Kemble, Lindsay

19-year-old Burra-born Lindsay David Kemble (1895-1976) caused a considerable stir in early 1915 when arrested for unlawfully impersonating a woman in Adelaide. In fashionable female attire, he pleaded guilty in the Adelaide police court on 11 January, regretting the foolish prank, the result of a £100 bet that he could walk the streets as a woman for two months avoiding arrest. He was cautioned with a £2 fine, but the event launched his successful decade-long stage career as a female impersonator. Immediately contracted by Adelaide’s King’s and Star Theatres performing to packed houses as the Parisian beauty Miss De Vere, by the end of January he was starring in his own film. Local pioneering filmmaker Harry Krischock’s Lindsay Kemble’s Adelaide showed Kemble ‘doing’ the city in company of unsuspecting well-known city men. This and the leniency of the police outraged the Melbourne Truth describing his antics as ‘pornographic poppycock’ (Sat 6 Feb 1915 p5). However Kemble continued to draw crowds in both Adelaide and the country, playing at Port Pirie, Kadina and Broken Hill.

In September 1916, as Victor Kemble, Lindsay enlisted at the Sydney showgrounds and within a year became the female lead in one of the vaudeville field theatres, the Sentimental Blokes, begun by South Australian Lieutenant Douglas Walsh (1884-1918) of the 10th Battalion. Kemble remained in London with the concert party during 1919, performing before the Prince of Wales. He toured Australasia with ex digger vaudeville troupes as Mademoiselle Mimi for much of the 1920s, remaining a Sydney-based actor during the 1930s and after the Second World War was a barman in Mackay, Queensland.