Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry (Paperback)

Review
* 'Excellent . treads a careful line between sensation and sentiment' DAILY TELEGRAPH * 'Remarkably gripping and at times quite hilarious' Val Hennessy, DAILY MAIL * 'Fascinating . Collis's unpretentious, ribald, chatty style carries this ripping yarn' TIME OUT * 'One of the oddest true stories ever told . film producers would be mad not to snap it up' Craig Brown, MAIL ON SUNDAY * 'Extraordinary . a fascinating history' BIG ISSUE

This entertaining romp would have made an appealing - if preposterous - novel; the fact that it is actually a true story makes it yet more compelling. Few would have guessed that the mundane arrest of a hotel clerk in London in 1929 for financial irregularities would result in such a scandal. Admittedly, the clerk at the Regent Palace Hotel was a wealthy gentleman fallen on hard times, with a wife and a son at boarding school, but such tales of downward mobility were not uncommon. The real story behind the trial would not hit the headlines until Victor Barker was examined by a medical officer at the prison where he was about to be admitted... and was found to be a woman. 'Men-women', as they were called, were not unknown of course, and had been a source of fascination for centuries. But rarely had such a charade been carried on for so many years, and with such a degree of chutzpah, as in the case of the infamous Colonel Barker. Barker was born Valerie Barker in Jersey in 1895 and showed no early signs of her later predilections. Indeed, her early preferences were for men, rather than for women: she was married at an early age to an Australian soldier then, when he turned out to be a violent drunk, she entered into a common-law relationship with yet another Australian soldier. Here the story becomes confused: fed up with her partner's failure to support them, Valerie left home with a young woman who had fallen under her spell, spinning her the unbelievable line that she was really a man who had been forced to assume the guise of a woman! This was to set in train a life of deception, and Valerie's - or Victor's - lies became ever more grandiose. She started dressing as a decorated officer, and took to the stage under the name of Ivor Gauntlett. One financial crisis succeeded another, and later in her life, Barker was even forced on to the freak-show circuit, with her new 'wife'. One of the most fascinating aspects of this story to modern eyes is Barker's serial deception of her 'wives'. All insisted that, in the darkness of the marital bed, they had no idea that she was a woman. And, for her part, Barker denied any sexual motive, claiming merely that her object had been to earn money to secure the future of her son in a world where men's earning power vastly exceeded that of women. By the time Barker died in 1960, living as Geoffrey Norton, her story had been largely forgotten, but the tale is an extraordinary one, and worthy of revival, especially written in Collis's jolly, narrative style, interspersed with other accounts of famous men-women. (Kirkus UK)

Bare-bones biography of a purported WWI hero who was in fact a woman. Lillias Irma Valerie Barker, born in 1895 on the Channel Island of Jersey, was a tomboy whose father taught her cricket and boxing, though Valerie also attended a convent school and had a formal debutante ball. She married in 1918 but fled her husband within six weeks and enrolled in the Women's Royal Air Force. At war's end, she took up with Australian soldier Ernest Pearce Crouch and had two children; when the couple split up, Valerie gave up the daughter for adoption. In 1922, she arrived in Brighton, young son in tow, claiming to be war hero "Victor Barker." Victor met and married Elfrida Haward, supporting her and the son (who had learned to call Victor "Daddy") as a stage actor, antiques shop owner, and gentleman farmer. In 1929, after a restaurant venture failed, Victor was arrested for contempt of court, and her true identity became known. A series of lurid newspaper stories followed; Elfrida left Victor, claiming to the pres