Dandy Style, Manchester Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, looks at 250 years of men’s fashion. So why is there a big poster of a Victorian woman in gallery 18? Who is she, and what on earth is she doing there? The woman in question stands dressed in a dapper man’s frock coat, holding a top hat and cane, and looking quite the swell.
Vesta Tilley in character
As well she should, for this is Matilda Alice Powles, also known as Vesta Tilley. Tilley was a Victorian musical hall star, with an act as a male impersonator. Although there were other male impersonators, Tilley was the biggest and most highly paid music hall star of the Victorian era. She made her fortune satirising male roles and behaviours in songs and comic sketches.
Born in Worcester in 1864, she was the second of thirteen children. Her father had a job as the manager of a music hall in Gloucester and introduced her to the stage at three. Matilda found herself drawn to singing and acting.
By the age of five, she was appearing dressed in male attire, imitating J. Sims Reeves, a popular tenor of the day. As her popularity grew, her father gave up his musical hall job to take her on tour, where he billed her as ‘The Great Little Tilley’.
At 14, she had adopted the stage name of Vesta Tilley and was appearing in ‘breeches roles’ as principal boy in a variety of pantomimes. As she grew, so did the number of her onstage male personas, as she added dandies, policemen, soldiers, and vicars to her repertoire.
Vesta Tilley as Principal Boy, credit: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Jack Tar credit: Queermusic heritage, Messenger Boy credit: British News Archive, Soldier credit: Sheffield ac.uk
She said that she felt she could express herself better if she were dressed as a boy. She was popular with the crowds; working men admired her for her well-observed lampooning of the upper-class males and women admired her independence.
The 1880s saw the rise of The New Woman. A feminist ideal referring to an independent, free-spirited woman, the New Woman was no longer chained by domesticity. They lived their lives in public, outside of the home. These women took more control of their lives, held down jobs, smoked, rode bicycles, sought broader educational opportunities and no longer allowed themselves to be constrained by outmoded forms of restrictive dress, adapting more masculine forms of attire and cutting their hair.
But Tilley didn’t hold with such ‘mannish women’ and said so in an article for the Pittsburgh Gazette Home Journal in April 1904;
“While my business is that of impersonating male characters, I heartily detest anything mannish in a woman’s private life. There is nothing so charming as the home woman, whose soft voice and gentle manner has done so much to make the world better…”
For Tilley, male impersonation was an act. She only dressed as a man on stage. She didn’t cut her hair, but plaited it and hid it under wigs. As women’s underwear of the period stressed the female figure, she had male underwear made for her, but only for the performance. She also sang in a clear soprano voice and theatres always introduced her as ‘Miss Vesta Tilley’, so there was never any doubt about her gender. Off stage, she wore women’s clothes;
“all characterised by a dainty refinement and simplicity… soft frills and chiffons, feminine flounces and fripperies–all in direct contrast with the tailor-made suits in which she sings her world renowned songs.”
-‘The Bohemian Girl’, Vesta Tilley at Home, Music Hall and Theatre Review, 7th July 1899
Vesta Tilley, The Tatler 30th August 1907 credit: British Newspaper Archive
The result was an ambiguity. The audiences knew they were watching a woman dressed as a man. Yet there was an intrigue about how this person seemingly could be both. Her performance was just that, however. It was gender-neutral, confined to the stage and didn’t threaten the gender politics of the day, unlike other male impersonators, such as Annie Hindle.
In 1888 Tilley married theatre impresario Walter de Frece, who began managing her career, leading to several successful America tours. Back home she became known as ‘The London Idol’.
By the 1890s, she was no longer wearing theatrical costumes, but dressing in men’s tailored garments, right down to the collar buttons and cufflinks, the better to represent the men she was impersonating, many of them in male evening dress. The details were as important to her as they would be to any dandy.
Dressed as a well-to-do toff, Burlington Bertie became her most famous song. Written in 1900 by Harry B. Norris, it was about an aristocratic idler and his life of leisure.
Burlington Bertie Sheet music. Public Domain
Burlington Bertie's the latest young jay
He rents a swell flat somewhere Kensington way.
He spends the good oof that his pater has made
Along with the Brandy and Soda Brigade.
A girl wants a brooch or a new diamond ring
And thinks a seal jacket is just now the thing,
Or sees a new bonnet she likes oh! So much.
Her simple remark is, 'Now, who can I touch?'
What price Burlington Bertie,
the boy with the Hyde Park drawl,
What price Burlington Bertie,
the boy with the Bond Street crawl?
A nice little supper at the Savoy,
Oh! What a duck of a boy,
'So free' says she, 'with L.s.d.,
Burlington Bertie's the boy for me.'
Burlington Arcade was then, as it is now, an exclusive shopping area in the West End and a place where many dandies went to shop, promenade, and to be seen.
Burlington stocks, or pre-tied cravats, © Manchester Art Gallery
Tilley’s song became so famous that another male impersonator, Ellie Shields, later parodied it in 1915. Burlington Bertie from Bow is a comic song about an idler from the poverty-stricken East End area of Bow; his lifestyle an ironic parallel to the upper-class moneyed idlers of the West End. The song’s popularity was such that Tilley’s original version is largely forgotten today.
“Burlington Bertie from Bow” from ‘Star’ (1968) 20th Century Fox
In 1912, Tilley was asked to perform at the first ever Royal Variety Performance before King George and Queen Mary. The Queen was so scandalised at the sight of a woman wearing trousers she spent the entire act hiding behind her programme.
When the First World War began, Tilley used her stage persona as a soldier to recruit men to the army, with well-known songs like “Your King and Country Need You”; a jingoist emotional appeal from women of Britain for the men in the audience to do their duty. She performed all over the country, including the Palace Theatre in Manchester on October 14th 1914, although not necessarily to enthusiastic audiences. Katie Morter remembers…
Recruitment Sergeants were often on stage at these evenings, signing up men on the spot. Young women or children in the aisles regularly handed those that didn’t join up white feathers for cowardice. Tilley soon became known as ‘England’s Greatest Recruiting Sergeant’, enlisting so many men during one week in Hackney, that they became known as “The Vesta Tilley Platoon”.
But as the war went on, Tilley questioned her actions. Wearing Hospital Blues, the blue flannel uniform of an invalided soldier, and singing songs like “I’m glad I’ve got a Bit of Blighty One,” she began raising money through her performances for injured and disabled soldiers sent back from the Front.
In 1919, Walter de Frece was knighted for services to the war effort and became a conservative MP. Having now become Lady Matilda Alice de Frece, Vesta Tilley retired from performing with a year-long farewell tour. When de Frece retired as an MP in 1931, the pair moved to Monaco, where they spent the rest of their lives. Walter died in 1935 and Tilley herself died in 1952 during a visit to London.
Tilley sought to reflect the fashions of the time, no more so than in the black frock coat she is wearing in the poster in gallery 18. It’s a style that is mirrored in the painting of William Greaves on the wall opposite.
(L) Vesta Tilley credit: wiki commons (R) Walter Greaves (1917) by Sir William Nicholson © Manchester Art Gallery
Tilley and Greaves are dressed in an almost identical in style. It was a time when men’s fashions became increasingly formal, becoming progressively darker and sombre in tone. Their stories, however, are opposites. After 50 years on the stage, she was one of the most well known and wealthiest musical hall artists of the time. Walter Greaves was an assistant to the artist J. McNeill’s Whistler, who taught Graves to paint. Whistler himself was a dandy and Greaves would spend a lot of money trying to imitate Whistler’s dress and manner. But as Whistler’s star rose he gathered more influential friends and Greaves found himself excluded from the circle, his life spiralling into poverty and obscurity.
Tilley retired as the social landscape began to shift. With the arrival of film, the interest in live musical hall performances had begun to dwindle. And as the 1920s progressed, for some wearing masculine clothing was becoming more about an expression of self rather than impersonation; more about gender non-conformity than gender neutrality. But Vesta Tilley, irrespective of her views of ‘the mannish woman’, blazed a trail of style for them to follow.