The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon

Author:Zoë Playdon [Playdon, Zoë]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

9 A PERFECT STORM

Both Ewan and Patty must have felt deeply concerned about what another decision might mean for their marriage. Ewan’s corrected birth certificate had not stopped the law from allowing John to take action against him, and although he had avoided being declared female, there was no guarantee that the law would allow him male primogeniture inheritance. If Ewan was not found to be the next male heir, would that mean his and Patty’s marriage was perjured? They continued to carry out the daily and seasonal round of tasks that were required of all farmers, but the possibility of a further abusive court hearing, with prison waiting for them at the finish, must have been an agony.

While Ewan’s case was in process in Scotland, another case was unfolding in England: April Ashley and Arthur Corbett’s highly publicized relationship. Ewan and Patty will certainly have read about April and Arthur in the press, after she was outed by the Sunday People and retaliated by serializing her biography in their competitor tabloid, the News of the World, from April to June 1962. But they could never have guessed how directly their lives would impact hers.

April was born in 1935, the year when William became the 19th Lord Sempill and Ewan began to manage the Craigievar estates. But instead of a castle, April was born in what she called “a dockland slum” in Liverpool, and instead of an attentive, resourceful Gwendolen, April’s mother used to pick her up by the ankles “and bang my head on the ground like a workman with a pneumatic drill” or “hit me until I was black and blue.”1 Her affectionate father was either at sea or drunk, and money was short, so like all her clothes, the wooden clogs April wore were hand-me-downs from older siblings. At the same time, she was a slight, fragile child, born with “a severe calcium deficiency” that required weekly hospital visits, and she was bullied by other children, who nicknamed her “Sissy.”2 But in spite of her deprivation and abuse, April was absolutely clear that she was a girl, not the boy it said on her birth certificate.

From the time she was three, strangers asked April’s mother if she was a boy or a girl, and at school, although she was “constantly taunted for being like a girl,” she very definitely “wanted to be one,” having “long conversations with God each night, asking him to make me wake up normal, wake up a girl.”3 Like Christine Jorgensen, by the time she left school at fifteen years old, she had no facial or pubic hair, her voice hadn’t broken and she was still very undersized for her age. Her life experience followed the typical patient narrative set out by Krafft-Ebing and exemplified by Lili Elbe, Christine Jorgensen, Michael Dillon and Ewan.

In her biography, April described her failed attempts to “be like a man” by joining the Royal Navy and the journey that took her to London, where she said she

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