"For some queer reason": the trials and tribulations of Colonel Barker's masquerade in Interwar Britain.

Abstract

n February 28, 1929, Colonel Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker was arrested for contempt of court, having failed to appear at a bankruptcy hearing the previous December. Removed to Brixton Prison, Barker was subjected to a routine medical inspection, during which he was discovered to be a woman and immediately transferred to the all-women Holloway prison.' By March 6, the news had leaked to the press and led to a series of sensational revelations that dominated the front pages of the press for a week. Barker, it was disclosed, had been born a biological female in 1895 and christened Lilias Irma Valerie Barker by her parents of independent means. In 1918 she had been married briefly to one Lieutenant Harold Arkell-Smith before having two children with her subsequent lover, Earnest Pearce-Crouch. Yet, after this relationship collapsed in 1923, Barker had begun life as a man and married Elfreda Haward. This marriage also had not lasted long and was followed by a series of relationships with other women, with whom Barker appeared to live as a common-law husband, earning a living variously as a farmer, actor, antique-shop owner, kennel manager, laborer, restaurateur, and gentleman of leisure. As these revelations were investigated by the police, Barker was charged on two counts of perjury for having falsely signed the register at his marriage to Haward. The subsequent trial at the Old Bailey took place amid great publicity and resulted in Barker's being imprisoned as a woman for