The heyday of the gay guardsmen

00:00 07:53

Peter Parker has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In 1943 the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor placed an advertisement in Exchange & Mart offering a pair of trooper’s breeches for sale. A number of men replied, one asking ‘Have they been worn by a trooper or just yourself?’, while another observed: ‘It is always good to see the boys pulling themselves into tight troopers and then admire the “smashing finish”.’

Members of the Household Division of the British Army, in their figure-hugging breeches and scarlet coats, had always held a particular appeal for homosexual men. It was therefore fortunate that, though the military authorities publicly denied it, there was a long tradition in Guards regiments of combining ceremonial duties with casual prostitution.

It is for this reason that while I was researching Some Men in London, my two-volume anthology of queer life in the capital from 1945 to 1967, guardsmen kept popping up – in relationships with people such as Stephen Spender, John Lehmann and J.R. Ackerley, or providing more temporary services for others.

In his diaries of the 1940s and 1950s the civil servant George Lucas provides a startlingly detailed record of many evenings spent at Marble Arch seeking sex and solace among the guardsmen who congregated there. Such liaisons carried risks of course: Lucas was several times threatened and robbed, while the theatre critic James Agate, whose flat was hung with photographs by Angus McBean of soldiers who had somehow mislaid their uniforms, found himself being blackmailed by a guardsman he had bedded.

The historian James Pope-Hennessy also made such regular use of guardsmen that when he once slept with a woman, she heard him mumble sleepily from beneath the sheets the following morning: ‘Are you going to shave now, darling, or when you get back to the barracks?’

The significant role these mostly obliging soldiers have played in the history of British homosexuality goes back a long way.