DRAGS ARMY!
How soldiers in dresses manned guns after Nazi alert interrupted panto
IF the Nazis had landed on the British coast in 1941, here’s a sight that might have stopped them in their tracks.
Beefy British soldiers manning antiaircraft guns – in ladies’ clothing, complete with stockings and frilly undies, and wearing full make-up.
It’s not, however, part of some bizarre plot to baffle the enemy.
In fact, these are troops in drag for their Christmas pantomime – and their activities were interrupted by a coastal alert, forcing them to man the camouflaged guns while still dressed as women (although some swapped their rather fetching bonnets for the good old tin helmet).
The pictures were taken near Gravesend in Kent, but the wartime government banned their publication so as not to damage the image of the tough British soldier.
Now revealed on the website Retronaut, some of the images show the men in lip-
Pictures were banned by the government
stick and rouge as they manoeuvre the guns, or running up beach-side steps as their skirts blow in the wind.
Others portray the soldiers showing off their undergarments on stage or applying make-up to each other.
The pictures were taken by photographer John Topham while he was working in RAF intelligence, but were censored by the Ministry of Information.
Panto and other productions were popular as a way for soldiers to let off steam in their free time.
British prisoners of war even performed them to keep up morale in Nazi camps. In March this year photos of the amateur dramatic group at Stalag 383, who wore drag for stage productions, were auctioned off.
The group were so serious about their performances that they turned a barn into a sloping auditorium.
The servicemen wore women’s clothing made out of hundreds of handkerchiefs stitched together and bartered their Red Cross parcels with their German guards for materials and props.
A more intriguing example of wartime cross-dressing involved Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke of MI6, who was detained in Madrid after being seen ‘in a main street dressed, down a brassiere, as a woman’.
He had stopped off in the Spanish capital on his way to Egypt. He told police he was a novelist who wished to study the reactions of men to women in the street.
However, he told the British consul he was taking the clothes to a woman in Gibraltar and had put them on as a prank. This didn’t explain why the clothes were a perfect fit for the spy.