Ewan
Forbes’ case is as significant to the trans experience as Oscar Wilde’s is to
gay men. With the difference that whereas everyone knows about Oscar, what
happened with Ewan has been hidden in the deepest secrecy. But the
repercussions which arose from his case transformed trans lives for the worse
in ways that are still being felt today, more than 50 years later.”
Via Zoom from her home in south-east London, Zoë Playdon, emeritus professor of medical humanities at the University of London, is talking about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, her enthralling and explosive first book for a non-academic readership. It concerns a transgender man, born the Honourable Elisabeth Forbes-Sempill into an aristocratic Scottish landowning family in 1912. With the financial means to procure synthetic hormones pre-puberty, and the ongoing support of his remarkably progressive mother Gwendolen, Ewan Forbes proceeded to live his life as a man, quietly and without scrutiny, just as he wished. He was able to correct his birth certificate, and in 1952, he married his wife Patty. But then in 1965, after the death of his elder brother William, he was forced to defend his gender in an extraordinary and at times horrifically intrusive court case, in order to prove that the Forbes of Craigievar baronetcy should pass to him, over a male cousin who claimed he was next in line.
The case took place behind closed doors, and afterwards was hushed up, the documentation placed entirely off limits, until the 1990s, when then home secretary Michael Howard ordered its disclosure after repeated requests by the former Labour MP Lynne Jones, with whom Playdon founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity in 1994. And the reason Playdon believes Forbes’ case was concealed from public scrutiny for so long? Because it provides a potential legal precedent not only for trans rights, but also for overturning the tradition of male primogeniture that has underpinned the British establishment for centuries.
Playdon came to this shocking conclusion after going through the 500 pages of transcripts which document this watershed case. Then her agent, Sarah Ballard at United Agents, suggested that she make Ewan Forbes the focus for telling the story of how trans people had previously enjoyed full equality and “how that equality had been quite deliberately removed”. And so now in The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, drawing on more than 30 years’ experience of frontline work in LGBTI human rights—including legal cases where she worked with the likes of Baroness Helena Kennedy QC—Playdon blows this astonishing case wide open. Alongside Forbes’ story, she charts the shifting sands in how the medical profession has treated trans people. And she also takes in the experiences of other trans men and women, including painter Lili Elbe, upon whose life a novel and subsequent film, “The Danish Girl”, was loosely based; as well as 1960s Vogue model and trans activist April Ashley MBE.
The counter argument
What Playdon documents runs entirely counter to our received view that the 1960s heralded a more liberal era in terms of our attitudes to sex and gender. She argues that in the intervening five decades since Forbes’ case was heard, trans rights have increasingly been undermined. Our now-systemic transphobia has resulted partly, she shows, from relatively recent pseudo-science which has led being trans to be equated with mental illness, despite a lack, says Playdon, of “scientific, objective evidence for this”. While in the 1930s, medicine recognised that birth sex might be fluid rather than fixed as male or female, the medical and legal narrative dating from the 1960s that surrounds trans people to this day is quite wrong, she says. “If we take Ewan as our starting point, we can draw on 100 years of trans experience which shows that there have never been any problems around the self-determination of trans people, or around elective medical procedures. And yet suddenly there is this desire to close all of that experience down.”
I’m interested to know how Playdon’s varied and distinguished CV as a teacher, senior civil servant, academic (she has five degrees, including two doctorates) and as an LGBTI activist has coalesced in the writing of The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, a remarkable blend of history, medicine, law, politics and dogged detective work. “My discipline of medical humanities is a relatively new subject, concerned with improving patient care by the application of humanities thinking. In terms of my own, practice-based medical humanities, we work directly with clinicians, often senior consultants and GPs, to help them make changes to improve both their working lives, and quality of life and care for their patients. If I had to point to the thread that runs all the way through my career, it would be the fact that I have always been concerned with change directed at improving equality.”
Via Zoom from her home in south-east London, Zoë Playdon, emeritus professor of medical humanities at the University of London, is talking about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, her enthralling and explosive first book for a non-academic readership. It concerns a transgender man, born the Honourable Elisabeth Forbes-Sempill into an aristocratic Scottish landowning family in 1912. With the financial means to procure synthetic hormones pre-puberty, and the ongoing support of his remarkably progressive mother Gwendolen, Ewan Forbes proceeded to live his life as a man, quietly and without scrutiny, just as he wished. He was able to correct his birth certificate, and in 1952, he married his wife Patty. But then in 1965, after the death of his elder brother William, he was forced to defend his gender in an extraordinary and at times horrifically intrusive court case, in order to prove that the Forbes of Craigievar baronetcy should pass to him, over a male cousin who claimed he was next in line.
The case took place behind closed doors, and afterwards was hushed up, the documentation placed entirely off limits, until the 1990s, when then home secretary Michael Howard ordered its disclosure after repeated requests by the former Labour MP Lynne Jones, with whom Playdon founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity in 1994. And the reason Playdon believes Forbes’ case was concealed from public scrutiny for so long? Because it provides a potential legal precedent not only for trans rights, but also for overturning the tradition of male primogeniture that has underpinned the British establishment for centuries.
Playdon came to this shocking conclusion after going through the 500 pages of transcripts which document this watershed case. Then her agent, Sarah Ballard at United Agents, suggested that she make Ewan Forbes the focus for telling the story of how trans people had previously enjoyed full equality and “how that equality had been quite deliberately removed”. And so now in The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, drawing on more than 30 years’ experience of frontline work in LGBTI human rights—including legal cases where she worked with the likes of Baroness Helena Kennedy QC—Playdon blows this astonishing case wide open. Alongside Forbes’ story, she charts the shifting sands in how the medical profession has treated trans people. And she also takes in the experiences of other trans men and women, including painter Lili Elbe, upon whose life a novel and subsequent film, “The Danish Girl”, was loosely based; as well as 1960s Vogue model and trans activist April Ashley MBE.
The counter argument
What Playdon documents runs entirely counter to our received view that the 1960s heralded a more liberal era in terms of our attitudes to sex and gender. She argues that in the intervening five decades since Forbes’ case was heard, trans rights have increasingly been undermined. Our now-systemic transphobia has resulted partly, she shows, from relatively recent pseudo-science which has led being trans to be equated with mental illness, despite a lack, says Playdon, of “scientific, objective evidence for this”. While in the 1930s, medicine recognised that birth sex might be fluid rather than fixed as male or female, the medical and legal narrative dating from the 1960s that surrounds trans people to this day is quite wrong, she says. “If we take Ewan as our starting point, we can draw on 100 years of trans experience which shows that there have never been any problems around the self-determination of trans people, or around elective medical procedures. And yet suddenly there is this desire to close all of that experience down.”
I’m interested to know how Playdon’s varied and distinguished CV as a teacher, senior civil servant, academic (she has five degrees, including two doctorates) and as an LGBTI activist has coalesced in the writing of The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, a remarkable blend of history, medicine, law, politics and dogged detective work. “My discipline of medical humanities is a relatively new subject, concerned with improving patient care by the application of humanities thinking. In terms of my own, practice-based medical humanities, we work directly with clinicians, often senior consultants and GPs, to help them make changes to improve both their working lives, and quality of life and care for their patients. If I had to point to the thread that runs all the way through my career, it would be the fact that I have always been concerned with change directed at improving equality.”
Her preoccupation with Forbes’ case began as a research project after she had retired, in the wake of the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013, which removed the precedence accorded to the male gender in terms of the royal succession. “I had always known the broader concept of primogeniture was an issue in trans civil liberties, but I thought that after the Act of 2013, things would get sorted. In the past few years, the issue of male primogeniture has repeatedly been raised in parliament, but each time the matter has been closed down. And the only reason for that, as far as I can see, is the self-interest of a small number of extremely wealthy, aristocratic people”.
Ironically, Ewan Forbes himself was born into such privilege: his mother Gwendolen was a close friend of Queen Mary, and her husband John (the so-called “Auld Laird”) was aide-de-camp to King George V. But while this initially enabled Forbes to access the pioneering endocrinal treatment he needed, the legal case later exposed him, as a member of the landed gentry, to a level of public and press scrutiny that was intensely painful to such a private and upstanding individual. Without going into spoiler details here, it was a case he eventually won and went on to prove he was able to occupy the position and responsibilities of his title as ably as any cis man. But with the hushing up of the case, the repercussions for trans people were profound.
My conversation with Professor Playdon—who was born into a working-class family in the Black Country, and was the first person in her family to go to university—is characterised by an openness and a geniality that is worlds away from the polarised vitriol which characterises much of the current so-called debate around trans rights. Her dry and subversive sense of humour is frequently on display; at one point she reminds me that we all start out as biologically female in the womb, and “then if you’re unlucky you get to be male”.
But, I say, it must be demoralising, not to say distressing, after more than 30 years of frontline campaigning for LGBTI rights, still to be fighting the same battles. How does she keep herself going? “I think I’m probably a hopeless optimist. I believe ultimately in the goodness of people. I think people do want to do the right thing, it’s just a question of taking some time and patience so they can understand what’s at stake. At the end of the day, the job of a philosopher is to make arguments available, not to impose them. You have to give people the opportunity to change. And that’s really been my whole career: making the ethical argument, and saying to people, ‘If you go down that route, this is the suffering you will cause. Is that really want you want to do?’”
Book extract
Most people are unaware that until the late 1960s, trans people lived in complete legal equality with everyone else. Ewan was the reason that changed, and since his life spanned nearly the entirety of the twentieth century, it gives us a glimpse into almost a hundred years of trans history. His story begins in the Victorian period, when the Viennese professor of sexology, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, published the first medical description of being trans, and it ends in the present day, with increasing attacks on trans people’s human rights in the US and the UK.
It draws on five years of research, 30 years of frontline LGBTI activism, and a lifetime in academia. Ewan’s hidden court case, finally decided in 1968, marks a tipping point between the trans equality that existed in the past and today’s trans discrimination. More broadly, it is also a story of how freedoms we all take for granted can be instantly lost.
Zoë Playdon | 'I think I’m probably a hopeless optimist. I believe ultimately in the goodness of people'. The Bookseller, August 13, 2021.
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: Interview With the Author. By Andy Reid. Anchor FM, November 1, 2021
Zoë
Playdon is the author of the new book The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes and the
Unwritten History of the Trans Experience. It focuses on a landmark legal case in
the UK. Playdon is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the
University of London.
Q: What inspired you to write this book about Ewan Forbes and his legal case?
A: Few people know that for decades, trans people self-identified, accessed affirmative medical care, corrected their birth certificates, and lived unproblematically in complete equality with everyone else.
But in 1970 UK trans people were stripped of their civil liberties, became socially excluded, and were subjected to an abusive medical regime that included conversion therapy and compulsory sterilisation.
Ewan’s legal case, decided in 1968, precipitated those changes, which damaged the lives of countless trans people. All the records of Ewan’s case were removed from public eye, the press gagged, and everyone involved in it sworn to secrecy, and so this crucial piece of trans history is unknown.
I felt it was important for people to know that trans equality used to be straightforward, and that it was deliberately removed to solve a political, constitutional problem – securing male-primogeniture inheritance to the British throne – which no longer exists.
Q: How would you characterize the attitude in Britain toward trans people in Ewan’s younger days and during the time of his case?
A: Ewan was born in 1912 – he’s the earliest example I have of a UK trans boy self-identifying and getting affirmative medical care – at a time when there was a well-established scientific recognition that some people have variations in sex characteristics that position them between typical male-female binaries.
So he grew up in a general social environment that accepted that some people’s sex was different from that assigned at birth.
In the 1930s, it was generally trans men, like the athlete Mark Weston, who attracted public attention and it was believed that trans men vastly outnumbered trans women, who were considered a rarity.
But in the 1950s, the world-wide publicity given to Christine Jorgensen in the US and to Roberta Cowell in the UK shifted that perception, and in the early 1960s, the publicity given to model and actress April Ashley cemented the social image of trans people as exquisitely beautiful “sex changes,” with trans women believed to vastly outnumber trans men. In fact, the issue wasn’t numbers but visibility.
Q: What inspired you to write this book about Ewan Forbes and his legal case?
A: Few people know that for decades, trans people self-identified, accessed affirmative medical care, corrected their birth certificates, and lived unproblematically in complete equality with everyone else.
But in 1970 UK trans people were stripped of their civil liberties, became socially excluded, and were subjected to an abusive medical regime that included conversion therapy and compulsory sterilisation.
Ewan’s legal case, decided in 1968, precipitated those changes, which damaged the lives of countless trans people. All the records of Ewan’s case were removed from public eye, the press gagged, and everyone involved in it sworn to secrecy, and so this crucial piece of trans history is unknown.
I felt it was important for people to know that trans equality used to be straightforward, and that it was deliberately removed to solve a political, constitutional problem – securing male-primogeniture inheritance to the British throne – which no longer exists.
Q: How would you characterize the attitude in Britain toward trans people in Ewan’s younger days and during the time of his case?
A: Ewan was born in 1912 – he’s the earliest example I have of a UK trans boy self-identifying and getting affirmative medical care – at a time when there was a well-established scientific recognition that some people have variations in sex characteristics that position them between typical male-female binaries.
So he grew up in a general social environment that accepted that some people’s sex was different from that assigned at birth.
In the 1930s, it was generally trans men, like the athlete Mark Weston, who attracted public attention and it was believed that trans men vastly outnumbered trans women, who were considered a rarity.
But in the 1950s, the world-wide publicity given to Christine Jorgensen in the US and to Roberta Cowell in the UK shifted that perception, and in the early 1960s, the publicity given to model and actress April Ashley cemented the social image of trans people as exquisitely beautiful “sex changes,” with trans women believed to vastly outnumber trans men. In fact, the issue wasn’t numbers but visibility.
Apart from these exceptional, well-known examples, trans people, both men and women, simply went through supportive medical and legal processes and lived their lives like anyone else.
No one knew they were trans, or if they did know, they regarded it as a purely personal matter of private medical history. This was the case for Ewan until he was in his 50s.
But in 1966, when his cousin John announced that he was taking Ewan to court to prove that he “is now and has all along been of the female sex,” Ewan knew, as a doctor, that the medical climate was changing dramatically.
A group of US psychiatrists, notably John Money, Richard Green, and Robert Stoller, were busy claiming that being trans was a mental illness caused by inadequate parenting, and that they could remedy it.
In 1962, the first Gender Identity Research Clinic was opened at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “cure” trans and gay people by a range of measures: aversion conditioning using either emetics or electric shocks, frontal lobotomy, psychotherapy, and electro-convulsive therapy.
Of course, it was nonsensical pseudo-science, but in an aggressive turf war with endocrinology, psychiatry won.
In the UK, the affirmative care given by surgeon Lennox Broster and his team was being replaced by a psychiatric model led by John Randell at Charing Cross Hospital, who saw his role as being to
“breed out of our genetic inheritance those with psychopathic and adverse genetic propensities.”
The new medical environment would classify Ewan as a floridly psychotic lesbian with a perjured marriage: both he and his wife Patty would be liable to two years’ imprisonment, their lives ruined.
Ewan was much-loved by his community, but he was lucky to escape the systemic transphobia that overtook the UK from 1970 onwards.
Q: How did you research the book and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Oh, I was constantly getting surprises, and sometime really big ones.
The first was that it took two years and the intervention of the Home Secretary to gain access to documents that should have been in the public record.
My starting point for writing was the court record of Ewan’s legal case, 500 pages of back-and-forth questions and answers. I went through it line by line, reconstructing what had happened in court, how the evidence had been presented and the narrative of Ewan’s life.
The next shock was that a trans man had inherited a male-line primogeniture baronetcy, something that we could never imagine happening today.
Clearly, something had changed, and so I backtracked to the first clinical categorisation of trans people in 1886 and went forward through medical literature, legal cases, and newspaper reports in the first part of the 20th century.
From that, and from the work of other historians, including unpublished doctoral theses, it became evident that for almost 80 years, being trans was classified as a variation of sex development, an intersex condition, and that the regimen was self-identification, affirmative medical care, correction of birth certificate, and an unremarkable life as an equal citizen.
And sadly, that was the next big shock, because since Ewan’s case, trans equality has been made to feel like an impossible dream.
Of course, I wanted to know what had happened after Ewan won his case. How had trans people suddenly been stripped of their civil liberties and what had the experience of that been like? So the next step was to work forward from Ewan’s case to the present day.
What I found was a mass of documents produced by trans activists in the 1970s and 1980s, all trying to make sense of what had happened to them.
It is really distressing material to read: a group of people who have suddenly been completely dispossessed and made subject to medical abuse, with no idea of why this has happened, and not even aware of what they were now allowed to do or be.
And like other ghetto archives, it is a very moving record of people trying to survive, and being obliged to accept the cruellest of conditions for survival: no employment rights, dismissal for being trans, unable to marry or adopt, and if unable to pay car parking fines, then sent to the wrong sex prison where women, certainly, were raped without it counting legally as rape.
They learned to expect to lose their jobs, homes, family, and friends, to be expelled from their church, sports teams, clubs, and societies. They knew they must never question their psychiatrist and must obey all their demands without argument, or they would get no healthcare.
To survive, the best chance was to move to another city, never speak of their past, not take any job with a pension or health insurance or social security or other benefits that required a birth certificate, and to accept that every interaction with officialdom would be exposing and humiliating because they would use birth names, pronouns, and titles.
The best to hope for was to live in hiding, hope not to get beaten or raped on the streets, and accept that if that did happen, the police would not investigate or provide any protection.
That was the legal regime until 1996, when the landmark case P v S and Cornwall County Council restored employment rights, and the official medical regime until the UK government accepted formally in 2002 that being trans was not a mental illness. I think that is the next shock for readers – that these events are so recent.
And the final shock for me was to discover how entrenched the British Establishment are in their protection of primogeniture.
When it was removed from the monarchy in 2013, there was a general expectation that it would be removed across the aristocracy as well. But now there have been six separate bills, one a year, entered into Parliament to try to end primogeniture – and they have all failed.
Q: What do you see as the legacy today of Ewan Forbes and of his legal case?
A: I see it as a dual legacy, both sweet and sour.
On the sweet side, we know that trans children were self-identifying and receiving affirmative medical care a hundred years ago, and that Ewan led a happy, fulfilled life. That puts the present moral panic about supporting trans children into a new perspective.
It’s also helpful to know that for a long time, it was believed that there were more trans boys than girls, then that switched to a belief that there were more trans women than trans men: it reminds us of the historical and scientific fact that we have no statistical records of the incidence of trans people, and that trans visibility is and has always been dependent on social nurturance.
And I think it is reassuring for the future to know that trans equality existed for many decades without being in any way socially problematic.
On the sour side, though, comes the uncomfortable truth that Ewan had to quite literally fight for his life in desperate circumstances, and that the consequence of his victory was a political crisis that was solved by putting trans people outside the social pale.
Two things, I think, are very hard to come to terms with.
The first is that historically, when we find a specific group stripped of their human rights, socially excluded, reviled by the media, and subjected to sterilisation, we term that not just a eugenic project, but genocide. It is unspeakably distressing to have to consider the possibility that the UK government effectively carried out such a project against its own citizens.
The second difficult thing to acknowledge is that it happened so recently and that most British citizens knew nothing about it. History was occluded by a social memory in which trans people had always been pushed to the social margins, and that this was justified because they weren’t “real men” or “real women.”
As we know from other periods in recent European history, once you’ve decided some individuals don’t count as “real people,” it becomes permissible to say or do whatever you like to them.
Those kinds of brutalities are not just devastating for the people themselves but are irreparably damaging to the societies that permit them.
Putting these two items together, Ewan’s legacy, perhaps, is to invite us to look at the century of trans lives that his life spanned and to ask ourselves, do we want our society to continue that kind of injustice?
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Two quite different things. With my colleague Professor Jo Winning at Birkbeck College, I’m planning a research symposium on trans narratives, for 2022, to think about how we can create, structure, and critique histories that represent trans lives authentically.
I’m also continuing to work with my colleague Dr. Lisa Fenton at the University of Cumbria to develop our ground-breaking master’s degree in Bushcraft – Wilderness Living Skills, as it is called in the US – as part of a wider ecological initiative.
Finding better ways of treating each other and the world we live in seems to me crucially important for social justice and for species survival.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m absolutely delighted that in spite of the restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic, we can still talk virtually to each other – but I’m also so disappointed, since I was really looking forward to visiting and spending time in the US, talking about these issues and getting to know each other better!
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb. Deborah Kalb Books blogspot, November 3, 2021.
A
narrative has developed about the position of transgender people today that has
become so widely accepted as to be assumed as fact: that it is only in the past
few decades that trans people have begun to enjoy any rights; that trans women
have always been more prominent than trans men; and most of all, that in recent
years, trans people have been seeking to gain more rights than they’ve ever had
before.
A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since.
The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.
Alongside a distinguished career in academia, Professor Playdon has been involved in human rights work for 30 years, during which she co-founded in 1994 the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity. Her manner is understated and learned, even as the scandalous tale unfolds. Books are piled up all around her.
She first suspected something important had been buried in 1996, while helping lawyers with a case about trans rights in the High Court of Justice, which failed, baffling everyone.
“I knew that there was something about primogeniture that was a stumbling block,” she tells me via video call. This sense was emboldened by an informant, the lawyer Terrence Walton, who had worked on a famous early case involving trans rights, who told her “‘there are some interests that it is more important to protect than the rights of individuals’. I thought, ‘we’re not going to actually get trans equality until the issue of primogeniture is dealt with.’”
Playdon hoped that after the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013, which removed male primogeniture from the monarchy, something would shift. But after the Act, several attempts to end the same among hereditary peers unexpectedly didn’t pass, and certain trans rights cases stalled. By then, Playdon had retired so was able to devote five years of digging to find out what happened, and why.
“I knew that in the past, trans people had corrected their birth certificates,” she says. “All the way through up to 1970, the path was: self-identify, get affirmative medical care, correct your birth certificate, and live equally. After 1970, that’s gone.”
The reason, she discovered, lay with the case of Ewan Forbes. “So I went through 500 pages of court transcripts, and reconstructed what had happened on those four days in court. I was really quite shocked.”
Ewan Forbes was born into a landed, aristocratic family in Aberdeenshire, in 1912. He was the youngest of three, with an older brother and sister. Ewan was assigned female at birth and named Elizabeth, but from the age of six, his parents became aware that the baby of the family was at odds with more than just his name. He was already living determinedly as a boy. They called him Benjie.
Due to the wealth and connections of Forbes’ supportive mother Lady Gwendolyn, at 15, he was taken to a range of specialists across Europe and given synthetic testosterone, which had only just become available. It prompted a male puberty (complete with spots and stubble) which supported the fact that throughout his young life he presented as and considered himself a boy.
In her book, Playdon reveals that in the 1930s, the media ran stories “predominantly about trans men”, and that “being trans was a mystery and trans women, who were considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious”.
At the time, trans people could take hormones, have gender confirmation surgery, and then change their birth certificates. There were no panels of psychiatrists and endocrinologists, as we have today, deciding whether to grant you a gender recognition certificate, which since the 2004 Gender Recognition Act has provided certain legal protections. There was no need; you could simply change your birth certificate and therefore other necessary paperwork.
It was the case of Ewan Forbes that changed that. He became a GP, corrected his birth certificate, and married a woman. Having been accepted as a man, he never considered that it all might be threatened until his father, Lord Sempill, died, and then his elder brother, William, in 1965.
As the second son, Forbes would inherit both paternal titles: the barony and the baronetcy, which could only be passed down the male line. But a cousin called John “turns up at William’s funeral”, says Playdon, and tells him he’ll contest the succession in court “because you’re not a real man”.
What followed in 1968 was a trial in which Forbes fought for his male birth certificate to be judged legitimate. His defence had to contend with a recent and radical change in medical thinking. Up until the 1960s, doctors largely regarded trans people as intersex; that is, a physiological difference in which individuals have elements of both sexes.
This idea was then engulfed by a new American psychiatric ideology, “which classifies being trans as a mental illness,” says Playdon, “as floridly psychotic”. The only way for Forbes to bypass this legally would be to prove he had physical male traits.
If he lost, he faced jail, because if declared female his marriage would be deemed perjured. If the case were held in open court, the media would have exposed the most intimate parts of his life and anatomy.
Forbes requested that the trial be conducted privately. “John says, ‘All right, provided Ewan agrees to a private medical examination by my experts, and pays all my legal fees,’” says Playdon. Forbes agreed.
The experts’ conclusion was that “Ewan has female anatomy with some male characteristics,” says Playdon. Although the examiners didn’t know Forbes had been taking testosterone, this wasn’t enough. Forbes procured some testes tissue and passed it off as his own.
“He wins,” says Playdon. “But it causes a constitutional crisis. A trans man won a primogeniture baronetcy. It could be used as precedent, not just for trans people, but crucially for primogeniture. What if an older sister of the heir turns out to be trans? Or the person you’re sure is heir is trans and no longer eligible?”
So the case was covered up. “Everyone involved in the trial was sworn to secrecy, and the trial was removed from public life,” says Playdon. The Home Office did not respond to her request for details in 1996. She enlisted an MP to ask the Lord Advocate (the chief legal officer for the Scottish government and crown) for the files, who initially denied that a “judgement was ever issued” before adding that “it would not be appropriate for me to… disclose the details”.
Finally, it took a complaint to the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, to begin to gain access to the legal documents in 1998.
But the effect on trans people had already been dramatic. In 1970, April Ashley, who had become the first well-known trans woman in Britain after being outed by a tabloid, was seven years into her marriage with the aristocrat Arthur Corbett. But it was failing. Rather than divorce her and give her money, Corbett attempted to have the marriage annulled, asserting that she was male.
This was despite Ashley having had lower surgery, and Corbett being fully aware before they married in Gibraltar. But she had not corrected her birth certificate.
The judge sided with the aristocrat and swore the lawyers to secrecy about the Forbes trial. During Ashley’s case, the judge “creates a sex test which dis-authenticates her,” says Playdon. Ashley was subjected to the most invasive genital examinations imaginable – twice – because after the expert clinicians concluded that she “had a perfectly usual vagina” the judge demanded they look again. After which, in defiance of their report, the judge declared her a “homosexual transvestite who’s mentally ill” and with a “supposed vagina”, says Playdon.
Ashley lost. It was this case that set the legal precedent, blocking legal rights for trans people, preventing the correction of birth certificates, while the opposing precedent was suppressed. It would be decades before any rights were reinstated.
Playdon’s book, which constitutes one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism ever written about trans people, has already been optioned for film adaptation. But she is particularly pleased by its timing amid a media moral panic and far-right backlash against trans people.
“Because it feels as though people need to know [about this],” she says. “Before we start getting too worked up, can we just remember that for decades and decades you just self-identified, got elective medical care, changed your birth certificate, and lived in equality?”
Instead, the fear and silence surrounding the Forbes case reversed progress, without anyone knowing why, which flourished into today’s ahistorical assumptions. “Things have become skewed further and further and further,” she says, “into a really very sinister place.”
The secret court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since. By Patrick Strudwick. i News, November 10, 2021.
A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since.
The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.
Alongside a distinguished career in academia, Professor Playdon has been involved in human rights work for 30 years, during which she co-founded in 1994 the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity. Her manner is understated and learned, even as the scandalous tale unfolds. Books are piled up all around her.
She first suspected something important had been buried in 1996, while helping lawyers with a case about trans rights in the High Court of Justice, which failed, baffling everyone.
“I knew that there was something about primogeniture that was a stumbling block,” she tells me via video call. This sense was emboldened by an informant, the lawyer Terrence Walton, who had worked on a famous early case involving trans rights, who told her “‘there are some interests that it is more important to protect than the rights of individuals’. I thought, ‘we’re not going to actually get trans equality until the issue of primogeniture is dealt with.’”
Playdon hoped that after the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013, which removed male primogeniture from the monarchy, something would shift. But after the Act, several attempts to end the same among hereditary peers unexpectedly didn’t pass, and certain trans rights cases stalled. By then, Playdon had retired so was able to devote five years of digging to find out what happened, and why.
“I knew that in the past, trans people had corrected their birth certificates,” she says. “All the way through up to 1970, the path was: self-identify, get affirmative medical care, correct your birth certificate, and live equally. After 1970, that’s gone.”
The reason, she discovered, lay with the case of Ewan Forbes. “So I went through 500 pages of court transcripts, and reconstructed what had happened on those four days in court. I was really quite shocked.”
Ewan Forbes was born into a landed, aristocratic family in Aberdeenshire, in 1912. He was the youngest of three, with an older brother and sister. Ewan was assigned female at birth and named Elizabeth, but from the age of six, his parents became aware that the baby of the family was at odds with more than just his name. He was already living determinedly as a boy. They called him Benjie.
Due to the wealth and connections of Forbes’ supportive mother Lady Gwendolyn, at 15, he was taken to a range of specialists across Europe and given synthetic testosterone, which had only just become available. It prompted a male puberty (complete with spots and stubble) which supported the fact that throughout his young life he presented as and considered himself a boy.
In her book, Playdon reveals that in the 1930s, the media ran stories “predominantly about trans men”, and that “being trans was a mystery and trans women, who were considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious”.
At the time, trans people could take hormones, have gender confirmation surgery, and then change their birth certificates. There were no panels of psychiatrists and endocrinologists, as we have today, deciding whether to grant you a gender recognition certificate, which since the 2004 Gender Recognition Act has provided certain legal protections. There was no need; you could simply change your birth certificate and therefore other necessary paperwork.
It was the case of Ewan Forbes that changed that. He became a GP, corrected his birth certificate, and married a woman. Having been accepted as a man, he never considered that it all might be threatened until his father, Lord Sempill, died, and then his elder brother, William, in 1965.
As the second son, Forbes would inherit both paternal titles: the barony and the baronetcy, which could only be passed down the male line. But a cousin called John “turns up at William’s funeral”, says Playdon, and tells him he’ll contest the succession in court “because you’re not a real man”.
What followed in 1968 was a trial in which Forbes fought for his male birth certificate to be judged legitimate. His defence had to contend with a recent and radical change in medical thinking. Up until the 1960s, doctors largely regarded trans people as intersex; that is, a physiological difference in which individuals have elements of both sexes.
This idea was then engulfed by a new American psychiatric ideology, “which classifies being trans as a mental illness,” says Playdon, “as floridly psychotic”. The only way for Forbes to bypass this legally would be to prove he had physical male traits.
If he lost, he faced jail, because if declared female his marriage would be deemed perjured. If the case were held in open court, the media would have exposed the most intimate parts of his life and anatomy.
Forbes requested that the trial be conducted privately. “John says, ‘All right, provided Ewan agrees to a private medical examination by my experts, and pays all my legal fees,’” says Playdon. Forbes agreed.
The experts’ conclusion was that “Ewan has female anatomy with some male characteristics,” says Playdon. Although the examiners didn’t know Forbes had been taking testosterone, this wasn’t enough. Forbes procured some testes tissue and passed it off as his own.
“He wins,” says Playdon. “But it causes a constitutional crisis. A trans man won a primogeniture baronetcy. It could be used as precedent, not just for trans people, but crucially for primogeniture. What if an older sister of the heir turns out to be trans? Or the person you’re sure is heir is trans and no longer eligible?”
So the case was covered up. “Everyone involved in the trial was sworn to secrecy, and the trial was removed from public life,” says Playdon. The Home Office did not respond to her request for details in 1996. She enlisted an MP to ask the Lord Advocate (the chief legal officer for the Scottish government and crown) for the files, who initially denied that a “judgement was ever issued” before adding that “it would not be appropriate for me to… disclose the details”.
Finally, it took a complaint to the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, to begin to gain access to the legal documents in 1998.
But the effect on trans people had already been dramatic. In 1970, April Ashley, who had become the first well-known trans woman in Britain after being outed by a tabloid, was seven years into her marriage with the aristocrat Arthur Corbett. But it was failing. Rather than divorce her and give her money, Corbett attempted to have the marriage annulled, asserting that she was male.
This was despite Ashley having had lower surgery, and Corbett being fully aware before they married in Gibraltar. But she had not corrected her birth certificate.
The judge sided with the aristocrat and swore the lawyers to secrecy about the Forbes trial. During Ashley’s case, the judge “creates a sex test which dis-authenticates her,” says Playdon. Ashley was subjected to the most invasive genital examinations imaginable – twice – because after the expert clinicians concluded that she “had a perfectly usual vagina” the judge demanded they look again. After which, in defiance of their report, the judge declared her a “homosexual transvestite who’s mentally ill” and with a “supposed vagina”, says Playdon.
Ashley lost. It was this case that set the legal precedent, blocking legal rights for trans people, preventing the correction of birth certificates, while the opposing precedent was suppressed. It would be decades before any rights were reinstated.
Playdon’s book, which constitutes one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism ever written about trans people, has already been optioned for film adaptation. But she is particularly pleased by its timing amid a media moral panic and far-right backlash against trans people.
“Because it feels as though people need to know [about this],” she says. “Before we start getting too worked up, can we just remember that for decades and decades you just self-identified, got elective medical care, changed your birth certificate, and lived in equality?”
Instead, the fear and silence surrounding the Forbes case reversed progress, without anyone knowing why, which flourished into today’s ahistorical assumptions. “Things have become skewed further and further and further,” she says, “into a really very sinister place.”
The secret court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since. By Patrick Strudwick. i News, November 10, 2021.
Ewan Forbes was born Elisabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the sex on his birth certificate in order to marry.
Then, in 1965, his older brother died and Ewan was set to inherit the family baronetcy. After his cousin contested the inheritance on the grounds that it could only be inherited by a male heir, Ewan was forced to defend his male status in an extraordinary court case, testing the legal system of the time to the limits of its understanding.
In The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, Zoë Playdon draws on the fields of law, medicine, psychology and biology to reveal a remarkable hidden history, uncovering for the first time records that were considered so threatening that they had been removed from view for decades.
Bloomsbury
As the
ongoing war against abortion rights tells us, people who are not in power have
no guaranteed stability of status. When autonomy is granted and easily taken
away, whole groups of citizens may experience unpredictable swings in their
legal rights, social customs and ability to be heard. Zoë Playdon’s erudite,
passionate, occasionally frustrating, yet ultimately persuasive new book, “The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience,”
encapsulates this reality by telling three stories at once.
At the
center is a biography of Ewan Forbes, a Scot of wealth and lineage born in
1912, assigned female at birth and raised, at least initially, as a girl, and
of his struggle to be seen by the state as the man he knew himself to be. This
account is contextualized by a rich and riveting social history of trans
people’s rocky road to cultural acceptance in the West, from the early 20th
century up to the current day. Within this frame, Playdon, an emeritus
professor of medical humanities at the University of London, situates the
specific story of the wavering right of trans people in Britain to correct
their birth certificates. In this way she intertwines individual, social and
legal history in a manner that is mostly illuminating. And she shows how
fluctuations in the rights of trans people evolved in tandem and in conflict
with those of gay men, women and lesbians.
Playdon
argues that trans people benefited from the publication in 1886 of
“Psychopathia Sexualis,” an influential medical book by the German psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing. The book was primarily intended, she maintains, for
use by the courts, in order to help juries distinguish between people who
engaged in criminal sexual behavior (gay men) and those who were merely
biologically different (trans). Krafft-Ebing presented trans identity as a form
of “physical intersex,” and argued that it should be accepted. Today we
increasingly understand that sexuality, biology and gender can represent three
separate experiences. But in the Victorian era, these three categories were
collapsed into one. While gay men and lesbians were regarded as lawbreakers and
subjected to awful medical punishments, trans people were seen as simply moving
from one binary pole to another — from man to woman or vice versa.
In 1910,
Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay German Jewish sexologist, published “The
Transvestites,” in which he differentiated cross-dressing, trans and
homosexuality while defending all three. He opened his Institute of Sexual
Science in central Berlin in 1919, when Ewan Forbes was 6 and playing in the
Scottish heather, already asserting his maleness. Hirschfeld worked closely
with endocrinologists developing early hormone therapies. In 1931 his institute
carried out the first documented gender confirmation surgery, a vaginoplasty
for a trans woman named Dorchen Richter. The next year, 19-year-old Forbes
moved to Munich for psychotherapy and hormone injections. He reported growing facial
hair and developing acne, often associated with testosterone shots.
While
trans women were far more numerous and visible in the climactic years of gay
liberation between the 1960s and 1990s, Playdon shows us that in the 1930s
trans men were overwhelmingly featured in popular news stories about “sex
changes.” “Being trans was a mystery,” she writes, and “trans women, who were
considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious.”
All that
changed when the Nazis came to power, and imposed their view of both
transsexuals and homosexuals as degenerates. Gay men and trans women were made
to wear the pink triangle, while lesbians and trans men got the black
“antisocial” triangle shared with communists and intellectuals. All were sent
to concentration camps. At the same time, psychiatrists working with the U.S.
Army during World War II promoted the idea of homosexuality as a pathology and
worked to eliminate queer people from American military service.
And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience
By Zoë Playdon
Illustrated. 368 pp. Scribner. $27.
The life
story of Sir Ewan Forbes – a Scottish aristocrat and trans man who fought a
bitter court battle over a title – is innately dramatic. Born in 1912, the
fourth child of John Forbes-Sempill, baronet of Craigievar, Ewan was thought to
be a girl at birth and christened Elisabeth. But from the earliest age, he
identified as male. So pronounced was his masculinity that by the time he was
six, his mother was encouraging family members to call him “Benjie” and
consulting paediatricians about possible medical interventions.
After a sometimes difficult adolescence and various treatments, Elisabeth became Ewan. He qualified as a doctor, and began working as a GP in Alford, Aberdeenshire, with little controversy. When he fell in love with his housekeeper Isabella, known as Patty, his birth certificate was amended – as was possible back then – so he could marry her.
Wedlock was one thing, though; inheritance another. The rule of primogeniture decreed that when Forbes’s older brother William died in 1966, the baronetcy should pass to the next male sibling. That ought to have been Ewan. But not everyone agreed. One cousin, John, mounted a legal challenge on the basis Ewan "is now, and has been all along, of the female sex".
Zoë Playdon’s book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, recounts these events and, more importantly, the extraordinary ones that followed. Emeritus professor in medical humanities at the University of London, she stumbled across the legal challenge while fighting for trans equality in 1996. She and some lawyers had taken a High Court action to allow trans people to once again amend their birth certificates. That right had been swept away by a precedent-setting case known as Corbett v Corbett in 1969. Then, a judge dissolved the marriage between trans woman April Ashley and her husband Arthur Corbett on the grounds that Ashley had always been a man and could not alter her birth certificate.
Playdon’s side lost the case, but remained mystified. They knew people had successfully altered their birth certificates in the past and could not understand what had prompted the change. But then one of the lawyers was contacted by Ashley’s solicitor, Terrence Walton. He said that before going into court in 1969, he had been called into the judge’s chamber and shown a previous case, then sworn to secrecy.
That case was Forbes’s. And now, Playdon is revealing the details Walton couldn’t. Preparation for the court battle had been traumatic. Forbes was subjected to intimate physical examinations by a specialist who pronounced him to have two X chromosomes and therefore to be genetically female. But then Forbes did something audacious. He told doctors a coughing fit had caused a “testicle” to suddenly descend. He performed his own "biopsy" and sent the specimen to a lab.
Forbes's claim was medically impossible; he must have bought the testis sample and faked the biopsy. But it was impossible to disprove. Eventually, the judge found in his favour. Forbes gained the title and kept his marriage. But, according to Walton, the case had led to a "blanket ban" on altering future birth certificates because “there are some interests it is more important to protect than the rights of the individuals”.
The victory proved pyrrhic for Forbes, too. The widespread conviction that he had committed perjury affected his standing. He deregistered himself from the General Medical Council and became moody and irascible.
The case of Ewan Forbes was a landmark, and kudos to Playdon for unearthing it. But her book is not without its problems. The first – not Playdon’s fault – is that a lack of first-hand material means we don’t get a feel for Forbes as a person. He never wrote in any detail about how it felt to be presented to the Queen as a “debutante” while sporting HRT-induced hair on his chin, or to have his genitalia the subject of legal speculation. There is no suggestion he ever embraced the role of trans campaigner.
The reader, then, relies on Playdon’s ability to enter that imaginative space. But she has so fully embraced the role of trans campaigner, she sacrifices nuance for polemic. Take her treatment of Forbes’s older sister Margaret. Margaret initially sided with John, providing a written statement to the effect that her brother had been brought up as a girl. Later she changed her mind but she died before she could alter her testimony.
Playdon has no time for Margaret. She makes reference to her "deadnaming" Ewan. And, of course, Margaret was in the wrong. But it doesn’t take much fellow feeling to understand why she behaved as she did. As a lesbian, she was barred from marrying her own partner. Yet she watched Forbes change sex and marry his. In addition, the rule of primogeniture discriminates against women. Whether Forbes was male or female, she was the older sibling. No wonder she felt resentment. I would have liked to have seen that intersection of injustices properly acknowledged, and the emotional conflicts more fully explored.
Instead, Playdon attempts to write a definitive history of transphobia, weaving reports and symposiums in and out of her account of Forbes's life. Every line of thinking she agrees with is legitimate; everything she disagrees with is “pseudo-medicine”, which is not to say that she is wrong, just that the black-and-white way in which she presents her argument has the effect of undermining it.
This is not helped by her comparison of the subtle shift in official policy on trans people to "the quiet bureaucratic process" that led to the Holocaust, or her habit of dismissing wholesale media representations of trans people such as Coronation Street's Haley Cropper.
The irony is that a greater focus on the human story with all its sadnesses might have played to her advantage.
At present in the UK, trans men and women still require a Gender Recognition Certificate to legally change sex and even those who obtain one cannot inherit a title. Playdon’s aim is to convince the reader of the virtues of self-identification. In the end, though, it was the ability to empathise with Forbes's suffering, much more than her proselytizing, that left me wondering why society makes it so difficult for trans people to be themselves.
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon, reviewed by Dani Garavelli. The Herald of Scotland, November 13, 2021.
After a sometimes difficult adolescence and various treatments, Elisabeth became Ewan. He qualified as a doctor, and began working as a GP in Alford, Aberdeenshire, with little controversy. When he fell in love with his housekeeper Isabella, known as Patty, his birth certificate was amended – as was possible back then – so he could marry her.
Wedlock was one thing, though; inheritance another. The rule of primogeniture decreed that when Forbes’s older brother William died in 1966, the baronetcy should pass to the next male sibling. That ought to have been Ewan. But not everyone agreed. One cousin, John, mounted a legal challenge on the basis Ewan "is now, and has been all along, of the female sex".
Zoë Playdon’s book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, recounts these events and, more importantly, the extraordinary ones that followed. Emeritus professor in medical humanities at the University of London, she stumbled across the legal challenge while fighting for trans equality in 1996. She and some lawyers had taken a High Court action to allow trans people to once again amend their birth certificates. That right had been swept away by a precedent-setting case known as Corbett v Corbett in 1969. Then, a judge dissolved the marriage between trans woman April Ashley and her husband Arthur Corbett on the grounds that Ashley had always been a man and could not alter her birth certificate.
Playdon’s side lost the case, but remained mystified. They knew people had successfully altered their birth certificates in the past and could not understand what had prompted the change. But then one of the lawyers was contacted by Ashley’s solicitor, Terrence Walton. He said that before going into court in 1969, he had been called into the judge’s chamber and shown a previous case, then sworn to secrecy.
That case was Forbes’s. And now, Playdon is revealing the details Walton couldn’t. Preparation for the court battle had been traumatic. Forbes was subjected to intimate physical examinations by a specialist who pronounced him to have two X chromosomes and therefore to be genetically female. But then Forbes did something audacious. He told doctors a coughing fit had caused a “testicle” to suddenly descend. He performed his own "biopsy" and sent the specimen to a lab.
Forbes's claim was medically impossible; he must have bought the testis sample and faked the biopsy. But it was impossible to disprove. Eventually, the judge found in his favour. Forbes gained the title and kept his marriage. But, according to Walton, the case had led to a "blanket ban" on altering future birth certificates because “there are some interests it is more important to protect than the rights of the individuals”.
The victory proved pyrrhic for Forbes, too. The widespread conviction that he had committed perjury affected his standing. He deregistered himself from the General Medical Council and became moody and irascible.
The case of Ewan Forbes was a landmark, and kudos to Playdon for unearthing it. But her book is not without its problems. The first – not Playdon’s fault – is that a lack of first-hand material means we don’t get a feel for Forbes as a person. He never wrote in any detail about how it felt to be presented to the Queen as a “debutante” while sporting HRT-induced hair on his chin, or to have his genitalia the subject of legal speculation. There is no suggestion he ever embraced the role of trans campaigner.
The reader, then, relies on Playdon’s ability to enter that imaginative space. But she has so fully embraced the role of trans campaigner, she sacrifices nuance for polemic. Take her treatment of Forbes’s older sister Margaret. Margaret initially sided with John, providing a written statement to the effect that her brother had been brought up as a girl. Later she changed her mind but she died before she could alter her testimony.
Playdon has no time for Margaret. She makes reference to her "deadnaming" Ewan. And, of course, Margaret was in the wrong. But it doesn’t take much fellow feeling to understand why she behaved as she did. As a lesbian, she was barred from marrying her own partner. Yet she watched Forbes change sex and marry his. In addition, the rule of primogeniture discriminates against women. Whether Forbes was male or female, she was the older sibling. No wonder she felt resentment. I would have liked to have seen that intersection of injustices properly acknowledged, and the emotional conflicts more fully explored.
Instead, Playdon attempts to write a definitive history of transphobia, weaving reports and symposiums in and out of her account of Forbes's life. Every line of thinking she agrees with is legitimate; everything she disagrees with is “pseudo-medicine”, which is not to say that she is wrong, just that the black-and-white way in which she presents her argument has the effect of undermining it.
This is not helped by her comparison of the subtle shift in official policy on trans people to "the quiet bureaucratic process" that led to the Holocaust, or her habit of dismissing wholesale media representations of trans people such as Coronation Street's Haley Cropper.
The irony is that a greater focus on the human story with all its sadnesses might have played to her advantage.
At present in the UK, trans men and women still require a Gender Recognition Certificate to legally change sex and even those who obtain one cannot inherit a title. Playdon’s aim is to convince the reader of the virtues of self-identification. In the end, though, it was the ability to empathise with Forbes's suffering, much more than her proselytizing, that left me wondering why society makes it so difficult for trans people to be themselves.
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon, reviewed by Dani Garavelli. The Herald of Scotland, November 13, 2021.
It was an
announcement whose brevity masked one of the more remarkable stories in
north-east life from the 1950s. And it appeared in the Press & Journal on
September 12 1952: “Dr E Forbes-Sempill henceforth wishes to be known as Dr
Ewan Forbes-Sempill”. (…)
And the interest in the person at the centre of these events – which is currently being turned into a TV drama – was heightened by the fact that the “Dr E Forbes-Sempill” in question was Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill: a birth registration which Ewan subsequently described as “a ghastly mistake” and which cast a cloud over the early years of his life in Aberdeenshire.
And the interest in the person at the centre of these events – which is currently being turned into a TV drama – was heightened by the fact that the “Dr E Forbes-Sempill” in question was Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill: a birth registration which Ewan subsequently described as “a ghastly mistake” and which cast a cloud over the early years of his life in Aberdeenshire.
Press and Journal, November 8, 2021.
Press and Journal November 1, 2021.
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