Digital Transgender Archive

Maitland Cecil Melville Wills, in drag, posing in a black corset and heavy skirt; on Shrove Tuesday 1911. Photographic postcard, 1911.

Hulme Hall Shrove Tuesday. 1911. Your loving 'daughter' Cecil.

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

He is wearing attire of a "wench" or country girl, standing in front of a faint painted backdrop. Inscriptions on the verso of this card and on the verso of Wellcome Library no. 2044535i identify the subject as Maitland Cecil Melville Wills M.C., J.P., (1891-1966), educated at Charterhouse and Manchester University, later a prolific writer of detective novels under the name Cecil M. Wills. He is here a student at Manchester having a laugh dressed in unconvincing amateur comic drag as an 18th-century country wench with laced bodice and a mob-cap. Certain photographic studios (such as the publisher of this card 'Rapid Electric Studio', of Sheffield and branches) would carry a variety of fancy dress for subjects who wished to be photographed in costume