After reading the Daily Sceptic’s article about Baroness Nicholson’s amusing letter to the Science Museum concerning the heteronormativity of Lego bricks, I was very disappointed to see from the comments below that the Science Museum has also implicated the late Roberta Cowell in its ‘Seeing Things Queerly’ tour. While the business of the Lego bricks provides easy ammunition with which to ridicule the Science Museum, it deserves far stronger criticism for its treatment of Cowell, which is simply morally reprehensible.
As a vintage motoring enthusiast, I have taken an interest in Cowell, a racing driver during the late pre- and early post-war periods, having observed in recent years that she has become an unwitting cause célèbre for virtue-signalling media and museum professionals. This first came to my notice in a piece published by the Brooklands Museum – whose job it is to preserve the pre-war Brooklands motor-racing circuit and the vehicles connected with it – during 2021 for something called ‘LGBTQ History Month’. The British Newspaper Archive and Surrey County Council followed suit with similar articles in 2022. Many other more overtly political outlets have latched on to Cowell’s life and likewise manipulated it.
All the above-mentioned articles fall over themselves to accuse Cowell of being Britain’s first transgender woman, which is nothing better than an outright lie. Leaving aside the point that the concept of transgenderism had not been imagined by 1951, when Cowell underwent surgery, the articles all ignore or obscure two or three very important facts. For one, Cowell was a genuine biological anomaly with mixed chromosomes resulting in both male and female physical characteristics – in her own words, “a freak”. For another, she actually underwent vaginoplasty, ergo she conformed with the medical definitions for an hermaphrodite and a transsexual, both of which are markedly different from the commonly understood definition of ‘transgender’, which is a person of the true male or true female sex who fervently desires to be, or sincerely believes that they are, a member of the opposite sex.
The greatest offence against, Cowell, however, is the assumption that she would be a standard-bearer for the transgender lobby today when, to go by the opinions she expressed in her last published interview, she would vehemently oppose it. She even abhorred straightforward feminism. Repeated below is an interview she gave to Michael Bateman, published in the March 12th 1972 edition of the Sunday Times:
Roberta Cowell, the wartime fighter pilot who re-registered as a woman in 1951, is writing another book to try to raise the money to go back into motor racing.
She’s 53, an age when you might think one’s speed of reaction isn’t so snappy; she says hers is. “Nothing falls off my mantelpiece and hits the deck if I’m anywhere near it. I have lapped Silverstone in half-a-second under the class record.”
Hasn’t she had enough publicity without writing another book? The operation was the sensational news story of the decade and each time in the last 21 years when there’s a sex-change story in the news, Roberta’s story is retold. She says there is a lot more to say: for instance there are some white lies about her ‘marriage’ to put right: but the most important message could be to those thinking of following her. It would be: DON’T.
“I was a freak. I had an operation and I’m not a freak any more. I had female chromosome make-up, XX. 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.
“At Hammersmith hospital the surgeons carry out about two operations a month. Many of those people will regret the operation later. There have been attempted suicides. They don’t change sex, as everyone knows, because the operation doesn’t alter the chromosomes.
“Many people thought they could copy me. But it’s like admiring someone without legs, like Bader, and having your legs off to be the same. Or it’s more like seeing a thalidomide child, and having an operation to be the same.”
Liz Hodgkinson, who’s writing the book with her, says Betty Cowell (as Roberta’s known to friends) is like no man or woman she’s ever met. “She’s a very masculine lady.”
In Richmond her home is cluttered with pilots’ helmets, high-frequency radios, models of planes and racing cars. She’s logged 1,600 hours as a pilot (recently she flew at Mach 2 twice the speed of sound). “Driving is what I do best. Jet planes don’t have personality the way racing cars do.” On the other hand she says she’s fond of music, and does needlework and tapestry. Picking up an example: “This is petit point. (Laughs). Well, grand point.”
In the book she will have her say on the changes in the sexual roles in the last 21 years. She doesn’t approve of the Permissive Society and she doesn’t welcome Women’s Lib. She certainly hopes the trend towards Unisex has stopped. It’s unhealthy, unnatural. “My experience shows that men and women are so completely different as to be almost different species.”
But she doesn’t feel she can say what it’s like to be a man, except in the social sense, because even at school she was physically a woman. Her breasts developed like a woman’s and she held them down with an elastic support. “I consciously tried to develop my muscles to compensate, so I was good at sport. I’d have thumped anyone who tried to send me up. But I always hated little boys, and I still see a lot of the little boy in the racing fraternity, especially when there’s a dinner night.”
She never sought the company of men, though she’s found they’ve sought hers. “When the story first broke I received 400 proposals. Some of them of marriage. I could have had titles, money, the lot.” She’s always preferred women, but this isn’t something she’d write about, out of consideration to friends.
Many of her friends are young people in fact, which is one more reason why she finds herself drawn back to motor-racing. “There’s nothing wrong with young people today,” she says with a smile. “You couldn’t meet a finer body of men, women and intersexes.”
Cowell’s second book was never published.
The interview is extremely easy to find via a quick web search and it, and her opinions concerning chromosomally-normal transsexuals, have for several years been detailed on her Wikipedia page, so it is inconceivable that anyone doing even the lightest research into her life could fail to be aware of her highly uncommon circumstances as well as her conservative attitude to sex and sexuality.
Are we to suppose that the Science Museum’s researchers are so lazy, incompetent and apathetic that they never once came across it? No, they are more likely in the same boat as the Brooklands Museum, British Newspaper Archive et al., who have acknowledged the interview and yet wilfully disregarded it, choosing nevertheless to frame Cowell as the trail-blazing advocate of transgenderism that she manifestly was not.
Anyone who cares to take a closer look at Cowell’s life will see that she was an intelligent and sensible woman whose life was marked by moments of brilliance, complicated personal trials and, ultimately, a rather sad decline. The fact that so many museums, journals and other outlets choose to exploit the misfortunes of a person they know cannot defend herself, turn her principles on their head, and alter or conceal historical facts exposes them for precisely what they are: cynical, dishonest and generally unfit for purpose. They have no scruples about misinforming the public who take their words in good faith, and are altogether devoid of the moral virtue which they desperately clamour to prove.
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Big respect to the author for speaking up. I’ll bet money that the perv had done it before, probably to his own son, and has most likely done it after the incident described above. He was a paedophile and don’t they say paedos cannot be rehabilitated? It’s not just a passing fancy, get it out of your system and then all deviant impulses disappear. You’re either programmed that way or you aren’t. But back in those days many things went on behind closed doors that were not talked about out in the open, this type of incident being just one example.
Toby, Cooper’s criticism of Raymond Baxter tells us less about Baxter than it does about your would-be molester. I recall Baxter’s authoritative voice introducing ‘Tomorrow’s World’ in the 60s. Added to which he (Baxter) was a decorated Spitfire pilot during the WW2. To be thought a “complete c***” by Cooper was something of a badge of honour.
The BPC.
I’ve asked this question since 2012 and never received an adequate reply.
What is the evidence (excluding allegations) that Jimmy savile committed the crimes he’s accused of?
Yes I’ll get lots of down ticks but, almost certainly, no reply to the actual question.
Maybe they buried all their ( whoever they were/are) dirty washing with Savile
No evidence then?
Savile suffered from mass hysteria as you know.
I see what you did there.
Thanks for the msg BTW..
No evidence then?
Lots of witness statements, plus he was well known by people who knew him and knew of him to be a pervert. It is hard to bring a dead person to trial (I shouldn’t need to say that).
Lots of witness statements that turned out to be false, and “I always knew he was a wrong un (but did nothing)” hearsay allegations by the sort of celebs who on another occasion promoted COVID jabs; perhaps we should believe them about that too. There was a very lengthy and public trawling operation for evidence, with financial incentives from his estate and, for those who went public, from newspaper stories, with no downside for false testimony. The late lawyer Susanne Nundy (the “Anna Raccoon” blogger), who had been a resident at the Duncroft school for girls where the allegations started, took a strong interest in the case and her conclusion was that there was no evidence that was made public that he’d done what he was accused of.
Well I’m confident that either way, had he been alive today, he’d be allowed to keep his bank account.
And remarkably, although the allegations ran into the hundreds, not a single documented police complaint made at the time,
I was sexually abused, by a teacher at a Catholic school, I never complained to the police. So I understand why there was “not a single documented police complaint made at the time”, and you don’t. It was a very different time.
No evidence then?
The evidence is documented in “‘Giving Victims a Voice’ A joint MPS and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile under Operation Yewtree”
https://library.nspcc.org.uk/HeritageScripts/Hapi.dll/filetransfer/2013GivingVictimsAVoiceSexualAllegationsMadeAgainstJimmySavile.pdf?filename=CC18C70DB7C8C3D49403BB94EB176F95207E5F66235DCA89651F5ED2BA5DA9311A3547010EB1745F9098C8189E66B54F16BBCA4419250DDAE584462476E362622BD259A20D1597309210AC995C99F449C7702D4CF7627CBCEC72291068BFEAFDDC8C9625B71658F22EAD1E815FED12FF6D0DEB5CDBB40AEA4EF5D058E57168353BEB2DA3730B57DF729865CC3271FEE73BB1D434AB645BB5&DataSetName=LIVEDATA
If you think more than 400 people, who don’t know each, making the same type of detailed serious allegations isn’t “evidence” because they could all be lying, then you need to explain why you don’t believe any of them and explain what you would regard as “evidence” for any sexual crimes.
“…more than 400 people, who don’t know each other,”!
I would regard correspondence, video, audio, photographic, forensic evidence, confession, police complaints at the time as evidence.
There is nothing for Jimmy saville.
Toby, well done for putting this on the recors.
What I have found amazing is how meny in the MSM and politics behave like that but are never reported. Why do they congregate there.
In all my year sin business at senior managerial level I only once ever had a similar situation. It eas a 3 something woman trying it on with a 20 year old woman whose mother called in to complain.
Wow, the BBC sure seems to be a really big magnet for creeps and nonces! You may recall one Jimmy Saville, for example.
I wonder if the reason his own son didn’t want to go on holiday to Skye was about a great deal more than boredom?
A very evocative account of the attitudes of the time. I was 14 in 1966, so a bit older, and fortunately do not recall a similar incident but I do remember the lack of questioning of motive, as well as the automatic deference to authority. A lot of people had the capacity to keep secrets, good and bad.
Fascinating story and glad you managed to avoid full-on sexual abuse by the sounds of it. I imagine many people can recount experiences of inappropriate behaviour if not full-on sexual abuse during that era. It does seem prominent people who one might describe as “larger than life” are prone to getting carried away (to use a polite term for such perverts) and taking advantage of vulnerable or impressionable youngsters. I’m not making excuses, just observations and I take the point make by a fellow commentator that evidence of Jimmy Saville’s abuses is thin on the ground. I wonder if anything has changed nowadays. It maybe that would-be abusers are more aware that they may get exposed if not brought to justice.
I also had this instinct to stay silent when similar things happened to me as a 16-17 year old – being driven back from a babysitting assignment or given a lift back to a campsite. I struggled and ran too, suffering little more than ruffled feathers – though it does, as you note, stick in the memory.
It is worth pondering this instinct to stay shtum. I suspect it is an evolutionary adaptation – better survival rates for those who did not tell tales on powerful people. When Trump famously observed that ‘it was amazing what you got away with once you were perceived as rich and powerful,’ I felt he was expressing honest surprise at his happy discovery as much as simply boasting. Better appreciation of this mechanism should help us stamp out the unacceptable exploitation of the young and powerless.
How many avuncular figures turned out to have WHT (wandering Hand Trouble) after drinking? Many women remember being groped by such men when they were young. It was such a surprise/shock (the switch from avuncular to groper) that you didn’t know what to do apart from try to distance yourself from them and keep your distance thereafter.
Groping is a strange thing – being groped so unpleasant, what do the gropers think they are doing apart from hurting their victim? It surely is a power thing.