Tommy Keele: the First World War soldier who wore a frock

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Like most young British men of the Great War generation, Tommy Keele served his country on the Western Front. Unlike the others, however, he did it dressed as a woman. As the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war approaches, the story of one of the British Army’s least typical soldiers is important for its reminder that the conflict wasn’t fought by sepia-toned emotional strangers, but by people just like us with a capacity for anger, cynicism, prejudice and pride.

Tommy was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive in 1991 at the age of 98. The interview tapes, which are now available online, reveal a man speaking with surprising frankness. For the first three years of the war, Tommy was an ordinary lance corporal in the Middlesex Regiment. At the start of 1917, he joined the Ace of Spades concert party as “First Girl”. Under the stage name Dot Keele, he took female parts in theatres behind the lines for the entertainment of sex-starved soldiers. “The audience never imagined,” he says, “that during the war years, in France, they would see variety acts like us.”

Tommy had acted professionally before the war (including a role riding a horse at a Drury Lane theatre), and he relished the chance to return to the stage. “People didn’t always know I was a man dressed up as a woman,” he boasts, recalling how a colonel was invited to place a bet on which of the two Spades “girls” was genuinely female. After carefully studying the candidates – Tommy and Dolly Clair (whom Tommy describes as “a fat little man”) – the colonel confidently placed £50 on Tommy. “I was wearing a very low-cut evening dress. I used to put a dark red line half way down my chest, and then shade it off, so the side was a little pink. It looked like a cleavage.” The colonel was fooled – and completely refused to accept that Tommy was a man. “So I had to go along to his barracks to prove I was a little lance corporal in the Middlesex Regiment. He was disgusted.”

Occasional disgust was balanced by the adoration of Tommy’s fans, the soldiers. He happily remembers their requests for signed photos which brought him “a nice little income”. His roles ranged from song-and-dance routines to serious dramatic parts. In a long-forgotten melodrama, The White Man, he played a young Indian girl: “I had to be glamorous and walk across the stage looking after this little boy who was going to become a lord. The idea was that they were taking my charge to England, and I was so heartbroken that I went behind a rock, fired a revolver and killed myself.”

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