity (London: T Werner Laurie, 1946), p. 177.
5. http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biob1/barnes04.html

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Male Impersonators

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Male impersonators in the Music Halls and beyond!

by Rosie Logiudice

The male impersonators of the music hall performed to the backdrop of Victorian and Edwardian England with the conservative image of women as ‘beautiful, chaste, domestic creatures.’ (1) The male impersonators challenged the stereotypical female type ‘who in male guise, assumed the values of the ‘dominant’ sex and undermined them, with satirical lyrics and a parody of male mannerisms’ (2). Among the better known of these was Matilda Alice Powles (13 May 1864-16 September 1952), more commonly known as Vesta Tilley.

 

Tilley was considered to be the greatest male impersonator in British music hall. She first appeared on stage at the age of three and a half and by the age of six performed her first role in male clothing. Managed by her father, Tilley toured extensively around the UK and at aged 11 her salary supported her parents and siblings. As she grew older she continued to act as a male impersonator portraying young men behaving either embarrassingly or badly; among them was Tilley’s most famous character ‘Burlington Bertie’. Aside from more comical characters such as Bertie she also had a number of military figures which were most popular during the Boer War and the First World War. Tilley’s popularity reached its all time high during the First World War, when she and her husband ran a military recruitment drive. In the guise of characters such as ‘Tommy in the Trench’ and ‘Jack Tar Home From Sea’, Tilley performed songs such as The Army of Today’s All Right and Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier.

Although Vesta Tilley spent much of her working life dressed as a man in her personal life she was married to Walter de Frece, a music hall entrepreneur and the son of a theatre owner. A similar story is depicted in Sarah Walter’s novel Tipping the Velvet set in Victorian England during the 1890s. Although Kitty, a music hall male impersonator, declares her love for Nan and in fact has a sexual relationship with her, she eventually conforms to the norms of the era and marries Walter Bliss, her music hall manager. Kitty is afraid that otherwise she would not be a success in the music halls.

Interestingly when Nan takes to the stage with Kitty and they are both dressed in male attire Nan is too convincing as a boy. The realism doesn't quite work: they need another male impersonator, a girl in male clothes where the audience can still tell she is a girl; otherwise they would have used a real boy instead. Ironically enough, Walter feels obliged to tame Nan’s boyishness and make her look more girly! (3) It is commendable what Sarah Walters is doing here, toying with gender in relation to social spaces, showing how gender is shaped based on the level of social tolerance at the time.

Kitty and Nan experience a short period of love that does not last because of Kitty’s fear about her reputation - a fear that is triggered by the power of words and the articulation of the label ‘Tom’. A Tom, according to Kitty, means a girl who makes a career out of kissing other girls. (4) Kitty fears the word and rejects it as a label or identification of herself and her relationship with Nancy. Kitty’s fear of identification with the word Tom reaches a climax when a drunken man on stage calls her and Nancy ‘a couple of tomes!’ (5) The incident highlights the beginning of their failure on stage. It also drives Kitty to make a decision to hide away her queerness by marrying Walter and dismissing Nancy. It seems that it was okay to flirt with cross dressing in the context of popular entertainment if it was obvious still that you were a girl and if you were known to be heterosexual in your private life.

The perception that a woman performing on stage as a man was acceptable and often even ‘sexy’ has not been confined to the music hall of the Victorian era or to modern day novels depicting this time. Later in the 20th Century a number of Hollywood actresses, including Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, flirted with dressing in male attire.

In the 1930 film Morocco, Dietrich was cast as a Cabaret singer. The film is best remembered for the sequence in which she performs a song dressed in a man’s white tie and kisses another woman, both provocative for the era. However, Dietrich was a glamorous femme fatale and in fact her role in Morocco led to her only Oscar nomination.

From the early 1950s until the mid 1970s Dietrich mainly worked as a highly paid cabaret artist performing in large theatres in cities across the world. Dietrich would perform half her show in an extremely feminine figurehugging dress and then the second part of her show in top hat and tails. This allowed her to sing songs usually associated with male singers.

However, Dietrich kept her private life private. Although she married Rudolf Sieber, an assistant director, she was in fact bisexual and had a string of affairs with women including Mercedes de Acosta, who was Greta Garbo’s on-off lover. Of course this was not apparent at the time and only in later years has their relationship been discussed in any great detail publicly, although Garbo’s family, which controls her estate, has permitted only 87 letters to be made public that were written between herself and De Acosta.

In 1960 when De Acosta was seriously ill she published her memoir. Within the text there was implied homosexuality which resulted in the severance of several friendships with women who felt she had betrayed their sexuality. Garbo also ended their 30 year 'friendship' at this time. Again this has similarities to Kitty’s hastiness to be deemed as 'normal' and respectable in society where she ceases relations with Nan once she feels her position as a music hall performer is compromised by suggestions about her private life. Similarly when De Acosta released her memoirs, Garbo and others even though they had been friends with De Acosta for many years, chose to distance themselves from her and the rumours about their possible homosexuality by association with her.

So it seems that if a woman wanted to flirt with cross dressing in the early to mid-20th century and maintain social respectability, she still had to look like a woman. In Hollywood she had to be glamorous and it was better if she were married, even if this meant at the same time having a string of 'secret' lesbian affairs.

Notes:

1. Cambridge Journal, May 2012, Aston, E, Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: the Case of Vesta Tilley, P247

2. Ibid 247.

3. Waters, S, Tipping the Velvet, 119

4. Ibid, 131

5. Ibid, 140

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Glad To Be Gay

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(Sing If You're) Glad To Be Gay
by Dr Louise Chambers

Back in 1977, the Tom Robinson Band (TRB) issued a live EP on the back of their first hit single, 2-4-6-8 Motorway. The EP comprised four tracks and one of them would, in the history of rock music, be landmarks because it celebrated gay sexuality.

(Sing if You're) Glad To Be Gay was originally written for London Pride in 1976 and the lyrics, like many of Robinson’s songs, are politically explicit and re-printed in all their glory on the right of this page. The lyrics were certainly too explicit for the BBC, who refused to play the track. Venues featuring punk and New Wave bands, however, were not so reluctant, and I remember many occasions when I would be among a crowd of punks and happily engaging in a pre-gig sing-a-long to Glad To Be Gay. Unfortunately, TRB’s history was rather shortlived.

After releasing the very politically oriented and powerful album, Power In The Darkness in 1978, the follow-up, TRB2, was much less successful and, following the usual ‘musical differences’, the band fell apart at the end of 1979. Sadly, BBC Radio listeners will always link TRB with their blandest single (2-4-6-8 Motorway) which was played incessantly on Radio One. For some of us, however, Glad To Be Gay was the first gunshot in the battle to get explicitly queer music on the radio and on TV.

TRB in 1976 (Tom is second from right)

As for Tom Robinson, he went on to enjoy a solo career and, at a benefit for Gay Switchboard, he met and married Sue, with whom he has had two children. Of course, the idiot tabloid press claimed that Robinson had ‘gone straight’, an accusation he refuted by adding the following lyric to Glad to be Gay on the 1996 album, Having It Both Ways:
"Well if gay liberation means freedom for all,
a label is no liberation at all.
I'm here and I'm queer and do what I do,
I'm not going to wear
a straitjacket for you."

Robinson has described himself as ‘a gay man in love with a woman, and in 2010, said:
“I still like both men and women... always have, and probably always will. This site bothways.com was first put together to promote my album Having It Both Ways (1) in 1996, but it's here now to celebrate the fact that sexuality is a lot wider, looser and more unpredictable than some people would have you believe...”

Notes:
1. http://bothways.com/hibw.htm
See also: http://tomrobinson.com/welcome/

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Oh, You Pretty Things!

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Oh, You Pretty Things: Queering Pop Music in the 70s & 80s

by Dr Louise Chambers

If you think you are starved of queer ‘role models’ in 2014, cast your minds back 45 years and imagine what life was like at the end of the 1960s: we were still experiencing the last vestiges of the Hays Code (1), so all lesbian and gay characters in the cinema were condemned to die, go mad, or go to prison. TV was no better, with the occasional camp, effeminate character appearing as a way of laughing at gay men. Think of John Inman’s ‘Mr Humphries’ in Are You Being Served, which began airing in 1972; Melvyn Hayes as ‘Gloria Beaumont’ in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974); Larry Grayson’s talk show, Shut That Door, which began life in 1972 (2). Elsewhere, however, something was stirring and that ‘something’ began to emerge at the beginning of the 1970s, as the optimism that accompanied the seemingly endless ‘summer of love’ in the late 60s gave way to the depression of the early 70s.

‘Lady Stardust’

I think the first time I was aware of sexual ambiguity in pop music was when I listened to Lady Stardust on David Bowie’s album, Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars. It was 1972 and I was 15 years old.

The lyric included the lines:

  Femme fatales emerged from shadows

  To watch this creature fair

  Boys stood upon their chairs

  To make their point of view

  I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey...

Marc Bolan

The song was about Marc Bolan - the singer and founder-member of hippy-turned-glitter band, T.Rex - and I must say I felt similarly about the elfin-like singer with the ethereal voice. It’s not often that I think of men as ‘beautiful’ but then I don’t think Marc Bolan was really ‘a man’ in the conventional sense. He had long, beautiful, ‘corkscrew’ hair, and fine, almost feline features; his feet were so small that he wore women’s shoes and, in the fashion of the time, his clothes could have been worn equally (but not, perhaps, equally as well) by most women. Bowie’s love for Bolan was manifest, not just from the Ziggy sessions, but also in the subsequent Aladdin Sane album, whose track Prettiest Star was about Marc Bolan (3); any further doubts were removed by listening to the lyric to All the Young Dudes, a song penned by Bowie for the then-struggling Mott the Hoople. “Who needs TV when I got T.Rex?” sang Ian Hunter, although I was never sure if the straight, white Hunter ever knew what he was singing about.

Of course, Bowie went on to pen lyrics such as: ‘Got your mother in whirl/She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl’ (Rebel, Rebel) and ‘If you want it, boys/Get it here then’ (Sweet Thing), both of which appeared on the 1974 opus, Diamond Dogs, but by then camp and sexual ambiguity had been well established through four years of ‘glam’ rock bands.

As for Bowie himself: if Bolan was from Middle-earth, Bowie came from another planet entirely; with his differently-coloured eyes, other-worldly clothes and ambivalent sexuality, we were left wondering: if the Spiders came from Mars, where in the Universe did Bowie spring from? Bowie wore make-up, glitter and fabulous, colourful costumes, whose designs negated any attempts at gendering. Some of my favourite outfits (see below) were produced by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto for the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane tours in 1972 and 1974.

Yamamoto costumes for the Ziggy Stardust & Aladdin Sane Tours

Of course, there was lots of conjecture at school (and in the press, of course) about Bowie’s sexuality and my class broadly fell into two camps (if you’ll pardon the pun), with some people expressing homophobic attitudes, whilst others embraced this new attitude towards sex/uality by wearing make-up and trying to imitate Bowie’s style. “I like people who are... AC/DC, know what I mean?”, as one fan famously put it in the 1973 documentary, Cracked Actor (4), referring to Bowie’s rumoured status as bisexual. Meanwhile, I stuck up Aladdin Sane posters in my bedroom and fantasised about wearing those outfits in public... So, where on earth did they come from?

The gods only knew why Glam appeared when it did. I was dimly aware of a couple of songs that had charted in 1971 because I had started to take an interest in the pop charts. Jeepster by T.Rex had made the no.2 spot by the end of that year, and a bunch of former skinheads, now glammed up with tons of glitter and calling themselves Slade, had a no.1 hit with the deliberately misspelt, Cos I Luv You. According to Barney Hoskins (1998) Glam was the shot in the arm that music needed, exploding into the vacuum left by the Beatles, but also (perhaps) as a reaction to the pompous, po-faced, straight-laced art rock that typified bands like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer and other ‘album bands’ that looked down on ‘singles bands’ as though they were the lowest form of life. Glam was about stardom, celebrity, fame, superficiality, plasticity and androgyny. It was also all those girlie things that the macho, ‘hard’ rock and prog bands seemed to despise: glitter, make-up, feather boas; bright, pastel colours; flamboyant outfits, platform soles and stacked heels; boys could wear their girlfriends’ clothes and make-up and vice versa. Most of all, it was about producing cheap, disposable 45s: those gorgeous little black discs that contained two songs, one on each side, both of which lasted less than three minutes; they ran at 45 rpm and cost 45p. Glam put the gay in pop music, before gay and camp became synonymous. As Hoskyns (1998: 6) put it: “[Glam] said flaunt it if you’ve got it, and if you haven’t got it, fake it – make it up with make-up, cover it up with stardust, reinvent yourself as a Martian androgyne.”

“She could kill you with a wink of her eye” - Steve Priest (The Sweet) 1973

Of course, from an historical perspective, it’s worth noting that the first gay march in London took place in 1970 and the first Gay Pride Rally in the same city was in the summer of 1972, when Glam was really getting established as a musical force to be reckoned with.

A Walk on the Wild Side

Maybe it also had something to do with Andy Warhol: Bowie was certainly enamoured of the Factory during the late ‘60s and a eulogy to Warhol himself appeared on the Hunky Dory album in 1971. Glam certainly embraced the trash aesthetic, but it did it with a smile and with the ‘wink of an eye’ and we loved it because it entertained us in the way that pop music is supposed to. Furthermore it was incredibly subversive: yes, there was that famous moment when Bowie went down on Mick Ronson’s guitar on Top Of The Pops in 1973, but Glam was subversive in so many other ways: it blurred the divide between straight and queer; it allowed us to play with make-up and clothing in way that no other musical genre had allowed and it introduced us to ‘chroniclers of perversion’ like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. It may be hard to believe now, but for this genderQueer teenager growing up in the quiet seaside town of Worthing in the early ‘70s, Walk On The Wild Side, with its stories of Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, was an absolutely revelation and truly life altering. Changing sex was no longer a dream: Glam held out the possibility of making it a reality.

It didn’t last of course; Glam was very quickly commodified. Let’s be honest, it was designed for commodification, and by 1973, Bowie had already seen the writing on the wall, ‘killing’ his Ziggy persona and eventually developing a more rock-oriented sound on the 1974 album, Diamond Dogs. By 1975, he had abandoned rock music altogether, as he embraced disco and became the first white male singer to appear on the US TV show, Soul Train. Other bands, like the brilliant Roxy Music and the hugely popular Slade, were imploding, and even T.Rex were failing to reach the number one spot as 1974 drew to a close. In any event, one of the last of the Glam wannabies, the New York Dolls, were transmuting into Something Else as their manager and mentor, Malcolm McClaren, realised there was a new kid on the blockand its name was Punk.

Ballroom Blitz to the Blitz Kids

‘There is old wave, there is new wave and there is David Bowie.’ (5)

Now, if I was still a Marxist, I could offer you a neat piece of dialectic materialism at this point. If 60s Bubblegum Pop was the thesis and Hard Rock the anti-thesis, then Glam would be the synthesis. If Hard Rock was the thesis and Glam the anti-thesis, then Punk was the synthesis. And if Glam was the thesis, and Punk the anti-thesis, then surely the New Romantics were the synthesis…or perhaps the synthesisers? Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved punk with a passion, but gods, it was so depressing and everyone was so badly dressed. Fortunately, a change was in the offing, as we began to experience the first sounds of a movement that became known as ‘the New Romantics’.

Marilyn

Bowie was hugely influential. By 1976, the Thin White Duke had decamped to Berlin and was experimenting with electronic music (influenced himself no doubt by Krautrock and bands like Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Amon Düül and Tangerine Dream). In 1977 and 1978, Bowie released two entirely electronic albums (Low and Heroes respectively) and toured them with huge success (I know because I was at one of the sold out Earls Court gigs in 1978 and people loved the new music as well as the old). At the same time, there were electronic stirrings on the margins of punk, as bands like Ultravox!, Tubeway Army, The Human League, Dalek I Love You, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark began to emerge. If Glam was dominated by the sound of guitars, the New Romantic instrument of choice was the synthesiser. According to legend, New Romanticism grew out of Bowie and Roxy Music nights in London and Birmingham, with the London nights eventually decamping to the Blitz Club in Covent Garden as they became more popular. Steve Strange (later to form Visage) was on the door, encouraging would-be pundits to dress as creatively and flamboyantly as possible, whilst two of the cloakroom attendants would later re-model themselves as Boy George (George O’Dowd) and Marilyn (Peter Robinson). As David Rimmer (2003: 12) noted:

“Strange is working the door, as he does every Tuesday, changing his look week by week: from leather jodhpurs and Nazi greatcoat to knee breeches, sash silver-topped cane to clownish, white-faced Pierrot.”

It could be argued that Steve Strange and the Blitz Kids’ appearance in the video to Bowie’s 1980 hit, Ashes to Ashes propelled the ‘Blitz Kids’ (later the New Romantics) into the mainstream, but by then the Human League, Ultravox, Classix Nouveaux, Visage (the band fronted by Steve Strange), and Orchestral Manoeuvres were all achieving some success with singles and album releases. At the end of 1980, Phil Oakey had replaced two of the guys in the Human League with two female singers and switched from a fairly dour sound to a much lighter and more accessible synthpop. The Blitz Kids had also been featured in Stepping Out in London, a documentary about the club, produced by Lyndall Hobbs. The film supported Alien in British cinemas, so it had a guaranteed audience. Meanwhile, Malcom McLaren (yes, him again) persuaded failed punk band Adam & the Ants to redefine themselves and adopt a more Romantic style (Lord Byron being the primary point of reference), and then enticed the band away to form Bow Wow Wow, leaving Adam himself (now sporting the outfit of a slightly effete pirate) to recreate the Ants as New-Romantics- With-More-Than-A-Soupcon-Of-Native American. He enjoyed 3 consecutive hit singles in 1981, together with a number album (Kings of the Wild Frontier).

Another factor, I think, was the establishment of MTV in 1981. Queen (themselves jumping rather belatedly on the Glamwagon) had pioneered pop videos and, arguably, the phenomenon that was Bohemian Rhapsody, was both the first and probably one of the greatest pop videos of all time. By 1981, music videos (many created to look like short films), produced to accompany newly-released singles, were almost de rigueur. Adam & the Ants, Eurhythmics, Culture Club, Duran Duran all had videos featured on MTV and Adam Ant, Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon (the latter from Duran Duran) were invited in as guest ‘VJs’ on the channel. There’s no doubting the importance of MTV: whilst radio stations might promote the music, MTV promoted The Look.

The Blitz Club did not just attract people who liked dressing up and dancing to synth-pop. On any night you might see Zandra Rhodes or Nicky Halsam, whilst Derek Jarman and Jasper Conran ‘might be upstairs in the restaurant’ (Rimmer, 2003). The Club was a magnet for every wannabe fashion designer and art student in London. Furthermore, if gender confusion was one of the ‘hallmarks’ of Glam rock, cross-dressing was undoubtedly a hallmark for the New Romantics: “When New Romantic finally made its move from margins to pop mainstream, Top Of The Pops was once again full of gender benders... But in a way New Romantic never strayed too far from pantomime and the staples of drag performance... As Boy George would eventually put it, accepting an American Grammy award when Culture Club were voted Best Newcomers in 1984: ‘Thank you, America. You have taste, style and you know a good drag queen when you see one’." (Rimmer, 2003)

Ok, so the clothes were flamboyant, the powder and paint was laid on thick and androgyny was once again the position of choice, but there was one big difference between Glam Rock and the New Romantics: many of the people fronting bands belonging to the latter category were no longer faking their sexuality. There was always rumour and conjecture around the sexualities of Bowie, Bolan and others on the Glamwagon, but there was less need for rumour when singers like Marc Almond (Soft Cell), Boy George (Culture Club), Steve Strange (Visage) and others were more open about adopting queer sexualities. For me (and no doubt for many others) Boy George’s first appearance on Top Of the Pops in 1982, performing Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me? was a complete wonder: Lou Reed may have sang about someone who ‘Shaved her legs/Then he was a she’, but Boy George was actually doing it. And so was Marilyn, whose Calling Your Name single reached no.4 in 1983. And for me, searching with my friends around the myriad boutiques and secondhand clothes shops in Brighton, for something glamorous enough to wear to the weekly New Romantics Night at Sherry’s Showbar, I finally had the chance to go out in full make-up and fancy clothes without worrying about getting beaten up. For a couple of years, I was free to wear pretty much anything I wanted. But alas, the Scene was short-lived and reminded me of a line from a movie (Blade Runner, 1982) released during those enlightened times:

“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly.”

Boy George, Culture Club - Top of the Pops, 1982

So, our enlightenment may have been shortlived, and of course many bands (Ultravox, Adam & The Ants, Depeche Mode, Japan, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, to name but a few) jumped on the Glamwagon, but for a moment there, we were all free to wear what we liked (provided it was sufficiently ‘creative’), drink what we liked, wear as much make-up as we liked and - to some extent - have sex with whomever we liked, and no-one cared. Oh, and we all had a great time because, like Glam rock before it, the music was fun, entertaining and we could dance to it.

Now, I should finish with a note of caution. For all its celebration of androgyny and ‘gender-bending’, both Glam and the New Romantics were about the boys. There isn’t one single example – in either genre – of women enjoying the kinds of success enjoyed by the boys. What about Suzi Quatro? You cry... or Alison Moyet (Yazoo) and Annie Lennox (Eurhythmics)? Well, ok, there are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, this is about boys challenging norms about masculinity in general and heteronormative masculinity in particular – lesbian and bisexual women are almost completely absent from these Scenes.

Where do we look for the next wave of Glam and androgyny?

Crossplaying ‘The Joker’

If you were looking for a new ‘scene’ at the beginning of 1990, you would be looking in vain. Nothing happened in 2000 either – in fact, with the exception of a few radical bands (like the Riot Grrrl and Queercore lesbian scenes) there’s precious little queerness to celebrate in mainstream music. So where have all the Pretty Things gone? I was having a conversation with a student (Martine) about this the other day: she was telling me about ‘Cosplay’ and suddenly it struck me: if you want to look for gender-bending, cross-dressing, androgyny and fluid sexualities, forget pop music, which has become soooo conventionally heteronormative – look elsewhere. ‘Cosplay’ (costume play) is an activity that used to be enjoyed by a handful of people – usually dismissed as ‘geeks’ or freaks – and often seen only at comic book conventions and other gatherings of fans of super heroes and SF television and movies. However, Cosplay these days seems to be a broader mix of fangirls and boys, plus people who write fan fiction or slash fiction (6), plus (of course) the geeks of legend. Martine said that both girls and boys enjoy dressing, and cross-dressing (aka ‘crossplay’), as their favourite (super)heroes, regardless of gender and, when they are dressed, ‘anything goes’. She says that most of her friends identify as bisexual and part of the fun of Cosplay is acting out slash fiction scenarios with other ‘characters’. Cosplay has also gone beyond superheroes, embracing any form of fiction, including characters from fantasy (Game of Thrones and the Harry Potter franchise are very popular), video games (Supermario, World Of Warcraft, Skyrim, Fallout etc), anime/manga, as well as science fiction and comic books.

From the Gaultier Collection, 2013

Meanwhile, Bowie’s influence can still be seen in 2013... The Victoria & Albert Museum in London recently curated a hugely successful exhibition of Bowie’s clothes and other paraphernalia and this has now gone out on a World Tour. Also, check out the Spring/Summer 2013 collection by Jean Paul Gaultier!. If you live in the UK, you’ve missed the V&A exhibition, so you might need to travel somewhere else (maybe catch the next Virgin flight to the Moon?) to relive those old glam memories.

Sources:

Camille Bacon-Smith (1991) Enterprising Women. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Barney Hoskyns (1998) Glam! Faber & Faber.

Dave Rimmer (2003) The Look. Omnibus Press.

Carola Katharina Bauer (2012) Naughty Girls & Gay Male Romance/Porn. Anchor Academic Publishing.

Notes:

1. A ‘voluntary code’, introduced in 1929, that effectively banned any and all ‘positive portrayals’ of lesbian/gay characters and storylines in the movie industry in general and Hollywood in particular.
2. For some reason, the folks that make TV chat shows seem to like fronting them with gay men – Graham Norton and Alan Carr are at the end of a long line of gay talkshow hosts...
3. In fact, Bolan played on the original recording of the song back in 1970. The producer Tony Visconti later said, “David…loved Marc – he was probably more in love with Marc than Marc was in love with him.” (Hoskyns, 1998: 10)
4. You can watch the documentary here, if you have time: http://vimeo.com/63032664 (it's just over 53 mins long).
5. RCA marketing strapline advertising Bowie’s Heroes album in 1978.

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Colonel Barker

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Colonel Barker, the most famous ‘man-woman’ of them all...
by Rosie Logiudice
 

Valerie Arkell-Smith (1895-1960), better known as Colonel Barker, was a cross-dresser who posed as a Royal Air Force officer after World War One.

Although in the earlier part of her life Arkell-Smith married and went on to have two children with another man, before her death in 1960 she had been living in poverty and obscurity, under the name Geoffrey Norton.

After the birth of her two children, Arkell-Smith found herself living at a farm in Sussex with their father, Ernest Pearce-Crouch. At this time Arkell-Smith started to dress in a more masculine way as Rose Collis outlines in her biography Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment. A local villager describes hearing rumours of Arkell-Smith cross dressing at this time:
“During the day she would walk up and down the village street in breeches and a pullover, with a cigarette between her lips. After she had been here a few months we heard strange stories of her parades in the evening along the lanes adjoining her house. We actually saw her sauntering along one of these lanes in a dinner suit, smoking a cigar.” (1)

In 1929, readers of the Sunday Express were shocked by what they read. In My Story by the Man-Woman’s Wife, Elfrida Howard, from Littlehampton, West Sussex - “a pretty little woman...slim, and with a mass of auburn shingled hair” - revealed how she had unknowingly lived as the ‘wife’ of Colonel Barker.

Several years earlier, Elfrida Howard, then in her mid-20s, had befriended a woman called Mrs Pearce Crouch, a newcomer to the area, who ran a farm with her husband. Mrs Crouch came into Elfrida’s father's chemist shop, and they struck up a friendship. After a few months, Mrs Crouch asked Elfrida to call her 'Bill', and confessed that she was “a man masquerading as a woman”.

Bill explained that his wife had eloped and he was worried about their son’s future. Elfrida believed ‘Bill’; “everything about her suggested that she was really a man. Her figure, manner, handwriting, interests - every conceivable thing was masculine.” Friendship soon turned to romance. “Polite, courteous and fascinating” Bill swept Elfrida off her feet, with trips to the theatre and gifts of expensive jewellery. Bill soon proposed and Elfrida accepted straight away. They were married at St Peters Church in Brighton, on the 14th of November 1923.

Elfrida claimed there was nothing to suggest to her during the early days of their marriage that anything was not as it should have been. Although Bill preferred to change his clothes in another room, Elfrida took that for embarrassment about scars on his back and neck, which he said were shrapnel wounds from his part in World War One.

Elfrida and Barker settled at Uckfield, where Bill first gained a job as a farm manager but shortly after, began touring with a theatre company under the stage name Ivor Gauntlett. In late 1926, Elfrida received a letter telling her that he had met another woman, and would not be coming home. Elfrida returned to her parents' house in an attempt to forget about Barker.
After leaving Elfrida, Arkell-Smith took on the name for which she would be remembered most: 'Colonel Barker'. Moving to London she joined the right-wing National Fascisti. In 1927, Barker was arrested for possessing an unauthorised revolver, discovered during a raid on the National Fascisti headquarters.

During this period, Barker lived in an expensive flat in Park Lane with a woman and Barker’s nine-year-old son who believed Barker was his father. Barker ran a restaurant, which failed, leaving him bankrupt. By the time the police caught up with him, Barker - who had left a trail of debts behind him - was working as a reception clerk at the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly. Barker was transported to Brixton prison, where he protested against being examined by the prison doctor, calling it "an indignity to which a man of his rank should not be subjected.” Finally, forced to confess the real reason, the Colonel was transferred to Holloway women's prison, refusing to give her real name.

The police tracked down Elfrida Howard, who informed them that the Colonel was her former ‘husband’ and Barker was sentenced to nine months imprisonment for making a false statement on a marriage certificate. After leaving prison, Arkell-Smith continued to live as Victor Barker, but he was forced into lower and less well paid jobs culminating in a stint in Blackpool.

The sideshow in Blackpool featured Colonel Barker in bed in a pit separated from a woman wearing a nightdress in another bed by a row of Belisha Beacons. Tourists could view the scene from above, often verbally abusing the two individuals. Advertising claimed that the Colonel was watched in the pit, day and night, but there is evidence to suggest this was not the case and Barker had lodgings elsewhere in Blackpool.

Editor Gary Cross in his text Worktowners at Blackpool best describes the conditions and scene that those happy to pay 2d would find as they entered the ‘show’.
“You pay at a circular pen-desk to a middle-aged female. Ticket, 2d., yellow. Up two steps, then anticlockwise between wooden walls decorated with cardboard cupids and Richard Coeur de Lion in red war-suit who is blessing the bride and bridegroom. Through glass, you look down on the couple in pit below. Two beds, and beside each a Belisha Beacon; between the beds is a broad track marked out with metal traffic studs on the floor. Traffic lights at red. A table and stand are beside the beds, covered with papers and novelettes, Craven A cigarettes, comb, etc. In each bed is an alive woman.
Holiday-makers pass in an almost continuous line queueing during peak periods, staring down, kept on the move by attendants.”(2)

Following the stint in Blackpool, Arkell-Smith led a less adventurous life. After suffering with deteriorating health, she passed away in 1960. Geoffrey Norton, as Arkell-Smith was known at this time, was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Edmund’s Church, Kessingland.

The story of Arkell-Smith is a sharp reminder that still in recent history a person that stepped outside the ‘norm’ could be persecuted, ridiculed and imprisoned. However, Arkell-Smith's story reveals more than this, in fact unravelling a culture’s profound ignorance about sex in the early to mid-20th century. It is hard to believe Arkell-Smith, who was still physically female, could be married to a woman who claimed she knew nothing of this and that there had not been any cause for her to be concerned that Barker was not the man he said he was. You might even question whether Elfrida was as innocent to Colonel Barker’s unnoticed female anatomy as everyone was led to believe. Whatever the case, the British public were happy to believe this was possible and accepted the story with wide-eyed wonder.

When I first read about Arkell-Smith/Colonel Barker I was shocked by her story, the attitudes of society towards her and how she was perceived in the press. It would be easy to condemn post Victorian Britain for its ignorance. However, only last year a young woman was in the same way convicted in court for misleading two other teenage females into thinking she was a young male. In 2008 Christine Wilson, then 21, pretending to be 17-year-old Chris seduced two teenage girls, who thought she was a male teen, into having sex with her. However, the judge in the High Court in Edinburgh gave Wilson probation as she genuinely believed that she was in fact male. (3)

Likewise it is hard to believe people were happy to pay a fee to view a sideshow with two women lying in separate beds from each other but they did. Similarly in recent years thousands have watched and jeered at contestants that took part in the television programme Big Brother, paying a telephone fee to vote for their favourite contestant, another case of modern technology sugar coating a tried and tested format.

It is easy to cast stories such as Colonel Barker's to the sea bed of history but sometimes it is worth considering whether things really have changed, or in 2014 are they just packaged in a different way?

NOTES:
1. Collis, Rose, Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry, 2002, p71.
2. Cross, Gary, editor, Worktowners at Blackpool, Mass-Observation and popular leisure in the 1930s, 1990, p193-194.
3. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/woman-given-probation-after-conning-teenage-girls-into-thinking-she-was-a-boy.1365504581; http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/man-%E2%80%98guilty%E2%80%99-fraud-not-telling-girlfriend-he-was-trans070313
 

Not all our foremothers wore taffeta and lace
Colonel Barker and Chris Wilson are, of course, not the only people born physically female who have chosen to express their gender identity differently.

Flickr.com user, pennylrichardsca, has set up a small online gallery of vintage photos that illustrate some of the ways that this has happened in the past.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11418107@N02/galleries/72157629537392319

The image below is of Ellen Tremaye alias de Lacy Evans (usually known as Edward) . On the reverse side of the photo is written “The woman of Bendigo always dressed as man”.
The image is believed to be a fake cut-and-paste portrait produced after de lacy Evans was discovered to be a woman in September 1879, after 22 years of dressing, living and working as a man. Registered by photographer, N White, of Sandhurst, Bendigo, Victoria, the image was probably sold as a curiosity.

From the Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales, Australia

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Jack The Lass

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The Song of a Yorkshire Jack the Lass
by Beth Brook

O’Hooley and Tidow are an English folk duo from Yorkshire and are also civil partners. Heidi Tidow and Belinda O’Hooley met in Huddersfield in 2009. The duo now has two albums out, Silent June and The Fragile, and are due to release their third this month. I can highly recommend their music, which is equally innovative and traditional. As the repertoire of
any good artist should, some of their songs make you laugh and some of them make you cry.

One of O’Hooley and Tidow’s songs, Gentleman Jack, relates to a piece of Yorkshire LGBT history which has featured in this magazine before (1). It is inspired, says Heidi Tidow in the album sleeve, by the tale of Anne Lister (1791-1840), entrepreneur, landowner, rural gentlewoman and lothario, known to disapproving Halifax residents as ‘Gentlemen Jack’. From Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire, Lister kept 4 million words’ worth of diaries written in code which were later discovered and deciphered (by Helena Whitbread) to reveal more than her business activities...

About a sixth of Anne Lister’s diaries are written in code and, when deciphered, detail her lesbian relationships and sexual conquests with women. Rictor Norton has called her ‘the first modern lesbian’ for her clear selfknowledge and openly lesbian lifestyle. She dressed entirely in black and took part in many activities that were not perceived as the norm for gentlewomen, such as opening and owning a colliery.

Called ‘Fred’ by her lover and ‘Gentleman Jack’ by Halifax residents, Lister suffered harassment for her sexuality. As O’Hooley and Tidow’s song lyrics reveal, ‘Handsome Anne’ seduced the fairer sex and was ‘sharp of mind’ but was persecuted for this. As the chorus goes:
Gentlemen Jack, oh Gentleman Jack
Watch your back, you’re under attack
Their husbands are coming, you’d better start running
For nobody likes a Jack-the-Lass

Anne Lister’s diaries have now been published (I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791-1840, ed. Helena Whitbread) and as a result we know much more know about women’s and LGBT history at this time. The diaries give valuable insights into lesbian history, an area of interest where written evidence is relatively rare. More recently, a British television biographical drama was made featuring Maxine Peake as Anne Lister. The film The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister was shown at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in March 2010, and broadcast in the United Kingdom by the BBC in May, drawing nearly 2 million viewers.

From the name-calling and some of the encounters she describes in her diary, there appeared to be a tone of infamy imposed on Lister as well as prejudice in how she was received among some of the townspeople of her time. This happily can be juxtaposed with her fame and popularity now and the extent to which she has been celebrated.

Sources:
O’Hooley and Tidow, The Fragile
http://rictornorton.co.uk/lister.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lister
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Hooley_%26_Tidow

Notes:
1. Past2Present 2010, Knowing Your Own Heart, p.9 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24371157/Past2Present-2010.pdf

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