Digital Transgender Archive

Bert Errol, in character, wearing an elaborate white dress. Process print, 1925.

Sincerely yours, Bert Errol.

Part of James Gardiner Collection: photograph album labelled ‘Drag’.

He is gazing to the side, with a charged facial expression. Bert Errol (1883-1949), was to some extent extent the British counterpart to Julian Eltinge. By the age of eighteen he was appearing as a concert singer in his home town of Birmingham, singing in a strong tenor voice. By the time of his first appearance in London, at the Pavilion in 1909, his act had evolved into a series of impersonations of popular female singers, as well as characters of his own devising. As his act developed into the 1920s, it became more comedy-based, and his routines featured lightning-fast costume changes. Film exists of one such routine, showing how the rapid changes were effected with the unseen help of his wife, who waited in the wings with specially made costumes and props at the ready. His long and successful career took him all over Europe and on several highly successful tours of America. Despite his large and definitely masculine features, photographs reveal a very stylish and fashionable figure, and he enjoyed a long and successful career, dying in Brighton in 1949. The present photograph shows him in a typically glamourous pose, wearing a draped lace costume with a large headdress somewhere between a mantilla and a Russian kokoshnik (James Gardiner)