Cross Dressing For King And Country

"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.

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The success of another concert party has been uncovered by researcher Peter Farrer for a recently published book. He found a review of their show in the British Army newspaper The Balkin News, which listed seven men playing girls' parts. The star part of Lizzie was played by Private T Wardle who "has a future to be envied", the paper reported, "with charming manners and soprano voice." The paper continued to gush: "The costumes must have been one of the many surprises. One hardly expects to find these things in a troupe from "up the line", but they were splendid, espacially Lizzie's who had to reveal the contents of her boudoir more than once." On the whole, it sounds like Private Wardle had a bad war.

As well as a third-party review of the concert party, we have a first hand account of what it was like to be a male actress in those days. For luckily one member of the cast wrote to the newspaper "Bits of Fun", which Peter Farrer has used as reference for his collection "Confidential Correspondence Part II 1916-1920"

Regular readers will remember that the first part of this collection was reviewed in our last issue. Peter Farrer has now followed it up with another batch of letters, almost 300 in total, which provide further fascinating information about cross-dressing in that period. The writer of the letter was a sergeant in the Mechanical Transport section, who had been a closet TV since he was a small boy. Suddenly, the war had given him the opportunity to wear his fantasy clothes in public for the very first time.

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