“Strange freak of a New Zealand girl”
WORDS: Wendy Riley
Dressed in a black cutaway coat, dark trousers, and a white silk neckcloth, and sporting a Billy-Cock hat over short hair, Henry James Muir stood before a London magistrate in 1889 dressed in the clothes he had been arrested in. Smoothed face, tall and attractive, Muir looked very much like a respectable young man.
A month earlier, Muir presented himself for enlistment at St. George’s Army Barracks. He answered all questions satisfactorily, but something odd in his behaviour roused the Sergeant’s suspicions. When faced with a medical examination, Muir confessed, he was not the person he appeared to be. Henry Muir was a woman.
As a young child, Harriet’s father had left her with friends in Scotland and sailed to New Zealand to seek his fortune. At age 16, Harriet ran away and became an actress in Bristol. When the company folded, she made her way to London and worked as an artist’s model.
Late one night, while walking out in Westminster, she met a musician, George Johnson. “They had refreshments, and, afterwards, at her invitation, he accompanied her” to her lodgings. The following morning, he awoke alone to find his clothes had gone. His pitiful cries for help were heard by the landlady as she farewelled her children to school.
Harriet had come up with a plan to join her wealthy pastoralist father in Christchurch. Dressed in Johnson’s clothes and with newly cut hair, she headed for the docks to enquire about a job as a steward. Unsuccessful, Harriet proceeded to the barracks, where her plan quickly unravelled. She became the object of curiosity and headlines as the “She Soldier” and “Strange Freak of a New Zealand Girl”.
The Magistrate bound Harriet over to the St James Workhouse, where she waited for friends to finance her trip to her father in New Zealand. When her lawyer successfully argued she had intended to return Johnson’s clothing, she was acquitted.
Harriet’s story may be as fanciful as the pantomimes she had acted in. It disappeared from the papers as quickly as it had appeared, and she was not heard of again.