TEN YEARS' MASQUERADE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15930, 29 May 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

TEN YEARS' MASQUERADE.

POSED AS A WOMAN.

A NOTTINGHAM SENSATION.

Foil the past ten years the citizens of Nottingham have been by turns amused, puzzled, and aroused to passing pity at the sight of a strange, eccentric figure in their streets), a woman to all appearance, wearing the dress of a woman, although of an unorthodox style. To the intense astonishment of the people, the weird and much-derided figure, so familiar in their streets, has proved to bo a man, who, while living in their midst, has successfully posed as a woman, and was taken by them to bo just an eccentric female. They even wove romances round "her" —or the more romantic of them did—and docidod that only some shattered love affair of tho past, as in the case of Miss Haversham, in Dickens' "Great Expectations," could account for the "woman's" extraordinary . appearance. For, indeed, it exceeded the whims even of any ordinary eccentric person.

Wearing a woman's skirt, shorter than tho usual length, as it reached only to the knees, a nondescript coat, a plaited straw hat beneath winch was a coil of black hair, "this figure of fun" paraded tho main streets of Nottingham, and was the object of a good deal ol ridicule. The eccentricity of costume did not stop at the short skirt and strange coat. The dress was profusely covered with medals, beads, rosaries, crucifixes, and many other curious ornaments. Strangest of all the items in the dress of this eccentric person, whoso left arm was disfigured, was a man's boot, not worn in the usual way—but laced up on the left hand. The face and hands were of a deep copper hue, which led to the supposition that tho person might cither have been born, or have lived a long time, in the East. The colour is now believed to have been produced by the use of a dye. He has stated, however, that he is a Serbian. What the name is of Nottingham's "man-woman," and what his history, are at present matters of speculation. On the door-post of the house in which he lived, in Woolaton Place, Woolpack Lane, this sign is displayed:— "Miss Dr. Vieh, F.R.H.S., Astronomer, Recorder, Astrology, Clairvoyance." Papers found in the man's possession since Ids sex was discovered have inscribed on them:—"Helen Phillips, Minister of the Christian Polic-s Mission," and before the discovery war made he gave the name of Helen Phillip Phillip. A diploma, believed to have been designed by the man himself, bears tho name, " Men Phillip, EJ.S.S."-