Colonel Barker and the Golden Mile Sideshows

The Golden Mile in the 1930s

Between the wars, the stretch of Promenade between Central Pier and the Tower was a carnival of stalls, freak shows, fortune tellers and "educational" exhibits. It became known as the Golden Mile because of the money that changed hands there. The showmen who ran its booths understood one thing above all: notoriety sold tickets. If someone's name was in the Sunday papers, a Golden Mile operator would try to put them in a booth by the following summer.

That made the Mile a mirror for the anxieties of the age, especially about sex and gender. One showman in 1930 exhibited a man billed as being male on one side and female on the other, until the police looked into it and decided he was entirely male. Exhibits like these let holidaymakers gawp at what they had been told was abnormal, while telling themselves they were simply curious. It was against that backdrop that Colonel Barker arrived.

Who was Colonel Barker?

Barker was born in Jersey in 1895, raised as a girl and grew up in Surrey. During the First World War Barker enlisted in the Women's Royal Air Force, married an Australian officer, and later had two children with another Australian serviceman, with whom Barker farmed for a time in West Sussex.

Then, in 1923, at the age of 28, Barker began living as a man. That same year he married a young woman, Elfrida Haward, at a Brighton church, and the couple lived as husband and wife. Over the following years Barker claimed a string of military titles and honours, styled himself a colonel, ran businesses and, in 1926, drifted into the National Fascisti, working as secretary to one of its leaders. It was not a period anyone today would hold up as heroic. It was a life of reinvention, bluff, debt and constant risk of exposure.

Exposure came in 1929. Arrested in London for failing to appear in bankruptcy proceedings, Barker was sent first to a men's prison and then, once the authorities decided he was legally a woman, to Holloway. The case became a national sensation. Barker was convicted of making a false statement on the 1923 marriage certificate, and the judge, the Recorder of London, sentenced him to nine months in a women's prison, declaring that Barker had "profaned the house of God". The papers fell over themselves to cover every detail, and "Colonel Barker" became a household name for all the wrong reasons.

Barker's life after prison was hard. Work was difficult to find, there were further brushes with the law, and he kept moving and changing names. He died in Suffolk in 1960, living as a man to the end.

"On a Strange Honeymoon"

In 1937 Barker met the Blackpool showman Luke Gannon, who knew exactly what to do with a famous name. Together they created a Golden Mile attraction called "On a Strange Honeymoon". It presented Barker and a "bride" as a newly married couple, with the gimmick that the pair had to be kept apart and that visitors could try to win money from Gannon in the process.

It was a sensation. Newspapers claimed that more than a million people passed through that summer. Whether or not that figure is exact, it gives a sense of how many holidaymakers were curious, amused or shocked enough to pay their money.

Adverts for the show in the town's own collections are a fascinating piece of evidence. One, from a Promenade hoarding in early June 1937, talks about "Barker and his or her bride", hedging its bets on exactly who and what the visitor was going to see. That uncertainty was the whole selling point.

Two ways of telling the story

One of the most interesting things researchers have found is how differently the press told Barker's story depending on where it was written. The London papers mostly mocked Barker as a woman pretending to be a man, or as a lesbian in disguise. Blackpool's local papers, by contrast, more often simply described a man and his wife.

It would be too much to call that acceptance. A sideshow is still a sideshow, and Barker was being displayed for money. But it does say something about the resort's attitude. Blackpool made its living from showmanship and from people who did not fit, and its local voice was often more matter-of-fact than the national one. That same practical tolerance would help the town's gay scene grow forty years later.

Why Barker matters to Blackpool's queer history

Barker does not fit neatly into any modern label. Some historians write about Barker as a trans man, others as a gender-nonconforming person whose choices were shaped by money and survival as much as identity. What is clear is that Barker lived as a man for most of the rest of his life, at a time when that carried enormous risk, and that for one summer Blackpool was where the whole country came to stare.

The episode also shows the double-edged nature of the Golden Mile. It gave people who were different a place to earn a living and be seen, but only on terms set by showmen and by a paying public that wanted a spectacle. The story of the town's queer community over the next century is, in part, the story of moving from being looked at to being in charge of the show.

Rediscovering Barker

For decades Barker's Blackpool summer was little more than a footnote. That has changed.

• Blackpool StoryTrails, an augmented-reality walking trail project, commissioned the Blackpool artist Joseph Doubtfire, who researched Barker's story and brought it to the trail.
• In June 2024, during Pride week, Doubtfire gave a talk at Showtown on the compelling story of Colonel Barker, with the Electric Pink Voices choir singing beforehand.
• Showtown's Pride Beside the Seaside tours now include Barker alongside Vesta Tilley, Terri Rogers and Funny Girls, and the museum has published research on the show and the very different ways it was reported.

Visiting the Golden Mile today

The Golden Mile is still there, between Central Pier and the Tower, though the booths are now amusement arcades, rock shops and takeaways rather than freak shows. Walk it with Barker's story in mind and you get a sense of how crowded, noisy and theatrical it must have been in 1937. Showtown is a few minutes away on Bank Hey Street if you want to dig deeper.

Tour dates and museum opening times can change, so check before you go.