Vesta Tilley and the Male Impersonators

A town built for variety

By the 1890s Blackpool had turned itself into the great playground of the industrial north. Mill towns emptied for their wakes weeks, trains poured into Central and North stations, and the visitors wanted entertainment from breakfast until bedtime. The piers, the Tower, the Winter Gardens, the theatres along the Promenade and countless hotel lounges and cafés all became stages. That is why the town still calls itself the home of variety, and why so much of its queer history begins not in a bar but in a spotlight.

Variety thrived on surprise, and one of its most reliable surprises was a performer who did not seem to be what they appeared. Women dressed as dandies and soldiers, men in frocks played pantomime dames, and audiences who might have been scandalised by the same thing in the street roared their approval from the stalls. Blackpool, which was always a little looser in its seaside clothes than the towns its visitors came from, was the perfect place for it.

The girl who became Vesta Tilley

Vesta Tilley was born Matilda Powles in 1864 and was on stage by the age of five. At eight she was already dressing as a boy for her act, billed as "the Great Little Tilley". When she made her first London season in 1874 the posters could not quite decide how to present her, since audiences were not sure whether they were looking at a boy or a girl. She settled on the stage name Vesta Tilley, borrowing the first part from a popular brand of matches, and kept it for the rest of her career.

Her speciality was the young man about town: the swell in a perfectly cut suit, the over-confident masher, the soldier and sailor home on leave. She studied men's tailoring and men's mannerisms with real care, then sent them up with a light, knowing touch. It was gentle mockery rather than a sneer, which is part of why everyone could laugh, including the men she was imitating.

What made her more than a novelty was who was laughing. Her audiences were largely women, and many of them were the young working women who came to Blackpool from the mills. Watching a woman step into masculinity, borrow its swagger and then poke fun at it gave them something they did not get anywhere else. Today's historians of gender and performance see her as one of the clearest examples of how the Victorian and Edwardian stage let people try on other ways of being, safely, under the cover of comedy.

Tilley in Blackpool

Tilley played Blackpool many times during the years of her greatest fame, and the town treated her like royalty. A programme from Blackpool's Palace Theatre in 1909 billed her as "The World's Favourite Artiste", a phrase that gives some idea of where she sat in the showbusiness pecking order. By the 1890s she was the highest-earning woman in Britain, and the resort's big halls were exactly the kind of venue that could pay what she was worth.

The Palace stood on the Promenade and was one of the resort's grandest variety houses in the years before the First World War. For holidaymakers who had saved all year for their week by the sea, a night watching Vesta Tilley was a highlight to talk about back home. Surviving programmes and posters in the town's heritage collections are a reminder that Blackpool was one of the places where she was most loved.

The Royal Variety and the farewell

In 1912 Tilley appeared at the first Royal Variety Performance. The story goes that Queen Mary hid her face behind her programme when Tilley walked on in trousers, which tells you how close to the line male impersonation still was, even for its biggest star. It did her career no harm at all.

She had married the theatre manager Walter de Frece in 1890. He built up a large chain of variety theatres across England, was knighted in 1919, and that same year stood for Parliament. Tilley left the stage around the same time to support his political career, and in 1920 she made a long farewell tour. At her final performance the last song is said to have earned a forty-minute standing ovation. From then on she lived as Lady de Frece.

A Blackpool MP's wife

Here the story loops back to the Fylde coast. In 1924 Walter de Frece was elected as Member of Parliament for Blackpool, and he held the seat until 1931. So for seven years the woman who had once been the town's favourite male impersonator was the wife of its MP. The couple spent much of that time on the French Riviera for her health, and his critics complained that he was rarely seen in the constituency, but the link between the town and its old stage favourite was there in the record books.

Walter de Frece died in 1935. Tilley lived on until 1952 and was buried beside him.

Gender play on the Blackpool stage after Tilley

Tilley was not the last performer to bring gender play to Blackpool audiences. The town's later variety and magic scene included one of the most remarkable stories in British showbusiness.

Terri Rogers was a ventriloquist and magician who started performing in the 1950s. She was one of the first people in Britain to have gender-affirming surgery on the NHS, and after transitioning she had to rebuild her career almost from scratch. She returned to the stage in 1968, toured widely with acts including the Krankies, and was a familiar face on television through the 1970s.

Her act was a beautifully judged contrast. Rogers performed in evening gowns and tiaras, while her dummy, Shorty Harris, was a foul-mouthed, macho, working-class character who said all the things she could not. She played the Blackpool Bonanza in 1978, and she was a regular at the gala shows of the Blackpool Magicians' Club convention until the late 1980s. Away from the stage she became an expert in topology, the branch of magic built on shapes and impossible objects, wrote books that magicians still rate highly, invented tricks that were sold commercially and worked on illusions with Paul Daniels and David Copperfield.

Rogers matters to Blackpool's history because she was out in plain sight at the heart of the town's entertainment world at a time when very few trans people could be. Showtown, the town's museum of fun and entertainment, now includes her in its Pride Beside the Seaside tours alongside Tilley.

From the Palace to Funny Girls

There is a straight line, in a manner of speaking, from Tilley's swells to the drag queens who made Blackpool famous a century later. The pantomime dame, the music-hall male impersonator and the end-of-the-pier drag act all fed into the all-male cabaret that took over Funny Girls from 1994. The difference is that Tilley's audiences could tell themselves it was all just a bit of fun. Today's audiences know perfectly well that it is also about identity, freedom and belonging, and they come for exactly that reason.

Where to see this history today

• Showtown on Bank Hey Street runs Pride Beside the Seaside tours that cover Vesta Tilley, Terri Rogers, Colonel Barker and Funny Girls. A free version has run during the national Heritage Open Days festival.
• The Winter Gardens and the Tower Ballroom are still standing and still hosting shows, so you can sit in the same kind of grand Victorian auditorium that Tilley's audiences knew.
• Funny Girls on Dickson Road is the living end of the story. Watch a show and you are watching the modern descendant of Blackpool's long love affair with performers who play with gender.

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