The mysteries of sex : women who posed as men and men who impersonated women / by C.J.S. Thompson.
- Charles Thompson
- Date:
- 1938
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The mysteries of sex : women who posed as men and men who impersonated women / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![a lunatic, but the man went on to tell him earnestly that his real name was Catherine Coombes, though for forty-two years he had worn men’s clothes and passed under the name of 4 Charley Wilson.’ He was sixty-three years of age and had never revealed his true sex. The master at once sent for the matron and a nurse who verified his story, and they further discovered that, in the previous July, a Mr. Charley Wilson had fractured his ribs in falling from a scaffold in Surbiton and, although attended by a doctor in Kingston, his sex had never been doubted. Catherine was then removed to the women’s department where she was given the proper outfit, consisting of a blue print-dress and red shawl, which gave her some little trouble before she discovered the proper way to put it on. Thus dressed in women’s clothes it was difficult to believe how she could have lived for nearly half a century as a man without detection. Her hair was about two inches long, just turning white, but her eyes were keen and bright and her mouth large and firm. Later, relating the story of her life, she said she was born at Axbridge in Somersetshire in 1834, and her real name was Catherine Wreford Tozer. She was educated at a girl’s college in Cheltenham and, on leaving school at the age of sixteen, married her first cousin, Percival Horatio Coome [or Coombes], who was twenty-three years older than herself. They were married at the Register Office in Cheltenham on 16 October, 1851. For a time after her marriage she was employed as a schoolmistress and had charge of the Cleeve National School, but owing to her husband’s bad treatment of some of the pupils she was obliged to give up her post. He went off to London, and then wrote to her, saying that he had obtained a situation in Chelsea and she](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30320070_0160.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
