At Last! The Book . Barbara Bell Invites You . Barbara's Lesbian Century . A Spanking Good Read . Rodin in Lewes

Barbara's Flight Map of the Lesbian Century

The work of turning Barbara's taped memories into a full scale book led us to research some obscure and interesting byways of lesbian history.Barbara's is in many ways an escape story; perhaps untypical; full of miraculous good fortune. She was lucky as a young woman to meet older lesbians and gay men who passed on what they knew, took her to a gay bar, introduced her to the lavender-tinged music of Cole Porter and Noël Coward.

Other working-class Lancashire women were not so fortunate. Stories we uncovered spoke of claustrophobia and a poverty unrelieved by escape. To many ordinary people an obvious lesbian was 'an object of derision, fair game for crude jokes and brutal insults'. At Blackpool, Colonel Victor Barker, who had achieved national fame after her Brighton marriage to another woman, exhibited herself as a freak show. At Rawtenstall, a few miles outside Blackburn, in 1948, Margaret (or Bill) Allen murdered a neighbour who had come to her door to borrow a cup of sugar. 'I didn't do it for money,' she told the arresting officer, 'I was in one of my funny moods'. Bill Allen had been dressing as a man for thirteen years. Despite her defence counsel's argument that her butch lesbianism constituted a form of insanity, Allen was condemned to death, one of the last women to be hanged in Britain.

We found that Barbara's story sheds important light on lesbian involvement in several key areas. The histories of the role of lesbians in teaching, in the co-operative housing movement, and in the maintenance of the British Empire, remain to be written but Just Take Your Frock Off also illuminates small particulars in lesbian social history. It was good, hearing about Barbara's encounters in Gunter's in Park Lane, to learn that the author of the pulp exposé Twilight Women Around the World was not entirely fantasising when he wrote that 'a friendly nod between two tweedy English women in a tea-room may well be a signal that arranges a "courtesy exchange".'

It made intuitive sense to us to suppose that Marlene Dietrich had a British lesbian fanbase so we enjoyed having that confirmed by a photo of Barbara in about 1932 in which she had clearly modelled her appearance on pictures of Dietrich appearing in many movie magazines at that time.

Having read with disbelief a nineteenth-century pornographic description of lesbians using 'an exact life-size reproduction of a man's organ of generation... that contained works... which cause some liquid to spurt out in imitation of the natural process', we were fascinated to hear of a woman making and using a similar toy in wartime London, although it is probably now impossible to tell which came first; actual lesbian practice or a male fantasy of lesbian practice.

Perhaps most importantly Just Take Your Frock Off documents lesbian involvement in police work. Until the First World War when lesbians broke into the profession - hust as previously they had opened by the profession of medicine - women had been employed only occasionally as detectives. The establishment of women as police officers in Britain was largely thanks to the determined efforts of the lesbians involved during the war in setting up the Womens Police Volunteers (later the Women Police Service). WPS leaders Mary Allen and Margaret Damer Dawson (who enjoyed a 'close association and intimate friendship') faced virulent opposition from male colleagues in their pursuit of a permanent professional body of women police. After the war Home Office backing was withdrawn from the WPS although WPS policewomen were retained in some areas, including Brighton and Hove, where Mabel Read was commended in 1928 for arresting a man stealing from a beach hut and awarded the Silver Jubilee medal in 1935.

In Londonthe Metropolitan Police began recruiting its own experimental force of 100 women despite policemen who looked upon them as a 'collection of freakish females full of fanciful and abnormal ideas'. The Metropolitan Commissioner was keen to distance this new body from its predecessor which he regarded as too militant, masculineand extreme. Nevertheless the new training, regulations and uniforms were based on the WPS model and many of the staff were the same, so that the force which Barbara Bell joined in 1939 was more or less the direct descendant of Mary Allenand Margaret Dawson's child.

Barbara remembers that many of the 'high-up policewomen, the older ones with grey hair, were lesbians' - among them Lilan Wyles who worked with CID taking the statements of children and women involved in sexual offences; Dorothy Peto, a tall, masculine and increasingly eccentric woman who had trained with the WPS in the First World War and risen via posts in Birmingham and Liverpool to become Superintendent of the Metropolitan Women's Scetion; and her second in command Bertha Clayden who had also been in the WPS. Of the rank and file, Joan Lock, serving at West End Central in the 1950s, reckoned ten to fifteen percent were of 'the confirmed spinster type'.This percentage was undoubtedly increased over time by WPCs leaving the force to marry.

Barbara's life offers a flight map of the lesbian century, an individual account of paths taken by many other lesbians and were-they-weren't-they spinsters - from a depressed Northern town to London, from the suburbs to the colonies and at last from the colonies to Brighton, our great refugee camp by the sea where so many stories end happily. Thank you, Barbara, for sharing your stories with us.