The dress is not important
A while ago I watched Rogue Heroes, a BBC drama about the formation of the British Special Air Service. This new unit emerged during desperate fighting in the African theatre of World War Two, in 1941.
Most major characters in the series are dramatized portrayals of the real-life individuals who were there at the birth of this regiment. Episode two introduces us to the master of military deception, decorated war hero, and nemesis of Axis intelligence gatherers, Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke. He is sought out by the only major character in the series who is entirely fictional: Eve Mansour, a Free French intelligence officer working with the Allies. She enters a building that is the Cairo headquarters of the British intelligence service in the Middle East. It is a ramshackle space and at first seems deserted. She calls out in hope of finding anyone in.
The response she gets reinforces the show’s portrayal of the SAS – and its foundations of military success – as the product of the unorthodox, the insubordinate and the alcoholic. If there is a theme to this series, it is not so much war, or violence, or male camaraderie, as it is drinking.
Roused from boozy slumber on a couch, in the first seconds in which we meet Clarke, he does three things: staggers to his feet dressed in a dark silk dress, pearls and lipstick; swigs leftover whisky from a glass; and declares to his French counterpart, “fun, isn’t it?”
There is so much compressed into this tiny scene.
What is Clarke telling us is fun? War? Revelry while there is carnage all around? Being a spy? Or wearing fine ladies’ clothes?
The ambiguity of this moment is, I think, one of the truest things about the show’s portrayal of Clarke. In real life, this was a man whose deceptions changed the course of the Second World War. His innovations were instrumental in Allied success, both in Africa and elsewhere. But the thing for which he is most notorious is his 1942 arrest in Spain dressed in women’s clothes. Why he was in women’s clothes was what everyone wanted to know; they seemed to care about this more than about what his mission might have been. Was he dressing up in apparel he was taking to a friend, which he decided to wear for a prank (the account he gave at the time)? Was he a homosexual (considered a possibility by Spanish police)? Was it an over-elaborate and failed espionage disguise (his command’s official assessment)?
There are no other records of him wearing women’s clothes, and, eighty years on, we are none the wiser. Clarke reportedly showed no concern when he was arrested wearing a dress; it lacked for him the significance attached to it by others, whether the Spanish police then, or media writers today. If only we could all move through life as Clarke did.
There in the chaos of his ramshackle office, his character provides my favourite moment of the series, as he introduces himself to Mansour:
I imagine you are a little surprised. I am who I am. This office is what it is; and I do what I do, in the way that I do it.
Mansour, completely unperturbed by Clarke being frocked up, admires the Chanel dress, Clarke admires Mansour, and the story moves along. Which is just right.
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You can read an excellent biography of Dudley Clarke here.
