Roberta Cowell

 ‘It’s easier to change a body than a mind.’ 

The first person I learnt about at the Beyond the Binary exhibition was Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell, who coincidentally was born OTD in 1918.  Roberta Cowell (1918 – 2011) was a British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot. She was the first known British trans woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery. 

Roberta Cowell was born Robert Marshall Cowell, one of three children of Major-General Sir Ernest Marshall Cowell KBE CB (1886–1971) and Dorothy Elizabeth Miller (1886–1962). Her father was a prominent surgeon who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War and became a surgeon at Croydon General Infirmary between the wars. During the Second World War, he again served in the army and was the Director of Medical Services for Allied forces in North Africa from 1942 to 1944. In 1944, he was made honorary surgeon to King George VI. Post-war, he was Public Medical Officer for the Allied High Commission (the Allied body that governed occupied Germany after the war). 

Roberta attended Whitgift School, a boys' public school in Croydon and was an enthusiastic member of the school's Motor Club. She travelled Europe with a school friend, visiting Belgium, Germany, and Austria with a school friend. She had a key interest in photography and filmmaking, and was briefly arrested in Germany for filming a Nazi military drill. She was released on condition that she destroyed the film, however she managed to retrieve the original footage. 

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Cowell left school at the age of 16 to join General Aircraft Limited as an apprentice aircraft engineer, but soon left to join the Royal Air Force, becoming an acting pilot officer on probation on 4 August 1936. She began training as a pilot, but unfortunately, found that she suffered from severe air-sickness and was medically discharged.  

In 1936, Cowell began studying engineering at University College London. In the same year, she began motor-racing, winning her class at the Land's End Speed Trial in a Riley.She gained initial experience of the sport by sneaking into the area where cars were serviced at the Brooklands racing circuit, wearing mechanic's overalls, and offering help to any driver or mechanic who wanted it. By 1939, she owned three cars and had competed in the 1939 Antwerp Grand Prix. 

On 28 December 1940, Cowell was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as second lieutenant, and in June 1941, married Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter  (1917–2006), who also had been an engineering student at UCL with an interest in motor racing (another noteworthy woman I must investigate…) Cowell served in Iceland before transferring from the Army to the RAF on 24 January 1942 with the rank of temporary pilot officer. Managing to overcome her nausea, she had obtained a private pilot's licence before the war and completed RAF flying training at RAF Ansty.

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Cowell served a tour with a front–line Spitfire squadron and then briefly as an instructor. By June 1944, she was flying with No. 4 Squadron RAF, a squadron assigned to the task of aerial reconnaissance. Shortly before the D-Day landings, on 4 June 1944, she had a miraculous escape when the oxygen system of her Spitfire malfunctioned at 31,000 feet (9,400 m) over Fruges, France. She passed out but the aircraft continued flying on its own for around an hour over German–occupied France while being subjected to German anti-aircraft fire. She regained semi-consciousness at low altitude and was able to fly back to the squadron's base at RAF Gatwick. Sounds like something out of a movie right?, but her life was only just beginning.  

By October 1944, 4 Squadron was based at Deurne, Belgium, on the outskirts of Antwerp. On 18 November 1944, Cowell was piloting one of a pair of Typhoons near Bocholt, Germany.Cowell attacked targets on the ground, but her aircraft's engine was knocked out and its wing holed by German anti-aircraft fire. Cowell was flying too low to bail-out and instead jettisoned the cockpit canopy and glided her Typhoon to a successful deadstick crash-landing. She was able to contact her companion by radio and confirm she was unhurt before being captured by German troops. Cowell made two escape attempts, reasoning that the chances of success were greatest if the attempt was made quickly, while still close to the front–line. However, the attempts failed and she was taken further into Germany, spending several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied aircrew, before being moved to the prisoner–of–war camp Stalag Luft I. Honestly, this period of Cowell’s life could be a movie in its own, but there was more to come!

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Cowell remained a prisoner for around five months, occupying the time by teaching classes in automotive-engineering to fellow inmates. She later described her discomfort at the sexual behaviour shown towards her in the camp, and how she turned down the part of a woman in a camp play for fear of being labelled as homosexual. As the end of the war approached, food became scarce and Cowell lost 50 pounds (23 kg) in weight, and later described killing the camp's cats and eating them raw out of sheer starvation.  

By April 1945, the Red Army was approaching and the Germans were keen to evacuate the camp. However, incredibly the prisoners refused to leave and eventually the Germans abandoned the camp and the prisoners with it. The unguarded and undefended camp was reached by the Red Army on the night of 30 April 1945. Commonwealth personnel were flown back to the United Kingdom some two weeks later by American aircraft. 

After the war, Cowell took up a number of business ventures until 1946 when she founded a motor-racing team and competed in events across Europe, including the Brighton Speed Trials and the Grand Prix at Rouen-Les-Essarts. 

However, despite her motoring successes, she described this as a time of great distress and PTSD from her war experiences. In 1948, she left her wife and two daughters in order to undergo gender reassignment surgery. She never saw her children, at the time aged four and six again, and they did not even learn of her sex-change until after her death. After her death, they claimed that they had tried to contact their father many times, but that Roberta refused contact.

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In 1948, Cowell separated from her wife and, suffering from depression, she sought out a leading Freudian psychiatrist but found his aid unsatisfactory. Sessions with a second Freudian psychiatrist, gradually revealed, in her own words, that her "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and "feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed." 

By 1950, Cowell was taking large doses of oestrogen, but still living as a man. She had become acquainted with Michael Dillon, a British physician who was the first trans man to get a phalloplasty. Cowell had read his book, Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics (1946) which argued that individuals should have the right to change gender and live in the body they desired. The two developed a close friendship and Dillon subsequently carried out an inguinal orchiectomy on Cowell. At the time, this operation was illegal, so no surgeon would agree to perform the operation. Following this procedure with Dillon, Cowell was able to present obtain a document from a private Harley Street gynaecologist stating that she was intersex. This allowed  her to have a new birth certificate issued, with her recorded sex changed to female. In May 1952, she had a vaginoplasty, carried out by Sir Harold Gillies, widely considered the father of plastic surgery. Gillies had operated on Michael Dillon, but vaginoplasty was then an entirely new procedure, which Gillies had only performed experimentally on a corpse. The operation was a success, and she soon legally changed her name.

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“The past is forgotten, the future doesn’t matter, and the glowingly happy present is even better than I had hoped. I am myself.” 

By 1954, her two business ventures, a racing car engineering company (Leacroft of Egham) and a clothing company had both ceased trading and her change of legal gender had made it impossible for her to continue Grand Prix motor racing. However, in March 1954, news of her gender reassignment broke, gaining global media attention. Cowell received a fee of around £8000 from a British magazine who published her story (equivalent to £220,000 in 2020), and she earnt a further £1500 (£42,000 in 2020) from the publication of her biography.  

At the time, the media (as it often does today) mistakenly conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and thus Cowell’s story attracted much attention because it disrupted the view of homosexuality and gender reassignment being synonymous – Cowell’s marriage, her parenting of children, her wartime combat service and her association with motor racing were, during this period, perceived as strong markers of heterosexual masculinity; these aspects of her life were described repeatedly in press reports and confused stereotypes about transgender people and gender stereotypes more widely.  

Cowell continued to be active in motor racing and attracted some publicity for winning the 1957 Shelsley Walsh Speed Hill Climb. In November 1958, she acquired an ex-RAF de Havilland Mosquito. Her intention was to use the aircraft for a record-breaking flight over the South Atlantic. However, the project fell through due to a lack of suitable engines and in 1958 she became bankrupt with debts totalling £12,580 (approximately £300,500 in 2020).

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Her financial difficulties continued, as she found it difficult to get employment owing to transphobic discrimination. In later years, she largely dropped out of the public eye. However she was still an active figure in British motor racing in the 1970s. She also continued flying and by this time had logged over 1600 hours as a pilot.  

Unfortunately, Cowell’s story does not have a very happy ending. She exhibited some internalised transphobia in a brief1972  interview with Sunday Times journalist Michael Bateman. She stated that she had been born as an intersex individual with the chromosomal abnormality XX male syndrome, and that the condition justified her transition. She also spoke in derogatory terms of those individuals with XY chromosomes who also underwent male to female gender reassignment, saying "The people who have followed me have often been those with male chromosomes, XY. So they've been normal people who've turned themselves into freaks by means of the operation." This has led prevented her from being lauded as the trans icon she may at first appear.  

Estranged from her only family, Cowell moved into sheltered accommodation in Hampton, London in the 1990s, although she continued to own and drive large, powerful cars.  

She died on 11 October 2011. Her funeral was attended by only six people and (on her instructions) was unpublicised – her death was not publicly reported until two years later, when a profile of her was printed in The Independent newspaper in October 2013. 

Roberta’s life was so much more than her gender identity – her wartime heroics, her survival at the hands of the Nazis, and her sporting achievements would ordinarily render her one of the most famous and respected figures in British history as so many male war-heroes and sporting legends are remembered. However, her place in history has been resigned to her gender reassignment and her unfortunate end, showing how transwomen are frequently erased from history. As with so many historical figures, they must be remembered for their good and problematic sides. I’m sad that I didn’t learn of her existence until the age of 26, despite doing a PhD on transgender communities and writing a blog and book on women’s history. I hope that sharing her story puts her story back on the radar and that her problematic views can instead be turned into a learning opportunity as understandings of gender continue to evolve. If anyone knows where one can get a copy of her autobiography, I would LOVE to read it. I imagine it makes a very fascinating read.