This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1700 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

27 February 2017

13 trans persons in New Zealand/Aotearoa who changed things by example and/or achievement.


Physicians:
  • Harold Gillies (1882 – 1960) from Dunedin, New Zealand. Organized and performed plastic surgery for Allied troops in WWI and WWII. Performed pioneering transgender surgery on Michael Dillon and Betty Cowell. GVWW.
  • Patrick Clarkson (1911 – 1969) from Christchurch, New Zealand, appointed to Guys Hospital, London. Performed corrective surgery on Georgina Somerset in 1957. GVWW.
  • John Money (1921 – 2006) moved to Johns Hopkins in the US, did pioneering work with intersex persons, co-founder of Gender Identity Clinic, his treatment of David Reimer became a scandal.   Biography   EN.Wikipedia
  • Russell Reid (1943 - ) trained at Otago University, became a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic. Eased the path of hundreds of trans person. GVWW EN.Wikipedia
  • Peter Walker (1942 - ) NZ’s only sex-change surgeon did 61 transgender operations. GVWW   Newsarticle
Persons:

  1. Peter Stratford (? - 1929) writer, Sufi, moved to US in 1904. GVWW
  2. Matene (190? - ?) Maori trapeze artist GVWW
  3. John Thorp (1927 - ) British physicist immigrant. Book   Smashwords   

  4. Noel McKay (193? - 2004) menswear retailer, performer in Auckland GVWW
  5. Carmen Rupe (1935 – 2011) Nagti Maniopoto Maori, performer in Sydney, mayoral candidate in Wellington. GVWW   
  6. Richard O'Brien (1942 - ) playwright, actor, musician, author of Rocky Horror Show. GVWW EN.Wikipedia.  
  7. Jacquie Grant (1943 - ) Australian in NZ, sailor, nightclub owner, councillor, foster mother. GVWW    
  8. Liz Roberts (1943 - ) couturier, 1969 surgery. Book   
  9. Joanne Proctor (1947 – 2011) from Kaikoura, crane driver, HBS activist. GVWW  
  10. Racheal McGonigal (1955 - ) farmer, businessman, sex worker. GVWW   
  11. Georgina Beyer (1957 - ) Māori mayor of Carterton, Labour MP, actress. GVWW    EN.Wikipedia  
  12. Gareth Farr (1968 - ) musician, performer. GVWW   EN.Wikipedia  
  13. Ramon Te Wake (1976 - ) Māori musician and broadcaster. GVWW   EN.Wikipedia  

23 February 2017

Victor Barker: Part IV - Reactions and afterwards

Part I: origins: daughter, wife, mother
Part II: husband, actor, manager
Part III: the trial
Part IV: reactions, and afterwards


Reactions

John Radclyffe Hall, in the doldrums after her novel, The Well of Loneliness, had been found obscene and banned in November 1928, and who partially cross-dressed herself but never really tried to pass as a man, wrote: 'I would like to see [Colonel Barker] drawn and quartered. A mad pervert of the most undesirable type'. Radclyffe Hall considered herself an invert and Barker a pervert, but despite what was said at Barker’s trial about passing as male to earn a wage, it was Barker, not Radclyffe Hall who lived full-time as male.

The novelist DH Lawrence wrote a pamphlet, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, later in 1929. This was to explain his novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and cited Elfrida’s belief that she was “married normally and happily to a real husband” as an example of the profound ignorance about sex in 1920s England.

The sports star, Violet Morris, in Paris, rejected by the French women's sporting authorities for her practice of wearing male clothing and who had just had her breasts removed, sued for reinstatement. She insisted that she was not at all like Barker in that she did not attempt to pass as male.

William Holtom, a timber haulier’s carter in Evesham, Worcestershire expressed great indignation about the Colonel Barker case. However he had recently quit his job after his best workmate had died under the wheels of the horse-drawn wagon he was driving. His health declined and when he was admitted to the infirmary with enteric fever, he was transferred to the women’s ward.

The farm that had been run by the Peace Crouches had since been acquired by Lady Evelyn and Colonel Guinness. Their son Bryan became engaged to Diana Mitford. Diana and her sisters had pored over the Colonel Barker story and she was thrilled to visit the scene of the crime. However she quickly learned that any mention of Barker was taboo by the dictat of Lady Evelyn. (The marriage of Bryan and Diana lasted three years; her second marriage of 42 years was to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.)


Afterwards

On release Victor continued to live as a man. He still had his £9 a month annuity, but that was mainly taken by his son’s boarding school fees. Barker became John Hill.

He worked six months at a furniture store in Tottenham Court Road, and then became a car salesman, but was twice recognised by female customers who had read of his trials in the newspapers. He worked a little as an extra in films at Elstree studios.

In the summer of 1932 he was in Shanklin, a seaside resort on the Isle of Wight working as an assistant to a fortune teller and also to a diver who went off the end of the pier in an asbestos suit, soaked in petrol and set alight.

In 1934 he was working as a kennelman for 15/- a week in Henfield, West Sussex. On 18 August he found a forgotten purse in the village’s only phone box. On 27 September he was charged, as John Hill, for theft by finding. However his legal name as Valerie Arkell Smith was revealed to the court, which enabled his lawyer to explain his odd behaviour as a fear of being found not to be a man. The jury understood and returned a verdict of not guilty.

John Hill spent the rest of 1934 and 1935 as an assistant chef at two large hotels in Cornwall and Devon. For a few months he was a manservant to a South African millionaire. Then he was servant to a Mrs Adrian Scott, who administered a charity and received 400-500 letters a day from around the world enclosing contributions. There were piles of money in every room. Despite the piles, Hill took five one-pound notes from Mrs Scott’s handbag. A police detective-sergeant came round. Hill unbuttoned his waistcoat to be searched. The detective-sergeant noticed that he was “full in the chest” and realised that he was Victor Barker.

Hill then confessed, and was taken to Marlborough Street Police Court. He was remanded for a week which he spent in the hospital ward at Holloway prison. Although he pleaded guilty the detective-sergeant recounted that Hill was also Barker and also Arkell Smith etc. Hill was fined twenty shillings, and ordered to pay back the five pounds within a month.

This brought Hill/Barker to the attention of Luke Gannon, an impresario in the popular seaside resort of Blackpool.

Gannon’s previous star attraction had been the ex-Revd Harold Davidson, defrocked for immoral conduct with young women.

In 1937 Hill again became Colonel Barker, 'The most famous intersexual character of our time'. The set arranged by Gannon on the Golden Mile at Blackpool allowed viewers who had paid two pence to look down upon two beds separated by a belisha beacon and traffic lights permanently on red; Barker in one bed, his wife in the other.
Colonel Barker in Blackpool

At the boarding house where he stayed, Barker gave the name Jeffrey Norton. The wife from the exhibit, Eva, shared his bed.

After the ex-Revd Davidson’s unfortunate demise in July 1937 (the lion, with whom he shared his act in Skegness, mauled him) his wife sold her story in several parts to The Leader, a weekly publication. As she finished, The Leader started “Colonel Barker, the Man-Woman who Hoaxed the World”, which purported to be Barker’s soon-to-be-published autobiography, although no such book ever appeared.

With the coming of war in September 1939, and subsequently identify cards and then ration cards, Jeffrey Norton and his wife Eva were registered in those names. Jeffrey was working on the switchboard of a local hospital. At the suggestion of the police, he, like many men of his age, joined the Home Guard ("Dad’s Army").

Victor’s son had joined the Grenadier Guards in 1938, and after earning his commission had transferred to the RAF to be trained as a pilot. Mr and Mrs Norton moved back into London, and Jeffrey worked at a factory making Hurricane fighter planes, but he found that his legs could not take the long hours standing at the factory bench. He left and became a night porter at an expensive apartment building in Grosvenor Square.

Victor’s son, now a fighter pilot, announced his marriage, to be held in a church. The father was understandably nervous about signing the marriage register, even as a witness, as the groom’s father would normally be expected to do. So he pretended to have got into the wrong train, and arrived late.

By 1944 the son was a bomber pilot flying over Germany. Jeffrey volunteered to be a driver of an ‘incident lorry’ – to go out during air-raids and mark any signs of bomb damage with red lamps. One night, while driving near Regent’s Park, an explosion blew him out of his lorry, but he survived.

However his son died in the daylight bombing of German garrisons in France after the D-Day invasion.

In 1948, Geoffrey and Eva Norton (he had changed to the other spelling of his name) moved to Kessingland, Suffolk. They kept to themselves. In 1956 Geoffrey’s health deteriorated, and the village doctor had him admitted to Lowestoft Hospital, 4 miles (6 km) away. Initially in the men’s ward, he was quickly moved to the women’s, and then to a private room, although he was not asked to pay for the private room. Eva came regularly, even though the journey required two buses. She pushed him around in a wheelchair.

Despite the National Health Service being up and running, and therefore having no medical bills, Geoffrey Norton was still in need of money, and his solicitor acted as an agent and arranged for Barker’s life story to be sold to Empire News and Chronicle. It appeared 19 February till 15 April 1956. Barker, again writing as Valerie Arkell-Smith, insisted that there was nothing ‘perverted’ in the life that he had chosen.

He had “suffered no ‘tendency’ to become a ‘man’ … I have undergone no physical operation to turn me from woman into man, and physically I am, as I started out in life to be, 100 per cent woman. But so long have I lived as a man, that I have come to think as one, behave as one, and be accepted as one.” This was all done for the sake of his boy. “I ask for no pity or sympathy. You may feel that I do not deserve it anyway and maybe you are right.” 

The story was not picked up by the local press in Suffolk, but the nurses at the hospital read it with interest. The Empire News and Chronicles sent the novelist Ursula Bloom to interview Barker at home as by this time he had been discharged.

He was not diagnosed while in hospital but over the next few years it became obvious that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease as did his mother. Barker was in hospital again in 1957, and in 1958 Eva was admitted, and died in hospital. A neighbour took on the task of looking after Geoffrey, assisted by the district nurse.

He sank into a coma and died in February 1960. He was buried in the grounds of the parish church, in an unmarked grave. He was 64.
________

The definitive account is, of course, that by Rose Collis, which I have largely followed. An excellent book.

Barker lived in many places. If you consult the EN.Wikipedia page for each you will find that in none of them is he listed among the notable residents.

Barker’s account in the Empire News and Chronicle was April 1956, two years before the press brouhaha about Michael Dillon, but two years after Betty Cowell’s autobiography. Most newspaper readers would not then know of female-to-male surgery, but Barker still feels a need to deny it.

Barker claimed at the 1929 trial that he lived as a man for the better wages and for his son, and claimed in his 1956 newspaper autobiography that he was 100% woman.   However he never reverted to living as female, not after his son died in the skies over France, not when he was no longer earning more than a woman would.   His existential need was to be male.

There is no record that Victor Barker ever met Joe Carstairs or any other trans man.   The term was not then in use, of course.   The most common term between the wars was 'female husband'.   Collis gives episodes about other female husbands who were featured in the press, and one assumes that Barker read about them.   There is good discussion in Alison Oram's Her Husband was a Woman! about how the newspapers at that time fitted such tales into standard patterns (although Oram refers to Barker only as 'she' and 'her').
________

*Not the novelist.
  • Valerie Arkell-Smith. “The Man-Woman – My Story” Sunday Dispatch, 10 March 1929.
  • Elfrida Barker. “My Story: By the Man-Woman’s Wife: Mrs Barker Reveals the Truth”. Sunday Express, 10 March 1929.
  • Valerie Arkell-Smith. “Colonel Barker, the Man-Woman who Hoaxed the World”. The Leader, 11 September 1937.
  • Valerie Arkell-Smith. “I Posed as a Man for 30 Years! My Amazing Masquerade – a wife confesses”. Empire News and Chronicle,19 February 1956
  • Valerie Arkell-Smith. “I posed as a man for 30 years”. Empire News and Chronicle 19 February 1956.
  • Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Pandora 1989: 1-5,10,11,70,157,165.
  • Julie Wheelwright. “’Colonel’ Barker: A Case Study in the Contradictions of Fascism”. In Tony Kushner & Kenneth Lunn. The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Radical Right, and Minorities in Twentieth-Century Britain. Riutledge, 1990: 40-8.
  • James Vernon. “’For Some Queer Reason’: The Trails and Tribulations of Colonel Barker’s Masquerade in Interwar Britain”. Signs 26, 1 Autumn 2000: 37-62.
  • Rose Collis. Colonel Barker's monstrous regiment: a tale of female husbandry. Virago, 2001.
  • Laura L. Doan. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. Columbia University Press, 2001: 82-94.
  • Alison Oram & Annmarie Turnbull. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780–1970. Routledge, 2001: 15, 38-43.
  • Judith Halberstam. Female Masculinity. Duke Univ. Press, 2006: 91-5.
  • Martin Pugh. Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars. 2006: 54-5. 69.
  • Alison Oram. Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing in modern British popular culture. Routledge, 2007: 2-3, 63-7, 76-7, 124-5, 150.
  • Lyndsy Spence. Mrs Guinness: The Rise and Fall of Diana Mitford, the Thirties Socialite. The History Press, 2015: 54.


WomenOfBrighton     EN.Wikipedia    Aangirfan

19 February 2017

Victor Barker: Part III - the trial

Part I: origins: daughter, wife, mother
Part II: husband, actor, manager
Part III: the trial
Part IV: reactions, and afterwards


Victor Barker did not pay much attention to an obscenity trial that took place in November 1928, that of John Radcliff Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, whose protagonist was a masculine woman. With much brouhaha the book was banned.

A bankruptcy notice and receiving order addressed to Barker was delivered to the Mascot Café, but Barker had left and did not go back. Hence he did not know that he was required to be present for a public hearing on 24 January 1929. An arrest warrant was subsequently issued, Barker’s presence at the Regent Palace Hotel was discovered, and he was there arrested. He was taken to Brixton Prison, where like all new prisoners he was medically examined. He was told to put his clothes back on and was quickly transferred to Holloway women’s prison.

It took a week before the first newspaper article about him appeared in The Times. This was quickly followed by articles in The Daily Herald and The Evening News. Government departments paid attention. The War Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions exchanged files.

Barker’s lawyers raised the issue that a person arrested as a man was being held in a women’s prison – which appeared to be unlawful. In addition they made application in the bankruptcy court that all information in connection with the bankruptcy had now been supplied and thus the offence had been purged. Barker’s immediate release was ordered.

However Holloway insisted that no woman would leave dressed as a man. This despite the fact that they had no women’s clothing that would match Barker, especially in girth. A special purchase was made, and the next day Barker was handed a coat, skirt, blouse, silk stockings and a large hat. A large crowd of reporters and onlookers awaited, but Barker was allowed to leave by the staff entrance at the back.

By now the police had tracked down Valerie’s second husband, Ernest Pearce Crouch, who had spent the last six years working sometimes in France, sometimes in England. He politely declined to give a statement.

Elfrida Haward (Barker) however was talking to the police, and to the press.

In the same weekend, 10 March 1929 both Mr and Mrs Barker published their respective accounts in the press. Victor’s story was in the Sunday Dispatch, illustrated with photographs of both Valerie and Victor.
“A man seems to have a better and easier time. There is, I am certain, more opportunity for a man in the world than a woman – that is why I became a man. I believe that, similarly placed, I would do much the same again. I do not mean that I would deliberately do those things which I now realize were wrong, but they were done in foolishness and not with any wrong intent.” 
Elfida’s account was in the Sunday Express.
 “It could not have been more of a shock to any woman in the world than it was to me to find myself utterly deluded, utterly alone in experience, in a position that made my name known to every man and woman in the country.” 
The Director of Public Prosecutions was considering whether they could charge Barker under the Army Act for impersonating an officer and wearing medals that had not been awarded to him. Instead they settled for charging him with “wilful and corrupt perjury in an affidavit” re his bankruptcy “in which affidavit she swore that she was truly named Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker”.

Wisely or not, Barker turned up for the hearing on 27 March in female clothing including a large hat and a large feather boa, so that he could hide his face.

Barker’s lawyer made the obvious point that there was no law against a woman dressing as a man, and in the affidavit Barker had used the name by which ‘she’ had been known for some time, and thus that was the name given. This was allowed in English law. The magistrate agreed.

However the prosecution than asked the magistrate to hear evidence and commit the defendant for trial on a different issue. In violation of the Perjury Act, 1911, the defendant had “knowingly and wilfully caused a false statement to be entered in a register of marriage”. The doctor from Brixton prison and Elfrida were called as witnesses. A copy of the marriage certificate was produced. Barker’s lawyer attempted the argument that “as two persons of the same sex could not marry there has been no marriage, and therefore no offence”. The magistrate was not having that.

The perjury in an affidavit charge was dropped, but Barker was formally charged with the second offence re the marriage register. £50 bail was granted, and the trial was set for 24 April at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey).

The judge was to be Sir Ernest Wild, KC, Conservative MP, Freemason, Recorder of London, who had been a strong supporter of the failed attempt in 1921 to criminalise “any act of gross indecency between female persons”, and who was firmly opposed to female jurors, especially in cases where the defendants were homosexual. The Prosecutor would be the same one Barker had faced in 1927 on a false firearms certificate charge.

On the day of the trial there was large queue for the public gallery. Victor Barker appeared dressed as his true self, but was summoned under the name of Lillias Irma Valerie Arkell-Smith. The prosecutor admitted, with some embarrassment, that the defendant had been prosecuted in this same court as a man two years previously. He made the comment
 “If she wanted to marry another woman she could have gone through a ceremony in a registry office. There is no justification for her abusing the Church to go through this ceremony”. 
And then:
“Your Lordship will appreciate how important it is that marriage registers should not be falsified. That is an aspect of the case which is of considerable gravity”.

Elfrida was the main witness. Despite admitting that she first met the defendant as Mrs Pearce Crouch, she claimed that she did not truly know Barker as a woman until she saw it in the newspapers. Barker's lawyer in summing up concentrated on Barker’s need to earn a male wage, and once having taken that step she had to keep it up or lose the employment. He did not defend the point about a false statement being entered in a register of marriage.

Sentencing was delayed until the next day when Recorder Wild commented:
“Without expressing any view as to the truth or falsity of Miss Haward’s evidence, I am assuming in your favour that Miss Haward must have known before the alleged marriage that you were a woman”. He concluded: “I have considered and carefully pondered on everything which can be said in your favour, and the result at which I have arrived is this. You are an unprincipled, mendacious and unscrupulous adventuress. You have, in the case before me, profaned the House of God, you have outraged the decencies of Nature, and you have broken the law of man. You have falsified a marriage register and set an evil example which, were you to go unpunished, others might follow. So grave in the eye of the law is the offence which you have committed that the maximum penalty for it is seven years’ penal servitude. In all the circumstances of this case, showing all the leniency that I can, I pass on you a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment in the second division.” 

The police considered action against Ernest Pearce Crouch who had made a false declaration in applying for Valerie Arkell Smith to be added to his passport; however they decided not to pursue the issue.

In Holloway prison, it was found that they had no uniform large enough to fit the new inmate known as Valerie Arkell Smith who weighed 16st 8 lb (105kg). It took a fortnight for the uniform to be ready, most of which Arkell Smith spent in the prison hospital. In the regular prison he was dismayed by the sanitation, by the food and by the non-recognition of class. The required work was tedious.

While Barker was in jail, Violet Morris, in Paris, also a masculine woman who always wore male clothing, sued the women's sporting authorities for rejecting her.   She insisted that she was not at all like Barker in that she did not attempt to pass as male.

Overall Arkell Smith was regarded as of good behaviour, and was released 15 December 1929. By now his weight was down to just above 13 st (82.5 kg).
_________

Not only was there no law against a woman dressing as a man, there was no specific law against any cross-dressing. This had been established in the trial of Fanny and Stella in 1870. Those persons arrested while transvesting were charged with ‘disturbing the peace’, ‘mischief’ etc.

Women’s fashions during the 1920s approached very close to transvestity. Barker, of course, had gone much further than making a fashion statement.

The second Mrs Barker seems to have quietly disappeared.  Only the Sunday People speculated about her: "'Col. Barker's' Red-Haired 'Wife' Vanishes: She Was 'His' Second".  Front page, 10 March 1929.   Despite a detailed series of articles on Barker, The People strangely carried no account of the actual trial.

The prosecutor made the comment “If she wanted to marry another woman she could have gone through a ceremony in a registry office”. Now this is odd in that such a ceremony, for gay men, lesbians or a couple containing a trans person, in a registry office would not be legal until the government introduced civil unions in 2004. Even after the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 such a ceremony is still not allowed in an Anglican church.

Barker’s lawyer focused on the practical aspect of men getting jobs more easily and earning more. The issue of Barker being a congenital invert (to use the language of the time) did not come up, and as we will see in Part IV, this led to misunderstandings.

The three trials, that of The Well of Loneliness, of Victor Barker and of Violet Morris, marked the end of the 1920s acceptance of female masculinity.    The 1930s would be very different.

15 February 2017

Victor Barker: Part II - husband, actor, manager

Part I: origins: daughter, wife, mother
Part II: husband, actor, manager
Part III: the trial
Part IV: reactions and afterwards


Sir Victor Barker DSO settled in at the Grand Hotel, Brighton. He visited a gentleman’s outfitters and purchased two or three suits, including a dress suit for evening wear, shirts, collars ties, etc. The asset sales from the farm and the sale of his mother’s jewellery, and his small annuity would carry him for the time being. His three-year-old son was cared for elsewhere in Brighton. He participated in tennis, swimming and horse riding with the other hotel residents.

Elfrida Haward arrived on the second day. Barker had explained:
“I told Miss Haward that I was not what she thought I was; I told her that I was a man who had been injured in the war; that I was really a man acting as a woman for family reasons. I made some excuse about it being my mother’s wish, and she believed it.”
The son was explained as with a first wife who had died, and the daughter was of Peace Crouch and his wife from whom he was now separated. Barker did concede though that
“I think that she had some doubt as to my being a baronet. I explained that I had dropped the title while living on my farm, but had assumed it again in the hope that it might help me get a job. I don’t think she swallowed this tale, though she never said much.”
Elfrida would later claim that she did not know that he was a woman until the trial and she understood that Victor could not have 'normal relations' because of an abdominal wound received during the war.

However Victor's previous persona, Mrs Peace-Crouch, had patronized the shop. Victor Barker was able to convince Elfrida's father that he had lived much of his life as a woman because his mother had always wanted a girl and had taken advantage of the death of the father to impose this whim. However he had also been an army Colonel, had served with the British Expeditionary Force in France, and had been awarded a DSO.

However, once this tale was digested, a new problem arose. The young man – albeit supposedly a woman – had spent a night with Elfrida in her bedroom. To avoid scandal they must marry. For Elfrida, this was a good match: a tradesman’s daughter and a knighted military man. However her parents, while permitting the marriage did not care for Sir Victor. They cancelled their plans to settle a sum of money on Elfrida at marriage.

Because the parents did not care to wait through the customary reading of banns on three consecutive Sundays, Victor applied for a marriage license. To do this he had to produce both their birth certificates, and make a sworn affidavit that
“he believeth that there is no impediment of any kindred or alliance or of any other lawful cause, or any suit commenced in any Ecclesiastical Court to bar or hinder the proceeding of the said Matrimony according to the Tenor of such licence”.
The impediment of alliance was not mentioned, nor was his biological sex; and a forged birth certificate was produced. Victor and Elfrida were married 14 November 1923 at St Peter’s, the parish church of Brighton. The ceremony was performed by the curate as the vicar collapsed and died while running for a bus that very morning.

From a meeting at the Grand Hotel, Barker became involved in the Brighton Repertory Company where he was paid 10/- a week. However his lifestyle required more. He opened an antiques and second hand furniture shop in Andover, Hampshire. He also bought a .32 Webley pistol and obtained a certificate for it. He sang in the Andover choir and played with the local cricket club. However he did not know much about antiques, they left town owing £457 to a fellow officer.

Barker did have some success as an actor. Using the stage name of Ivor Gauntlet, he obtained parts in touring productions playing against famous actresses such as Mrs Patrick Campbell and Dolores. However his voice broke down after the strain of singing in a low register.

And Ivor Gauntlet soon had creditors. A tailor in Birmingham was claiming £40/13/-. An actor was public and easy to trace. Victor Barker resorted to paid employment: farm manager (3 months), kennel manager (1 month) and labourer in a brick works where he contracted chicken pox. Elfrida nursed him back to health.

However by this time she had had enough and went back to her parents, and working in the chemist shop. Barker took rooms in Soho.

the boxer
Either because of a misdelivered letter, or on the suggestion of a fellow resident, in late 1926 Barker came into contact with Colonel Henry Rippon Seymour, the leader of the National Fascisti, a splinter group from the British Fascists. He became the live-in secretary of the group and gained the flat above their offices at 5a Hogarth Road, Earls Court. At that time the National Fascisti had a membership of less than 400.

Barker was in his element. He often wore his medals (actually those of Pearce-Crough), gave fencing and boxing lessons to the young recruits, and advised them of the folly of getting mixed up with women.

On 8 March 1927 a small group of fascisti, mainly from the Croydon branch, dissatisfied with Seymour’s usurpation of leadership, burst into the offices. Seymour grabbed his sword, and the Webley pistol from the drawer of the desk and threatened to shoot the first man.

The police arrived. They took possession of the pistol. Seymour appeared at the West London Police Court the next day and pleaded guilty to common assault and possessing a firearm. However the magistrate directed that the second plea be withdrawn when it was clarified that the gun was Barker’s. It was a Webley pistol, but not the same one as on Barker’s certificate from Andover. He was charged with “uttering a forged firearm certificate”.

At the trial in July Barker presented with his eyes swathed. His counsel explained that ‘temporary blindness owing to war wounds’ had flared up. He was found not guilty and discharged.

His firearms certificate was cancelled; he quit the National Fascisti; the Public Prosecution Office wrote to the War Office to ascertain Colonel Barker’s war record; they discovered rumours from Andover about a woman masquerading as a man. However the Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the rumours about a woman, and did not proceed.

Also in July 1927, Tom Barker died of tuberculosis, age 28. He left £1,000 to his sister Valerie. This enabled Barker, and a second Mrs Barker, to rent an expensive flat (£295 per annum) in Mayfair, and employed a valet. His son came to visit regularly, but the current Mrs Barker was always sent away on these occasions.

Barker often held dinner parties for officers whom he had met while in the National Fascisti. From this grew the idea of a fellowship for the British survivors of the Battle of Mons, August 1914. The inaugural dinner was held in Barker’s flat 17 December 1927 with fourteen veterans. However the events proved so successful, that they had to be moved to a hotel.

This was done in association with Colonel Neave, who in fact had been present at Valerie's wedding to Harold Arkell-Smith, but who was completely convinced by Colonel Barker's knowledge of military manoeuvres. Some thought that Barker looked a bit odd, but when he talked about his experiences in the war, he was completely convincing.

With of the success of the Mons dinners, Barker felt that he could run a restaurant. In February 1928, he found one to lease just off Charing Cross Rd, and renamed it Mascot Café. The Daily Sketch received an anonymous tipoff that Colonel Barker was really a woman, and sent a reporter. Twice he engaged Barker in conversation, but was unable to fault his manhood.


However the café did not thrive. He owed a considerable sum in back-rent and the landlady was losing patience. He surrendered the café, moved to cheaper accommodation and found a job as reception clerk at the Regent Palace Hotel.


_____________________________________________________

Rose Collis' biography of Barker, the most reliable source, definitely states that the two guns were Webleys.   However the EN.Wikipedia on the National Fascisti insists it was a colt,   It does not cite Collis at all, but relies on Martin Pugh's Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, 2006, but this merely says 'revolver'.  (Pugh, for some reason refuses to be polite, and uses female pronouns throughout). This EN.Wikipedia article summarizes Barker's involvement:  "In 1927 a leading member was "Colonel Victor Barker", who was actually a cross-dresser by the name Valerie Arkell-Smith. Her fellow National Fascisti members did not know she was a woman and treated her as a man and she became secretary to Rippon-Seymour as well as training members in the boxing and fencing clubs."  This of course distorts the issue and misses the point.

Surely Seymour could have pleaded self-defence.

The EN.Wikipedia page on English Fascists includes Valerie Arkell-Smith but not Victor Barker.

13 February 2017

Victor Barker (1895 -1960) part I: origins

Part I: origins: daughter, wife, mother
Part II: husband, actor, manager
Part III: the trial
Part IV: reactions and afterwards

James Barker was a prosperous businessman in Oldham, Lancashire. His son Thomas (1857 – 1918) became an architect in Brighton, Sussex. In 1887 he wed the 18-year-old Lillias Hill (1868 – 1923), the fourth daughter of a country parson, and a distant relative of Olave Baden-Powell.

James Barker died in 1889, and Thomas, coming into his inheritance, abandoned his career and with his wife moved to the parish of St Clement, Jersey. Their daughter Lillias Irma Valerie Barker was born in 1895.

The family moved back to England in 1899, and settled in Bramley, Surrey, where a son, Thomas Leslie was born later that year. Later they moved to nearby Milford.

As it developed, it was Valerie who grew up with a love of dogs, horses, sports and pranks. Mr Barker, disappointed with his son, taught his daughter fencing, cricket and boxing. After attending two schools for young ladies, as a finishing, she was sent to a convent school at Graty, Silly near Brussels. Both at the convent school, and back home, Valerie would dress male whenever she could. At age 19, Valerie had her formal coming out ball.

During the First World War she was a nurse, an ambulance driver and then a horse trainer. Particularly the last position entitled her to dress in khaki breeches, tunic, cap and riding boots. At the end of the war she was working with horses at an estate in Kent, where she met the recuperating Harold Arkell-Smith, an Australian who had been successively promoted from private to lieutenant and awarded three medals. They were married in April 1918. - however the marriage lasted only six weeks, although they never did divorce.

In August using her married name, Mrs L I Valerie Smith enrolled in the newly established Women’s Royal Air Force. The WRAF was considered to have the smartest uniform of all the women’s services and it made no concessions at all to femininity. The women in the WRAF liked to refer to each other with male nicknames. Valerie Smith worked as a driver and was paid 38/- a week.

Thomas Barker died in October, age 63. His widow went to live in London with their son. The WRAF was disbanded after the Armistice. Valerie found work in a tea-shop in Warminster.

There she met another Australian, Ernest Pearce Crouch. He also was separated from his wife. Crouch was offered a job in the Paris office of The Times, and Valerie having agreed to join him, he applied for his wife, Valerie Pearce Crouch to be added to his passport. They lived in Paris just over a year. Valerie continued her preference for masculine attire, and they had a baby son. However The Times had falling sales, and Ernest was made redundant. They rented a house in Hook, in the London borough of Kingston, not far from where Valerie’s brother was living. However Ernest was unable to find work, and a daughter was born in June 1921. Neither child was ever registered.

The Pearce Crouches became tenant farmers at an estate outside Littlehampton, West Sussex, intending to also run it as a guest house. Valerie, as usual wore men’s clothing to do farm work, including a collar and tie, and was even spotted in a dinner suit. Ernest took to drink, and sometimes violence.

Valerie was developing a friendship with Elfrida Haward who worked in her father's chemist shop in Littlehampton.

Lillias Barker had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for six years, and died in September 1923, age 55. She left her daughter an annuity of £9 a month for life.

After an assault that put her in hospital for a few days, Valerie threatened legal action if Ernest did not leave. She agreed that he could take their daughter.


She sold off what she could of the farm’s assets. After purchasing some new men’s clothes, she bicycled to the next railway station, not Littlehampton, where she would be recognised. She then took the train to Brighton, and a taxi to the Grand Hotel, where a reservation for Sir Victor Barker DSO was waiting.

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The Grand hotel in Brighton in 1923 was one of the finest in England.   It was one of the first, outside London, to have lifts, electric lights and external fire escapes.

11 February 2017

Nina Arsenault (1975–) sex worker, performer, journalist

Rodney Arsenault was raised in a trailer park in Beamesville, Ontario, where he identified with beautiful women. He gained two masters degrees and became an instructor in acting at Toronto’s York University.

Arsenault started having plastic surgery during holiday breaks and reading weeks, and became Nina. At a staff Christmas party, a grad student proclaimed:
“Aren’t you victimizing yourself by constructing your new identity out of the oppressive misogynistic values that you were socialized with as a male?”
Nina conceded the point, but embraced the image anyway.

Early on, Nina dated Eric Newman, the future Luka Magnotta, who later became a porn actor, and had plastic surgery such that when he was a contestant on COVERguy on OUTtv and Nina was a judge, she failed to recognise him.

In 2003, she had a small part in the film Soldier’s Girl.

In 2005, Nina’s talent agent was Eugene Pichler, who was also advocating against funding for transgender surgery at the same time.

After nine years, 60 cosmetic surgeries and $160,000, financed mainly from working in the actual sex trade, working as a cyber-whore, and writing a ‘t-girl’ column in Fab magazine, Nina was chosen for one of eight Unstoppable awards, that year’s theme in the 2007 Toronto Pride Gala.

Sky Gilbert, drag queen and playwright, wrote a play, Ladylike, around her persona, and it opened in November 2007. In 2010, she starred in the solo piece, I Was Barbie. In 2012, Nina’s play in seven monologues,  The Silicone Diaries, was professionally produced. She has also done performance pieces in art galleries.

In May 2012, Luka Magnotta murdered Lín Jùn, 林俊, a student at Concordia University, posted videos of the crime online and physically posted body parts to politicians and to schools. He fled to Paris and Berlin, but was arrested, returned to Canada, tried and sentenced to life in prison. His earlier relationship with Nina attracted press attention.

Later that year, the book TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, a series of essays on her work, was published.

In 2013, while on a flight to Edmonton with fellow performer Lexi Sanfino, a flight attendant asked for makeup advice “because you used to be guys, right?” In response, Sanfino decided to strut topless down the aisle. She was arrested when the plane landed, and Nina who filmed the arrest was also arrested, but released without charges. They were addressed as male based on the ‘M’ in their passports, and Nina was questioned about whether she had had genital surgery. They pointed out that it was not illegal for a legal male to remove his top. Lexi was charged with causing a disturbance.

In 2015, Nina appeared at TEDxToronto.
IMDB     EN.WIKIPEDIA
 






05 February 2017

Keith Mina Caputo (1973 - ) musician

Keith Caputo grew up in Brooklyn, NY. Mother OD’ed at age 20. Father was a drug dealer, in and out of prison, a tattoo artist, and able to rebuild old cars.

Caputo was mainly raised by his paternal grandparents, and was experimenting with female clothes from age eight or so. The teenage Caputo took classical piano lessons, but then, at the urging of a cousin started singing with garage bands. By age 18 Caputo was going out as her female self, to New York nightclubs such as Escuelita.

While in college Caputo sang with the heavy metal group, Life of Agony, and was on their 1993 album, River Runs Red. After the third album in 1997, Caputo controversially left.
 “People started to resent me because I quit the band at the height of our — we were about to explode on radio. … I was different by nature, and it really wasn’t my style to be sleeping with a million different girls. I’ve experimented with some drugs, but I wasn’t really like seriously addicted to any substance, you know?”(Petros)
Caputo had girlfriends, was usually faithful, but also experimented with men.
A new group, Absolute Bloom lasted only a year.

Caputo’s father was released from jail for good behaviour in 2002, and died that same night after taking drugs. He was 56.

Caputo worked with the Brazilian band Freakx which had broken up a decade earlier. They put out an album in 2003. The same year Caputo did a reunion with the original Life of Agony, and formed a new band which recorded as Live Monsters. Caputo also put out solo albums.

In July 2011 at age 39, Caputo announced transition, and started female hormones.

“There is no right or wrong way of how to express your human nature. It was odd growing up identifying as a woman. My subconscious sex is female, living in a male body — it was difficult. It was confusing. It was depressing.” (Petros)
She continued to perform with Life of Agony, and her first solo album as Mina was As Much Truth as One Can Bear.

In November 2024, Caputo reverted,  He wrote in an Instagram post: "“My surgery has been booked to remove my fake breasts, and I will be lovingly living in my divine male self.  I’ve cured my gender dysphoria. It took many years, a lot of walking through the fire, but I rose above my misunderstandings of my soul and my spirit.”
EN.Wikipedia