"Join Your Country's Army-to cross dress!" was never exactly the message Lord Kitchener was trying to get across in his Great War recruitment campaign. But to some of the young lads who did join up, learning how to act like a girl was the only skill they were ever taught.

They were the "volunteers" enlisted into the various concert parties which were used to keep up morale amongst the troops. Many of them were probably closet trannies anyway, glad of a chance to slip into a frock, but even those who weren't at least learned a trade they could use in civilian life. One far more useful than killing people.

And use it they did, taking their feminine tricks of the trade onto theatre stages throughout the country in all-male revues that were highly successful into the 1920's and beyond.

One of the most celebrated wartime concert parties had been called Les Rouges et Noir in France, but changed its name back to splinters back in Britain. The cast of cross-dressed ex-soldiers played to full houses in Shaftesbury Avenue and the London Coliseum before launching a provincial tour that ran with various changes of company for another twenty years.