Drag: A British History

Jacob Bloomfield 

Drag: A British History illuminates how drag performance has endured as a central and cherished part of British popular culture despite the controversy the art form sometimes aroused. Drag aficionados will learn about new archival discoveries and might be surprised by the popularity, boldness, and ingenuity of drag well over a century before RuPaul’s Drag Race. Newcomers will get a brisk survey of significant people, places, and events in British drag history. All will come away, I hope, with an appreciation for drag’s longstanding, unique position as a conspicuous forum for people from all walks of life to consider gender and sexuality, as well as a myriad of other contemporary issues.

NOTCHES: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your academic interest in drag began during your master’s when you came across the 1870–71 Boulton and Park case. How did that specific moment guide your methodological or theoretical approach throughout the book?

Jacob Bloomfield: The Boulton and Park case shows that drag, cross-dressing, and female impersonation could be associated with many concepts historically. For example: everyday entertainment, amusement, and, yes, transgressive sexuality. Famously, the prosecution’s case against Boulton and Park faltered because it could not definitively link drag and same-sex desire and the pair’s female impersonations were, in fact, celebrated by many members of the public before, during, and after the trial. Drag continued to operate in this way well into the twentieth century: it didn’t mean just one thing and continued to be endemic to British popular culture despite sometimes arousing controversy. 

NOTCHES: You conducted research in archives like the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays and the BFI archives. Were there any archival discoveries—documents or images—that reshaped your understanding of drag’s cultural role in unexpected ways?

JB: One surprise was that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was not as stodgy as one might expect a theatre censor to be. Yes, employees of the Office could often be pearl-clutchers: ‘Too many jokes bearing on the eternal subject of sexual intercourse,’ wrote an Office Reader about the 1940 show Strip Ahoy, ‘There are moments when I wish God had not created Man and Woman, but had thought of something else!’ But the censor was frequently tolerant of drag, even drag that the Office found tawdry. ‘There is no law which prevents female impersonation on the stage; it is in fact as old as the stage,’ wrote the Lord Chamberlain’s Secretary Ronald John Hill in defence of the risqué 1958 drag show We’re No Ladies.

NOTCHES: You emphasise in the book that drag’s power lies in its ordinariness and ubiquity—even amid censorship and controversy. Can you unpack how focusing on the everyday or mundane aspects of drag helps us rethink its place in popular culture?

JB: Drag was and is an adaptable artistic medium. You had drag on gramophone record and radio (though we think of it as a visual art form); in film from its early days; on television; and in theatres and clubs. Touring drag theatricals were continuously travelling throughout the country and some localities might have local star female impersonators, like Rhyl’s Billie Manders. So throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people from various walks of life were engaging with drag on multiple levels.

NOTCHES: Your portrayal of Danny La Rue as emblematic of ‘conservative drag’, lamenting broader social change even while performing in the ‘permissive’ 1960s, is intriguing. How do you see that tension between conservatism and performance artistry reflected in present-day drag?

JB:Many drag fans would argue that drag is an inherently progressive or politically virtuous art form. One is welcome to define drag that way, but I think that sort of definition creates difficulties. For instance, to say that all drag is inherently progressive means that one has to, first, watch a performance and, afterwards, deem it sufficiently progressive before finally labelling it as drag – or does the artist’s intent matter more than how the audience receives it? Then there’s Danny La Rue’s act that was lauded by the establishment and consistently bristled against social liberalism, while also taking potshots at doctrinaire conservative figures like Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse. Given that, where would La Rue fit in if drag has to be progressive? To argue that drag must be politically right-on in order to be drag seems like a very difficult definition to maintain to me.

I prefer definitions of drag that are capacious and easy to remember, if imperfect, rules of thumb. My own is: ‘A kind of performance that comments on gender.’ I think this definition applies to drag in the past and in the present, though it may be less salient as drag moves to more avant-garde territories. I also like Dominic Janes’ definition of drag historically: ‘cross-dressing with sexual implications.’

One could make an argument that RuPaul’s Drag Race represents present-day conservative drag. Framing art as a competition where the supposed weakest artist is banished – keeping in mind that the artists on Drag Race tend to be from marginalised groups too – seems antithetical to queer and artistic community building. In my book, I discuss the leftist drag commune Colvillia. I don’t think the residents there would have kicked anyone out for dressing shabbily.

NOTCHES: Arthur Lucan’s Old Mother Riley is a recurring figure—so indelible that Lucan died in the character’s costume—whose appearances on stage and screen were imbued with social commentary and pathos as well as humour. How did you navigate the tension between the dame as comic figure and the dame as an emotionally evocative cultural mirror?

JB: Working-class entertainment has often been cast as simple escapism. During Arthur Lucan’s heyday, in the 1930s through 1950s, cultural commentators who felt that art should uplift the working classes bemoaned the quality of working-class popular culture. The Old Mother Riley plays, films, radio programmes, and gramophone records – there was a whole media empire built around this character – were ignored or dismissed by cultural cognoscenti, and still are. Old Mother Riley media was reliant on broad humour, for sure, but amidst that could be substantive political, social, and cultural critique that spoke to working-class concerns. For example, the 1939 film Old Mother Riley, MP sees the dame running for a parliamentary seat on a platform of universal employment and protection of public parks, with her opponent being her former boss who is also a property baron. It’s no wonder that Love on the Dole (1941) director John Baxter, who directed three Riley films, described the dame as ‘a great character for propaganda purposes.’ I think you also see in the Riley films some interesting absurdist humour that anticipates media like A Hard Day’s Night (1964). I’m thinking in this instance of a pie fight at the end of Old Mother Riley’s New Venture (1949) that gets so out of hand that it breaks the fourth wall.

NOTCHES: Your chapter on Les Rouges et Noirs—the ex-servicemen’s drag troupe turned stars of early British ‘talkie’ films—offers a glimpse into drag’s interwar cultural appeal. What do their performances suggest or illuminate about that era?

JB: After the First World War, there was a cultural discussion around the extent to which the arts and popular culture should be addressing the War or whether the general public just wanted to move on. I think we can relate to this regarding media about the covid-19 pandemic and, to me, it seems like there’s little appetite for covid-themed media right now. Cultural consumers in the immediate aftermath of the First World War appeared to settle on wanting war-themed media that purportedly educated them about Tommies’ wartime experiences without getting too dour or bloody. Les Rouges et Noirs thrived in this milieu. They presented themselves as a facsimile of an authentic concert party drag show; the kind Tommies had seen on the front. Beyond that, audiences found the female impersonation in Les Rouges shows to be genuinely beautiful and alluring. I’d like to add that interwar audiences were not dupes. Many openly acknowledged that the war-themed media they were consuming was not entirely true to life, but yet they tended to prefer ultimately uplifting plays and films about the War over more realistically harrowing material.

NOTCHES: You expose how drag has always had international connections—for instance, Julian Eltinge performing before King Edward VII at Windsor Castle. How do these transnational ties shape our understanding of drag as both a confined tradition and a migratory cultural force?

JB: RuPaul’s Drag Race has often been credited with shaping a more globally homogeneous drag scene in the present, but global networks of drag have been around since the nineteenth century at least. Just look at the aforementioned Ernest Boulton, for instance. After the trial, Boulton had a successful career in the U.S. without evidently changing much about his act, save for changing his stage name to Ernest Byne. This was not unusual. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the acts of British male and female impersonators travelled well and successfully outside of the country. Likewise, drag artists from other countries found success in Britain. Especially as notions of glamour became more homogeneous across the West due to influences like Hollywood, drag artists the world over were drawing from the same reference points. 

I have to admit an error in the book. While American female impersonator Julian Eltinge did carry out a successful tour of Europe, including Britain, from 1906 to 1907, the recent, thorough biography of Eltinge by Andrew L. Erdman has concluded that the American female impersonator probably did not meet King Edward VII. Nor was Eltinge given a white bulldog by the king, as the entertainer claimed. The story was likely one of Eltinge’s many tall tales that he used to add lustre to his image. I am grateful to Erdman for finally correcting the record.

NOTCHES: Finally, given your work now extends to exploring the reception of artists like Little Richard, how might you envision the evolution of drag history as a field? What gaps remain, and where should future scholars—especially younger, queer historians—look next?

JB: There’s definitely a lot more to discover vis-à-vis British drag history. I personally am hoping to illuminate the history of the aforementioned global networks of drag further in future projects. There are figures I bring up in the book, like the early twentieth-century ‘Canadian Indian’ female impersonator Mystery Gauze, about whom biographical details are presently murky. There’s an interesting historical curiosity, a novel called Chorus of Witches (1959), whose action takes place amidst an ex-servicemen’s drag revue. The author, Paul Buckland, is a total enigma but he probably had firsthand experience of being in one or more of those revues. I’d love for someone to uncover more information about Buckland. Even the very famous figures I cover in the book like Danny La Rue have received scant attention from scholars and, in general, I think cultural historians too often overlook middlebrow entertainment like the kind La Rue offered. If anyone wishes to posit new interpretations of the people and performances I cover in the book, I’d adore that, even if one wishes to criticise my approach. I very much want my work to spark conversation and not be the final word on anything.

Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Associated Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. Jacob is the author of Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023). His second monograph (under contract) will be about the historical reception to, and cultural impact of, musician Little Richard.

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