Pride in Suffolk's Past

Colonel Barker

Colonel Barker, who was assigned female at their birth on 27^th August 1895, lived an extraordinary life filled with different identities, careers, relationships and criminal convictions. Throughout the years Barker was also known by the names Leslie Ivor, Victor Gauntlett, Bligh Barker and John Hill; married twice to a man then a woman; bore a child; served a prison sentence for fraud and attracted spectacular crowds to a peep show on Blackpool Marquee in 1937.

It is difficult to know whether Colonel Barker would have lived such a secretive and eventful life, had it not been for the societal attitudes surrounding same sex relationships and gender that existed at the time.

Life started out in a seemingly traditional manner. After Barker’s coming out party in 1914 (a party where a young debutante woman is formally introduced to society), Barker took up work as a nurse, an ambulance driver and a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Barker married an Australian army officer, Lt. Harold Arkwell-Smith on 27^th April 1918. The marriage only lasted six weeks and soon Barker became involved with another Australian, Earnest Pearce-Crouch. They lived together and had two children until Barker left him in 1923, after growing tired of his binge drinking and violent behaviour.

Valerie Barker felt helpless due to the limited financial opportunities available to women at this time, and so assumed a new identity as Colonel Victor Barker. In their own words, “I could not use my knowledge of horses, dogs and farm work and I simply had to become a man – I had to!”  This suggests that male privilege and the opportunities that came with it, could have played a role in Barker’s decision to live as a man. However, Barker may also have used this explanation as it was also the most conventional and “understanding” reason at the time. Barker sold their story to the tabloids several times throughout their life, and their story is surprisingly more common than you might think. Tabloids often reported stories of women impersonating men in order to find a job and stage performers such as Vesta Tilley were famous for their male impersonations. It thus makes it less surprising that Barker chose this narrative when talking about their life. We will probably never know Barker’s true feelings regarding their identity.

After leaving Pearce-Crouch in 1923, Barker began a relationship with Elfrida Haward. When they met, Barker told Elfrida that they had been wounded during the war, sustaining injuries to the abdomen. Under pressure from Elfrida’s parents, the couple married at a Brighton church in 1923. Elfrida later claimed that she did not realise her husband was ‘anything but a man’, but we cannot know her motivations for saying this.

In 1929, Barker was charged with perjury in relation to bankruptcy proceedings and taken to Brixton Prison, whereby their assigned female sex was revealed and Barker was therefore transferred to Holloway Prison for women. When on trial Barker was condemned by the judge as “evil” and said that Barker had “profaned the house of God”. Ultimately Barker was convicted of making a false statement on a marriage certificate, rather than the original charge of perjury. Although Barker had committed a crime, the opinions and prejudices of the time are reflected in the judges’ comments, the conviction, and punishment of a prison sentence.

In 1937, Barker and Elfrida attracted spectacular crowds to their peep show on the Blackpool Marquee. During the season, thousands of people paid to walk past a pit and glimpse down on Barker and Elfrida – Colonel Barker in red pyjamas and their bride in a nightgown, both lying in single beds. Billed as ‘the most famous intersexual character of our time’, the popularity of Colonel Barker’s seaside show drew a complex web of reactions from their mainly working class patrons.

It was mentioned at the start that whilst still identifying as a woman, Barker bore two children. Little is known about the daughter, Betty, who was adopted by Australian friends when Barker and Pearce-Crouch separated. Tony, their son, never knew the true identity of the person he called ‘Pops,’ as Barker raised him to believe they were his father and that his mother had left long ago (Pearce-Crouch had long returned to Australia so Tony did not know his real father either). Both Tony and Betty were very young when their parents separated and presumably Tony did not remember nor recognise Barker as anything other than ‘Pops.’ In 1940, Tony got married and invited his father to be the main witness at his wedding, being unaware that this man was in fact his mother. Barker was forced to miss the ceremony as they did not want to risk the repeat offence of uttering another false name on a marriage certificate. Four years later, Tony tragically died as a member of the RAF’s Bomber Command during an Allied air raid over German garrisons in Le Havre and Calais. Barker could not go and see their son’s grave in France as they needed a passport – and they could not get one without committing perjury. It is heart-breaking to think of the lengths that Barker had to go to in order to stay true to their identity, and it begs the question of whether all this would have happened had Barker lived in a time less hostile and dangerous for those whose gender identity and sexual orientation deviated from “normal.”

Colonel Barker lived out the rest of their days as Geoffrey Norton with their ‘wife’ Eva, in Kessingland, Suffolk. Every day, she would wheel her husband to the local pub in a bathchair where, weather-permitting, they would have a drink outside. Barker died in 1960.

With thanks to Catherine Strainer for sharing her research and writing about Colonel Barker.