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Lilias Irma Valerie Arkell-Smith
(1895 - 1960) U.K.

Lilias Arkell

Transvestite

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Lilias was woman who passed herself off as a gentleman and a war hero.

In an England devastated by the terrible losses of World War I, Colonel Victor Barker was a rare man indeed. Dashing, well-respected, with impeccable manners, he was a model gentleman. Victor Barker had married a young woman named Elfrida Haward in a Brighton church in 1923. His wife was proud of his good breeding and fine looks, and his young son worshipped him as a war hero. But beneath the army uniform and bearing Barker hid an astounding secret.

In 1929, a warrant was issued for the arrest of a Colonel Victor Barker, who had failed to attend his bankruptcy hearing - on the face of it, a trivial news item. However, it soon emerged that the 'Colonel' was Lilias Arkell-Smith who had been passing himself off as an Army officer for years. She was charged with perjury and with making a flase statement in a marriage register and in court. Elfrida abandoned her, claiming she had no idea her husband was a woman.

Arkell-Smith was found guilty and sentenced at the Old Bailey to nine months imprisonment in 1929. In the '30s, she re-emerged as the centrepriece of a sideshow in Blackppol, then disappeared from public view until she sold her story to a Sunday paper in the '50s.

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Source: Rose Collis, Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry, 2002

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