How censors failed to see the funny side of soldiers in drag
Images of troops in dresses scrambling to guns emerge after 80 years
WHEN the Duke of Wellington inspected his troops, he is said to have declared: “I don’t know if they frighten the enemy, but they scare the hell out of me.”
That may well have been the reaction of Britain’s wartime censor to this set of photographs showing troops dressed in drag manning coastal defences in Kent during an air raid, having had to dash out of rehearsals for their theatre act when the sirens sounded.
So alarmed were officials at the Ministry of Informa- tion that they promptly banned the images from being published.
Now, nearly 80 years on, the photographs can be seen for the first time after the originals were discovered in the archive of John Topham, the veteran Fleet Street photographer.
He took the photographs in 1940, during a visit to the base of the Royal Artillery Coastal Defence Battery at Shornemead Fort, near Gravesend, in Kent.
Topham’s intention had been to photograph the men rehearsing in drag for one of the regular shows they staged to keep themselves entertained.
But during his visit the troops were scrambled to deal with the approach of Luftwaffe bombers flying across the Channel.
With no time to change back into their uniforms, the men went to their battle stations still dressed head to toe in women’s clothing, followed by Topham.
After the war, he recalled that the Ministry of Information feared these particular images could undermine morale by giving the impression that British soldiers were not quite as manly as the public might expect.
There may have also been fears that Nazi propaganda chiefs would use the photographs of men in drag firing anti-aircraft guns, to poke fun at Britain.
Other photographs from Topham’s visit to Shornemead Fort were published at the time in papers such as The Sketch and The War Illustrated.
One showed the men performing on stage in bonnets, dresses and black stockings, and another even showed the unit, still in their dresses, running up a grass embankment, in response to the air raid sirens. It appears one man did not even have enough time to swap his bonnet for his helmet.
A caption accompanying the photographs, taken from a cutting in one of Topham’s many scrapbooks, reads: “They were in the middle of a rehearsal when an Alert sounded. ‘Jerry’, like Time, waits for no one, so the rehearsal was called off while contact was made with the battery.”
Another read: “Still wearing their dresses, the dancers rushed to their action stations – wolves in sheep’s clothing, so to speak.”
Staging pantomime shows and music hall skits proved to be a popular pastime among servicemen and were found to help maintain morale during wartime, with shows even being put on by British Pows held in German prisoner camps.
In 1941, Topham, who had started his career as a policeman in London’s East End, joined RAF intelligence as a photographer and after the war set up his own picture agency supplying numerous publications, including Life magazine and national newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph.
He died, aged 84, in 1992.