The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience
384
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience
384Hardcover
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Overview
Ewan Forbes was born to a wealthy, landowning family, holders of a baronetcy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1912. Assigned female at birth, his true identity was nevertheless clear even in childhood—and so, with the support of his mother, he was taken to European specialists and eventually treated with early preparations of synthetic testosterone. Raised as a boy at home but socially obliged to present himself as a girl in public until his official coming out to the Queen, Ewan grew up, became a doctor, and got married. (This required him to correct the sex on his birth certificate, which was possible at that time without much fuss.) For decades, he lived a quiet life as a husband, doctor, and a pillar of the local community.
But in 1965, Ewan’s older brother died unexpectedly—leaving Ewan, the next oldest man in the family, to inherit the baronetcy. When his cousin John—spurred on by Ewan’s sister—contested the inheritance he was forced to defend his male status in Scotland’s supreme civil court, where he prevailed.
This hugely important case would have changed the lives of trans people across the world—had it not been hidden. The hearing was conducted privately, the media were gagged, and those involved were sworn to secrecy. The case remained unknown until 1996 and is at last described here, along with the life of Ewan Forbes, for the first time. Enlightening and galvanizing, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes is a “remarkable...vital historical reference” (Booklist) for transgender history and the ongoing struggle for trans rights.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982139469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 11/02/2021 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 1,029,749 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Childhood Craigievar is one of the loveliest castles in Scotland, its faded pink roughcast walls and high, circular turrets giving it an appearance more of a fairy tale than the Highlands. Its ancestral lands march between the river Don and the river Dee, and close by is Balmoral, the Queen’s home. At the start of the last century, the Forbes-Sempill family estate included a mansion twenty miles east at Fintray. The family owned the village of Fintray, which for generations had provided the army of servants it required: cooks and gardeners, butlers and kitchen maids, nannies and footmen, grooms and porters and pageboys. Inside the mansion a vast hall opened onto a wide staircase filled with ancestral portraits. At Christmas, the hall became the stage for a glorious pantomime of their own making, in which everyone took part—family, staff and guests—dressing up in whatever came to hand. It is here that we first meet Ewan.
In a photograph of everyone in their costumes, little Ewan has his back to the stairs, standing between two young girls, one with a crown and one with a hat. Ewan is bareheaded, his hair brushed back from his high forehead, his gaze direct and quizzical. His face is thinner than the other children’s, making him seem frailer, but his chin is tilted defiantly upward. Dressed in some kind of ornate tunic, his is an androgynous figure when compared with the girls in their frocks framing him. At the rear center of the photograph stands his sister, Margaret, dressed as Britannia, with trident, helmet and Union flag shield, suggesting that the photo was taken at the Christmas of 1918, and Margaret is epitomizing Britain’s victory at the end of World War I. She was seven years older than Ewan, and since she looks about twelve or thirteen here, Ewan, born on September 6, 1912, would just have been six. Margaret and Ewan’s older brother, William, is not there: he was nineteen years older than Ewan, and by the end of the war he had become a colonel in the new Royal Air Force. Ewan will have missed him, for one of his earliest memories was of William arriving in uniform on a motorbike to visit the family, and he grew up hero-worshiping him. But their father, the Lord Sempill, is close at hand, sitting on the floor at the front right in an elaborate robe, a long false ponytail trailing over his shoulder and his face painted like a pantomime Aladdin, while their mother, Gwendolen, the Lady Sempill, sits just in front of Margaret. She looks tired of being in her showy wig of heaped-up ringlets, and her corseted, tight-fitting gown, with its plunging ruffled neckline showing her three strings of pearls. Doubtless she will have been energetically organizing everything and everyone all day.
The Christmas costume party at Fintray Manor
Fintray House was built in the grand style, imposing, distinguished, fit for its royal and noble guests. Its airy drawing room dwarfed the grand piano; in the dining room, a life-size full-length portrait of Ewan’s grandfather, “Auld Sir Wullie,” an intimate friend of Queen Victoria, gazed benignly down; the library was filled with vellum quartos and folios, literary treasures older than Shakespeare. The mansion’s diamond-shaped windows looked onto elegant lawns and terraces falling away to the broad, mellow, silver Don. But the real, beating heart of the family, the place young Ewan loved to go, was the wild Highlands: Craigievar.
A regular move each summer from the mansion to the castle—“the flitting”—was one of Ewan’s earliest and happiest memories. It was heralded by the departure of the head housemaid, two days before everyone else, to alert the Craigievar caretaker and begin making up beds for the family and the rest of their servants. Cook was the next to leave, complete with a milking cow, so that food could be ready for everyone on arrival, and while the chauffeur ferried the rest of the domestic staff in the family’s big Siddeley-Deasy limousine, Ewan, his sister and his mother set off on a more leisurely journey.
As soon as he was old enough, Ewan rode his pony for the expedition, while his sister, Margaret, and their mother each drove Shetlands in pony carts. A photograph taken in 1919, when Ewan was almost seven, shows them ready to depart. Ewan, in “ratcatchers” and riding hat, is astride his beloved pony Tommy, impatient to be off. Thirteen-year-old Margaret’s legs dangle from the back of her custom-built cart, where she is organizing her Pekingese dog. Their mother, Gwendolen, is between them, with impeccably upright posture, driving that trickiest of all small carriages: a governess cart, where the driver has to sit sideways and steer a true line from a difficult angle—the life skill she would need for raising Ewan.
The flitting
Ewan’s brother, William, who as firstborn son was known as the Master of Sempill, had married Eileen, the daughter of the distinguished painter Sir John Lavery, a few months before, and they were pursuing their own adventurous lives in the new aviation industry. The Lord Sempill drove down separately with his butler in a little American car, an Essex, in what sounds like a hair-raising journey since, Ewan said, the butler “risked his life.” In a gentler progress, the equestrian group broke their twenty-two-mile journey at Monymusk, a village Ewan’s forebears had bought in the 1560s. It belonged by that point to the Grant family, and Ewan’s godmother lived at the House of Monymusk, built centuries earlier from the stones of the old Norman priory. Everywhere was steeped in ancestral associations. A couple of miles farther up the Don, nestled in a bend of the river, lay Paradise Wood, which Queen Victoria visited in 1866 to see its spectacular mature larches: perhaps she, too, had been on the way to Craigievar Castle. Beech trees lined the castle’s main drive, the falling sun making their shadows a ladder of light, which Ewan rode up to the castle door. Here he lived between the castle, warm welcomes in local farm kitchens, and the country separating them. Craigievar was wild to Fintray House’s domesticated, a tall tower to its spreading rooms, heath, hill, moor and forest, not gardens and greenhouses. Craigievar was adventure.1
Early nineteenth century lithograph of Craigievar Castle
The Forbes-Sempill family was discreetly distinguished. Ewan’s father held two titles, a baronetcy (“Sir”) and a barony (“Lord”).2 Both titles were among the oldest in Scotland. The family had long-standing royal associations: not only had their ancestors been friends of Scots national hero Robert the Bruce, but they had played a part in the release from English captivity of King James I, who conferred their knighthood in 1430.3 Friendship with and service to the monarch became an enduring theme for the family, and in 1488, King James IV upgraded the knighthood conferred by James I to the Barony of Sempill. The Forbes lineage was similarly honored, so that in 1630, Sir William Forbes was created a baronet of Nova Scotia. Both the Sempill and Forbes dynasties converged in Auld Sir Wullie, who was the 8th Baronet Forbes of Craigievar and the 17th Lord Sempill. As well, in the Scottish way, the Forbes-Sempills were also lairds, the ancient Scots clan title held by estate owners who place the welfare of the land and its people at the heart of their work and lives.
Ewan’s father, John, whom he referred to as “the Auld Laird,” inherited both the titles and the close royal connection, becoming an aide-de-camp to King George V. But he was also a dark, unpredictable, somewhat obsessive character. In World War I, General Kitchener had tasked him with raising a new battalion of the Black Watch, the Scottish infantry regiment traditionally associated with the Forbes-Sempill family. After leading his men “over the top” in trench warfare at the Battle of Loos, the Auld Laird was struck in the spine by shrapnel and lay paralyzed all night in no-man’s-land, his life saved only by his orderly, Corporal Smith, who found him the next morning and got him to safety, to be invalided home. Two of his brothers were killed at war: only the youngest one, Lionel, survived unscathed, as a rear admiral in the Royal Navy.
Those terrible experiences perhaps had something to do with the Auld Laird’s difficult relationship with William and Ewan, who were very attached to each other despite their age difference. Ewan observed that “his father’s tantrums and tempers were constant, and the unfairness of things that were perpetrated on us had to be experienced to be believed.”4 When Ewan was grown-up, his mother told him that when William was born, and she proudly showed him to their father, the response she got was, “You go to hell, I don’t want a son, I wanted my brother Douglas to succeed.” Douglas would have been next in line, and it was not uncommon for eldest sons to feel that a sibling was “the better man” or that they would cope better with the duties of rank, which included sitting in Parliament in the House of Lords.5 Simply by being born, William had seemingly thwarted his father’s wishes: he attributed the Auld Laird’s black moods to that and told Ewan to ignore them. But there was also a certain stubborn dogmatism in the family. Ewan’s great-grandfather had preserved Craigievar Castle in the baronial style of its original, seventeenth-century building, and his father was determined to do the same. Hence the annual “flitting”—Craigievar’s paucity of modern plumbing, heating or lighting meant that even by early twentieth-century standards it was uncomfortable to live in during the winter.
Left to Right, the 18th, 19th and 17th Lords Sempill: the Auld Laird, William, and Auld Sir Wullie
But Ewan was happy, in spite of these restrictions and his father’s moods. He was a patient and biddable child who did his best to comply with whatever was required from him. His father insisted that everyone learn to speak, read and write in Doric, the Scots vernacular, which Robbie Burns used in his verse, and so Ewan did. His father’s family were Old Covenanters, rigorous Presbyterians, and Ewan not only attended worship faithfully but later in life became an elder at his local kirk, as Presbyterians call their church. Engagement with Scots folk culture was another family imperative, and like his grandfather, father and mother, Ewan became an accomplished Scots country dancer, eventually founding his own troupe, the Dancers of Don. At the same time, mindful of Scots historical friendships and trade with continental Europe, Ewan’s father expected everyone to be able to speak two or three European languages, and Ewan dutifully complied. It was as if he had the resilience, intellect and imagination not only to take in his stride every austerity and duty his father demanded, but to enjoy and thrive on them. At least, every demand but one, and it was in that matter that Ewan’s mother, Gwendolen, came to the fore.
A photograph of Ewan’s parents outside Craigievar Castle shows Gwendolen’s strong, good-humored face, erect carriage and firm jawline, and where the Lord Sempill could be flinty, dour and grim, the Lady Sempill was gentle, caring, and fun. Her family was of Welsh and Cornish descent, from the distinguished Ap Roger line, which came over with William the Conqueror, and she was a close friend of Queen Mary, who admired her gardens at Fintray. While her husband was away at war, Gwendolen ran the estates of Fintray and Craigievar, and on rainy days she sat toddler Ewan on a cushion inside a large, upside-down turtle shell and told him to “go on a voyage” while she wrote business letters. Using his hands as paddles, he sailed round the vast room, “negotiating chairs, tables and all sorts of cabinets and ornaments as rocks,” guarding the trust his mother placed in him—not to hit the Bühl table or Louis XVI cabinet—with fierce, childish honor.6 An accomplished musician—she played five instruments, but the harp was her favorite—Gwendolen took her aristocratic responsibilities seriously. During World War I, she established a hospital for wounded Belgian soldiers at Fintray House, donated four ambulances to the Red Cross, and entertained British walking wounded at tea every Sunday. She paid at least one visit a year to each of the estate’s 120 tenant farmers and employees, more if there was illness in their family, and she paid for a doctor for those who could not afford to do so themselves. And she focused all of that willingness to empathize, nurture and care on Ewan.
Ewan’s parents outside Craigievar Castle
He had been assigned as female at birth, christened Elisabeth, and raised as a girl. Because his external anatomy was visually consistent with that of a baby girl, there was no reason for his parents to imagine he was anything other than female until he got older. But as far as Ewan was concerned, he was a boy, and his certainty about this was so firm that his tranquil memoir, The Aul’ Days, published when he was seventy-two, mentions no other possibility. Ewan was in every other way an obedient child: he loved learning to play the harp like his mother, becoming an accomplished traditional dancer like his father and grandfather, and doing his lessons in the airy schoolroom at the top of the castle. But Gwendolen could see that there was something quite different about him from his older brother and sister. Although they had been sent to boarding school from the age of six or seven, William eventually going to Eton, and Margaret to Queen Margaret’s School in York, Gwendolen understood immediately that Ewan needed a quite different learning environment, and she employed governesses and tutors to teach him at home. School would be disastrous for Ewan, for it would treat him as if he was a girl, causing immediate distress and enduring psychological damage. But in the protected environment of homeschooling, Ewan could thrive. Strongly receptive to Ewan’s needs, Gwendolen called him “Benjie” at home, not “Elisabeth” or “Betty,” encouraging family friends to do the same, and saying it was because, like Benjamin in the Bible, he was so much younger than her other children. It worked: thirty years later, the Marquess of Aberdeen still opened her letters to Ewan with “My Dear Benjie.”
When Ewan was six, Gwendolen decided that she had to do something because, as we now know, it is between the ages of six and seven that children develop the understanding of gender consistency and stability, which Ewan had clearly developed.7 His former experience of healthcare had been literally limited to horse medicine: for coughs and colds Gwendolen dosed him with a fluid called Globena—declaring, “Of course it will cure you, it saved the life of your father’s horse in the South African war”—and for sprains and other injuries with “Elliman’s Embrocation as prepared for horses.”8 But when he was six, Gwendolen took Ewan to a pediatrician, in what was to become the first of a long series of medical interventions. The pediatrician referred them to Professor McKeren, a urologist at Aberdeen. In later life, in spite of his medical qualifications, Ewan would say little about his childhood treatments, politely claiming that he never knew quite what was going on: his body, and especially his genitalia, were his business, and not for public inquiry. But it is clear that Gwendolen now brought into play all of the family’s powerful connections to do everything she could to solve Ewan’s dilemma.
Time was not on their side. As the caring parents of all trans children know, Gwendolen and Ewan needed to find a solution before he went through the wrong puberty. In the early 1920s, this was a difficult task, with only a limited chance of success. They hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.
The power of the Forbes-Sempill family gave her hope. The family connections were wide and various. As well as the family’s links with the aristocratic and crowned European elite (the Queen of Spain was a houseguest), Gwendolen’s family had money. A cousin, Ernan Forbes, was the head of MI6 for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, and his wife, the American writer Phyllis Bottome, was part of the international avant-garde, friendly with Ivor Novello, Ezra Pound, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and the American journalist Dorothy Thompson and her husband, the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gwendolen’s energy was a family legend: when someone complained there were not enough chairs at Craigievar, Gwendolen responded, “Chairs? What for?” since, as everyone knew, she was too busy to sit down. She swung into action. Whatever could be done for Ewan would be done.
A massively influential medical text, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, was current among the intellectual set. First published in 1886, it was still sold in an English edition in 1947, and it shaped medicine’s thinking about trans people until the 1960s. In Radclyffe Hall’s famous 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, her trans man hero, Stephen, finds the book in his father’s study. It is a landmark medical book for trans healthcare, since it provided the first set of diagnostic criteria for what Krafft-Ebing called “metamorphosis sexualis without paranoia.” These diagnostic criteria operated by setting out the patient history of several trans men and women and deducing from this what is known as a “typical patient narrative.” If a patient presented with a history that corresponded to Krafft-Ebing’s typical patient narrative, then they would be diagnosed as experiencing “metamorphosis sexualis without paranoia,” or, as we would say today, being trans.
But there was a vicious sting in the tail of Krafft-Ebing’s diagnosis. What he meant by “without paranoia” was “not being gay.” Male homosexuality was illegal, and Psychopathia Sexualis was written primarily for the criminal courts, to enable juries to distinguish between gay men (go directly to jail) and people with apparently similar but actually different “diseases.” For at that time, to be gay was to be diseased or degenerate. Either you had been born with your biology broken in some way or you had been corrupted by society. To support this idea, Krafft-Ebing described what he called the “law of the sexual homologous development.”9 It was claimed as a matter of scientific “fact” that “cerebral development” must match genital development: right-minded people were right-bodied people, and right-bodied people were heterosexual. Gay and bisexual people were unnatural and possibly criminal. But where gay men and lesbians were mentally ill, “diseased and degenerate,” being trans was simply a form of physical intersex, people who were biologically different, and natural justice demanded that they be supported and accepted, not persecuted.
Krafft-Ebing’s work impacted several generations of psychiatrists. Psychopathia Sexualis went to twelve editions, was widely translated and was cited by other sexologists, including Sigmund Freud. And it carried its homophobia with it. Decriminalization of male homosexuality did not begin until 1961 in the US and 1967 in the UK.10 This meant that trans people were conscripted into institutionalized homophobia: unless they presented with a history that explicitly rejected same-sex intimate relationships, they would not get medical care. That medical imposition created tensions that still endure today for some members of LGBTI communities.
But to be fair to Victorian medicine, we should recognize that belief in the law of the sexual homologous development was general. Nowadays we take sex to mean biology (intersex, female, male), sexuality to refer to love (bisexual, gay, straight), and gender to denote cultural conventions for dress and behavior (androgynous, masculine, feminine). But the Victorian error, which in philosophy is known as a “category error,” made no distinction between sex, sexuality and gender. The false but enduring idea they gave us was that to be female was to be feminine and heterosexual, and to be male was to be masculine and heterosexual. Anything else was “abnormal.”
The politics of the day turned this category error into a persistent pseudo-medicine, separated from real, empirical, scientific medicine by a “stubborn will to nonknowledge.”11 Pseudo-medicine refused to recognize the obvious biological evidence that humanity’s variety incorporates variations in sex development, differences in sexual preference and diverse personal expressions of social identity. Since homosexuality was illegal or illicit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most of the developed world, including Europe, North America and Australia, this new pseudo-medicine supported both the imprisonment of gay and lesbian people as criminal and their abuse by medical “cures.”12 Similarly, the category error determined the shape of Krafft-Ebing’s “typical patient narrative,” supplying its notion of trans people moving from one binary pole of sex, gender and sexuality to another, ultimately engendering the concept of “transition,” which is still used to disauthenticate and diminish trans people today.
Even so, Krafft-Ebing’s description of “metamorphosis sexualis without paranoia” had left a medicolegal loophole for trans people, and it was this affordance that Ewan and Gwendolen used. Medical research was challenging established views, and by 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld had published his landmark work Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites). Without using those terms, he began to distinguish recreational cross-dressing from homosexuality and both from being trans, while mounting a powerful defense of all three. In July 1919, when Ewan was six, Hirschfeld opened his renowned Institute for Sexual Science in central Berlin, to the great interest of the European gay avant-garde: the playwright and diarist Christopher Isherwood lived next door, and his friend and sometime lover, the famous modernist English poet W. H. Auden, visited the clinic. Hirschfeld’s institute worked closely with Vienna’s Institute for Experimental Biology, where pioneering endocrinologist Eugen Steinach had been using transplants of animal tissue to rejuvenate and improve the sexual performance of elderly men.13 Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yeats both attested to the effectiveness of the Steinach procedure, although, like Serge Voronoff’s contemporaneous process of implanting monkey glands, it in fact operated only by a placebo effect.14 But work of this kind introduced the idea that endocrinology could affect the boundaries usually drawn in human experience and meant that research was carried out to synthesize hormones such as estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. In 1923, a film made by Steinach that explained basic endocrinology and the effects of “glandular juices” on shaping human bodies and minds as female, male or intersex had been screened across Germany and Austria.15 Hirschfeld’s institute had “developed ‘ovarian’ and ‘testicular preparations’ to be injected as a primitive form of hormone therapy,”16 and in the 1920s and 1930s, Nobel Prize–winning American and German biochemists had increasing success in producing the preparations that form the basis of modern hormone replacement therapy (HRT).17 This meant that there was information and at least experimental solutions available to those trans people and their families who had the wherewithal to access them.
During his preteen years, Ewan was allowed to run wild with his male cousins and the other boys on the estates, riding, skating, organizing races and wrestling competitions, hunting for rats in the estates’ granaries, lassoing the farm cattle, and every other boisterous boyhood activity. Whenever he could, he wore either riding breeches or a kilt, and a childhood picture shows him short-haired, in a jumper and breeches, trick-riding his pony Tommy by standing on his back. Visitors being shown round Craigievar—the great American novelist Henry James was one such—discovered that an air rifle and a bowie knife were given pride of place in Ewan’s room.18 His mother would explain, “Oh, these belong to my youngest child, such a queer child, you know, sort of tomboy and very masculine.” But such visitors and other formal social events were a torment to young Ewan, who was expected to behave “properly” and to wear what he called “frilly things or dresses and things of that kind.” His life was shaped and often constricted by such implacable family duty, so that when he was eight years old and running wild with other boys at Craigievar, Ewan had to put on a dress to join his older sister, Margaret, in a ceremony to commemorate the people of Fintray who had died in the war. They listened quietly to lengthy prayers and speeches from their father and other dignitaries, before stepping forward to unveil the new war memorial. Occasions like these must have been deeply distressing even to an obedient child. To make matters worse, the public press always referred to Ewan as “the Hon. Elisabeth Forbes-Sempill” even though no one called him that at home.
Of course, Ewan had no choice but to comply, and speaking forty-five years later, he said somberly that it made him feel “like a bird that had had its wings clipped.” He did his intrepid best to avoid such occasions. At Craigievar, where there was only one door in or out, he was thin enough to squeeze through the kitchen window on the castle’s ground floor, while if unexpected visitors turned up at Fintray, Ewan jumped the twelve feet out of the schoolroom window and ran away as fast as he could, so that he could honestly say that he had never heard his name being called. Perhaps the occasional mischief he got up to was him compensating for those restrictions: dropping a huge stone down the kitchen chimney to put the fire out, or catching bees and putting them in the kitchen cupboard as a surprise for the cook—there was no oatcake treat for him that day! Gwendolen did her best to occupy him. One of Ewan’s jobs was cutting up the family’s annual supply of laundry soap, bought in a two-hundredweight (one-hundred-kilogram) lump from Glasgow Drysalteries. He had to turn it into small squares and stack them up in neat arches to dry out. He had been sensible and responsible enough to be trusted to take messages on his pony when he was just five years old, so that by the time he was nine, he was delivering buckets of soup, balanced on his saddle, to local families stricken with the flu.
Ewan’s brother, William, had given Gwendolen a firm grounding in dealing with children who knew themselves to be different. William and school didn’t mix, and in 1907, the newspapers were full of the schoolboy who had run away from Eton, seen the sights of London and then taken himself home to face his parents. Gwendolen’s solution was to allow William to leave school when he was fifteen and take up an engineering apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, where he started work at six in the morning with all the other apprentice mechanics. She operated to the principle that people knew their own hearts, and she would do her best to make sure her children got what they needed from the world. What’s more, his older brother provided Ewan with an inspirational model of independence. As Ewan was becoming a teenager and starting to meet his own personal challenges, William was becoming known worldwide as an aeronautical expert, leading advisory missions to Japan, America and Greece, flying everywhere in his de Havilland Moth, breaking international records and supporting the new British aerospace industry. William’s title, Colonel the Master of Sempill, and his intrepid life made him a real-life version of a cinema hero. Ewan worshipped him.
When he was six, Gwendolen had established that Ewan had a normal female anatomy, and later, she warned him that he might menstruate, saying, “You know what may occur,” and questioning him frequently about it. At least menstruation was likely to occur later in those days, perhaps not until sixteen.19 By the age of thirteen, Ewan was holidaying in St. Moritz with his uncle, the Reverend Charles Prodgers, making friends with the Cartier children, winning a bobsleigh race with them, and falling desperately in love with his eighteen-year-old female cousin. St. Moritz was famous as a health spa before it became a leisure resort, and perhaps his visit was also a part of his healthcare. Certainly, it gave Ewan much-needed companionship, since at home his society was mostly adults who worked on the estates: Annie, who gave him glasses of milk that were half cream; Jimmie, who told stories about smugglers on the Don; and Postie Lawson, who showed him endless ingenious inventions.
Ewan’s sister, Margaret, was at boarding school for most of the year, often staying with friends during holidays, and their almost seven-year age difference meant that they had little in common when she was at home. She returned from finishing school to be presented at Court as a debutante, and ten-year-old Ewan was “dragged over the border” into the London Season’s fashionable parties and dinners, which he found “a very wild and hectic time of society nonsense.” They were never very close. Every now and then Margaret would deign to play with Ewan: once they rooted through the outbuildings and “collected together all the strange commodes and conveniences of a bygone age, including some with cute little steps to climb up to some of the four-posters about five feet off the ground.” Titling their assemblage “Baronial Sanitation throughout the Ages,” they presented it as an entertainment to dinner guests. But for the most part, Margaret simply wanted to spend her time with her Shetland ponies and her friends, grooming, cleaning tack and preparing for shows, and while Ewan was allowed to watch, he was not trusted to touch. Yes, he rejoiced when his cousins David and Patrick came to visit, and they could organize rodeos or ice hockey or a carnival, and reassemble their impromptu musical trio of melodeon, mouth organ, and paper and comb. But those were the high days. For most of the time at Craigievar, his only constant companion was “the mannie,” a red-haired mummified head, “which my father had picked up in the desert beside Wadi Halfa” and who, Ewan said, “was really a very sincere friend.” Similarly, at Fintray he was “often lonely,” finding solace by lying down among the ponies and horses and putting “my head on their warm comforting rumps.”
This sense of personal isolation, so familiar to many trans children, was accompanied by an equally familiar increase in risky behavior. Back home, Ewan began to imitate the skijoring he had seen in Switzerland, an extreme sport in which a skier is towed by a galloping horse. Even in today’s controlled conditions, on flat, groomed racetracks, wearing modern full-body protective clothing and helmets, with emergency ambulance services on standby, it reportedly gives an adrenaline rush like no other. Fourteen-year-old Ewan, though, “tore along the roads at home which were usually very ice-bound, even with the modest amount of traffic in 1926,” with the added danger of being trampled if he overtook “the horse going down steep braes,” and only able to stop with “vigorous stemming.” It was a radical level of risk-taking.
But everything was about to change. In spite of his social isolation, Ewan was a gifted student. The most complicated steps in traditional Scots dance were always the ones he most enjoyed learning, while his horsemanship was as skilled as it was extreme. And his homeschooling had given him excellent support. By the time he was fifteen, fluent in French and German, he was allowed to attend a coeducational college in Dresden, where he relished the days filled with lectures, visits to operas, weekends skiing, skating and wandering in the forests, and still more advanced lessons in music and the harp. It seems to have been one of Ewan’s happiest times. His remarkable outdoors experience, gained running wild in Scotland, stood him in good stead. Although he was the youngest in his group, he led the cross-country skiing in Bavaria’s deep forests: the others called him the “Wichtel Männchen,” or “good elf,” because of his ability to guide them safely and securely. He relished the new companionship.
Against this background of Ewan’s life as a student and woodlander, Gwendolen arrived in Dresden. She had done a good job. Letting Ewan live, dress, play and be named as he wished at home allowed him to develop a sense of himself as an individual, and it meant Gwendolen could be certain that he was trans, rather than just “going through a phase.”20 In spite of the loneliness and risk-taking of his term-time life, Ewan had been able to form a positive sense of himself and his abilities and to relish learning and life. This was vital to surviving the social traumas that he endured as his part of the bargain, for the wonderful support Gwendolen gave him came at a price.
Intelligent, liberal and caring though she was, Gwendolen had still been brought up with Victorian values of propriety, and the Forbes-Sempill family was a focus of attention locally and distinguished nationally. Ewan’s father had a strict code of personal honor, and a sense of duty that demanded that family members fulfill their social obligations. What’s more, Gwendolen cared a great deal about her husband’s profile and presentation. Trying her best to manage the tension between the demands of social position and the needs of her children, the trade-off she made with Ewan for all the help and support he received was that he played his part and didn’t rock the public boat. Put simply, on some formal social occasions his parents gave Ewan no choice but to dress as a girl. The Victorian values that overshadowed the early twentieth century made it a brutal period for any child who was different. Before William was allowed to become an apprentice at Rolls-Royce, he was sent back to Eton, where he was birched—held down by two other boys and ritually beaten, mercilessly, on his bare buttocks with a bunch of thin, whip-like twigs, designed to cut and mangle—in front of the other pupils as a lesson to him and them. Ewan paid his price in mental rather than physical anguish, but it was no less humiliating or painful.
It would be decades before Ewan finally rebelled against family duty and publicly changed his name and corrected his birth certificate. At fifteen, he was just beginning his journey into autonomy, springing from his positive experiences of life in a different country, ready to find out how the world might help him. And putting aside her problems in managing her husband’s iron inflexibility in matters of protocol, Gwendolen’s wartime experience had made her into an excellent guide. By managing the hospital that Fintray House had become and organizing the Aberdeen branch of the Red Cross, she had gained a practical knowledge of medical circles and a healthy respect for the mysteries of medicine. Sphagnum moss was just one of these. Writing to the Aberdeen Press and Journal in 1917, Gwendolen encouraged others to follow her example, saying, “I started a two-hour Saturday afternoon meeting (of course attending regularly personally) last September, gathering moss whenever weather permits and drying it in a laundry loft in cricket bags.”21 Sphagnum moss was in great demand for the treatment of war wounds at the front, for it was a far superior dressing to cotton wool, which was being commandeered for explosives manufacture anyway. It was much more absorbent and had antiseptic qualities that science recognized but couldn’t explain. The filthy conditions of the trenches meant that bullets and shrapnel carried sewage bacteria from contaminated clothing deep into wounds, frequently resulting in amputations to avoid septicemia. Sphagnum moss absorbed the blood and pus and mysteriously healed the infection where chemical antiseptics failed. Gwendolen encouraged local people to collect the moss, prevalent on bogs and moors, with the aim of Aberdeenshire supplying 150 bags of it a week. She might not have known the science, but she knew what worked.
When he was fifteen, then, Ewan and his mother began a series of visits to European specialist doctors, beginning in Dresden, moving on to Prague, Vienna and then Budapest. Their remarkable expedition into trans healthcare was neatly disguised as a cultural tour, and en route they saw the sights together: the castle in Prague; the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where Ewan made friends with the grooms of the famous Lipizzaner horses; museums and galleries in Hungary; and a period in Paris when, Ewan said, he attended classes at the Sorbonne. But much as he liked to talk about his travels, Ewan was reticent about the medical treatment he received. In Dresden, the doctor arrived “on the instructions of my mother” and he “got something to take,” while in Paris, his first consultation was attended by “a terrible plague of boils and pimples” and his second was with a Dr. Block, who sent him to the Laboratory de Tuille for investigation. Ewan says that there was a vaccine, “a particularly vile one,” and “various other forms of treatment,” with the consequence that the “boils still went on” and that at age sixteen, he “began to have erections and emissions.” When they returned to Aberdeen, Ewan’s mother took him to “Dr. Tom Fraser and he produced some more vaccine, and I had a further course of injections,” after which the boils stopped temporarily.
Even today, when preparations are far more refined and prescribing far more accurate than in the experimental days of the 1920s, trans boys and men are warned that some acne can appear as a result of taking testosterone, and it is clear that, almost a hundred years ago, Ewan was a guinea pig for early endocrinology. If cross-sex hormones are continued, then they stimulate a male puberty, just as Ewan experienced, thanks to the careful arrangements made for him with Dr. Fraser when they returned home.
Their journeys were a travelogue of famous names and connections. In the spring of 1931, Ewan visited his mother at Baden-Baden, where she was taking the waters, for a series of consultations with Phyllis Bottome’s physician, Dr. Eddy Schacht, whose brother was then president of the Reichsbank and later became Hitler’s minister for economics.22 That year is another landmark in trans history as the date of the first documented gender-confirmation surgery, provided for a trans woman named Dorchen Richter. Her vaginoplasty, carried out at Hirschfeld’s institute, was a milestone in surgical reconstruction and heralded a new era in trans healthcare. The same year was also a turning point for Ewan. Medical understandings of being trans were changing radically, and although Dr. Schacht said only a little to Ewan—at eighteen, he was still regarded as a minor—he spoke at length to Gwendolen. Ewan reported that:
he must have said something to my mother which gave her a far better understanding of the situation, because after the visit to Dr. Schacht, that was the first visit, there was far less restriction put upon me, and I was allowed more to dress as I liked, and I could smoke my pipe in the house, and that kind of thing, otherwise I always had to go outside and smoke it.
Eighteen months after first consulting Dr. Schacht, in the winter of 1932, Ewan moved to Munich, to stay with his cousins Ernan and Phyllis for nine months. It was essentially an elective period of counseling and psychotherapy. Ernan and Phyllis had both gone into analysis with Dr. Leonard Seif, whose approach followed that of the famous Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, and Ernan had trained as an Adlerian psychotherapist. Together, he and Phyllis opened a residential school at the Villa Tennerhof, in the Tyrolean ski resort of Kitzbühel. They specialized in treating and teaching wealthy troubled youth, but it seems as though Ernan also scouted for talent for the British secret service. One of his pupils was the creator of James Bond, the writer Ian Fleming, who had been troublesome at both Eton and Sandhurst and who left Ernan’s school first to work as a journalist for Reuters, and then to join military intelligence. Fleming’s devotion to Phyllis is described in detail by her biographer, and Ewan gets a brief mention, as “a strictly-brought-up young Scottish cousin of Ernan’s.”23 Ewan said simply that he had “a wonderful chance to study at the University of Munich under Dr. Seif, who was professor of Adlerian Psychology.”24 However, since the Adlerian approach was to reeducate, clients were often referred to as “pupils,” and in this sense, for example, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth was another of Ernan’s “pupils” in his profession as a therapist.25 As a “pupil” of Dr. Seif, Ewan was in therapy with him while at the same time continuing his endocrinology appointments with Dr. Schacht. Schacht’s HRT was effective, since at this time, Ewan said, “I found it necessary to shave, because I had quite a lusty growth of hair on my chin and cheeks, and there also, of course, was hair growth on my body, on my chest in particular.” His elective counseling support from Dr. Seif also seems to have been effective. Adler’s approach had three key tenets as a framework for life: work, love and social engagement. Ewan’s future life—his medical practice; his devoted relationship with his wife, Patty; and his deep engagement with his local community—was to reflect those principles in full.
The Auld Laird had played no part in the arrangements Gwendolen made for Ewan. His own father, Ewan’s grandfather, had been a larger-than-life figure, fighting in the Crimea, marrying three times and spending recklessly: he brought back the billiard table at Fintray House from the officers’ mess in the Crimea at huge expense, and a romantic, full-length portrait of Auld Sir Wullie in full Highland dress still loomed over Fintray’s dining room. It can be hard growing up in such an irresponsibly glamorous shadow, and Ewan’s father had struggled at Eton, his master reporting in 1877 that “now and then he takes a naughty fit” and was “kept clean of scrapes” only “by dint of curtailing his liberty and requiring him to do all his work under my eye.”26 After Eton, in 1883, Ewan’s father joined the army, but Sir Wullie’s fecklessness dogged him. As the eldest of a large family of children, it was the Auld Laird’s unenviable duty to write to his father in 1890, just as Sir Wullie was about to marry his third wife, pointing out that it was “entirely through you that the family have been brought into their present poverty-stricken condition” and asking him why he was marrying again when he was “unable to support in a manner suitable to their station in life” the family he already had.27 Apparently unable to pay even the household bills, Sir Wullie had casually borrowed £1,000 (present-day value £130,000, or $177,000) at an exorbitant rate of interest from moneylenders.
Perhaps the Auld Laird became such a stickler for the rules because his own father had paid so little heed to them. He is first recorded in the company of Ewan’s mother, Gwendolen, at the Wiltshire Society Annual Ball, held in London in 1888, and at that period, such a coupling in the public eye was tantamount to engagement. A family story says that the Auld Laird had made one too many social calls on Gwendolen, obliging him to marry her to save her reputation, and, certainly, the motive fits well with his character: duty was everything. Four years later, in 1892, the Auld Laird left the army and married Gwendolen at St. Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge. Nine months later, William, the son he didn’t want, was born.
The Auld Laird didn’t have any better of a relationship with his children than his own neglectful father had, and part of his motive in joining the Lovat Scouts to fight in the Boer War in 1901 may have been to get away from his family. The Scouts were a precursor of today’s special forces, recruited from lairds, ghillies and gamekeepers for their fieldcraft and shooting skills, and in his slouch hat, khaki tunic and riding boots, Ewan’s father cut as romantic a figure as Auld Sir Wullie.28 He commanded the 100th Company, and even when he was wounded in a Boer nighttime attack, he mustered thirty-five men and continued fighting. Less glamorously, he rode for a day to take terms for surrender from the British chief of staff, Lord Kitchener, to a Boer commando unit. The Boers refused the terms and took the Auld Laird’s horse and boots, obliging him to walk back barefoot in humiliation.29 Twelve years later, in 1914, two years after Ewan’s birth, having “received a telegram from Kitchener asking him to command the 8th Battalion Black Watch,”30 the Auld Laird fought in World War I. But by then he was fifty-one, too old to do well in the harsh conditions of trench warfare, and it is unsurprising that he fell to enemy fire, though perhaps it was his inflexible sense of duty and propriety that was his real enemy.
Gwendolen was aware that her husband was a difficult man, for whatever reason, and like other women of the period, she accepted that it was her job to “manage” him. He was not sociable, and when they had titled visitors to Fintray House, he would go and clear the field drains and leave Gwendolen to make his excuses and do all the entertaining. He preferred the company of ordinary people, where he could show his puckish sense of humor. One of Ewan’s favorite stories was about his father being mistaken for a gamekeeper by a workman. The workman asked him how long he had been a keeper, and using Doric rather than his usual upper-class English accent, Ewan’s father told him, “O a gey lang file, but I’m nae gaun tae bide” (“Oh, a right long time but I’m not going to stay”). The workman asked him why he was leaving, and “I canna thole the laird” (“I can’t stand the laird”) was the prompt reply. Of course, Ewan’s father was the laird, though he didn’t look like it in the old clothes he was wearing. But he was more often dour than jolly, as far as Ewan was concerned. After the angry reception he had given to William’s birth, it can have been no surprise to Gwendolen that the Auld Laird went out fishing when Ewan was being born, and if he was out of temper at having a new child, she could tell everyone it was because he had failed to catch anything. Gwendolen put herself between her husband and her children as best she could, and she occupied herself with her garden, took an annual sketching holiday abroad and clearly delighted in the many and varied friendships that enabled her to find help for Ewan. But she couldn’t always intervene. It was doubtless the Auld Laird’s obsession with duty and family honor that sent William back to Eton to be flogged, and he treated Ewan with the same inflexibility.
He didn’t oppose the treatment Gwendolen found for Ewan—major difficulties are caused when one parent is unable to come to terms with having a trans child—but Ewan could never do anything right for him. Trying to emulate his father’s sharpshooting, Ewan practiced target shooting with his air rifle, and when he was seventeen, his father let him go out with the keeper with a cheap secondhand shotgun to shoot the rabbits that were destroying the farm’s crops. Ewan killed twenty-three with twenty-six shots, a remarkable performance, which meant that “no adverse comment was made and shortly permission was given to shoot game.” But the Auld Laird seemed incapable of praise, even about an area in which they had common ground, so that “if other guns praised my shooting, he could be very annoyed,” but if Ewan did not shoot well, “scolding inevitably followed, so whichever way things went, I was in the dog house.” Gwendolen had to sort out and try to put to rights these constant injustices and jealousies on her husband’s part, and a major part of her effort was spent mitigating his deficiencies as far as she could. However, as every parent who deals with such a difficult partner knows, protection can never be complete.
Gwendolen was powerless to prevent the Auld Laird from forcing Ewan to comply with the social observances he believed fitting to the family name. So, in 1930, even though the HRT he had received on his European tour had begun to produce hair on his chin, cheeks and chest, Ewan was given no choice but to be presented to the Queen as a debutante.
This process of “coming out,” which Margaret had already followed seven years earlier, was an elaborate ritual. Only the daughters of selected upper-class families could take part in this ornate court ceremonial, and its rules were very strict. Ewan had to wear the required long white dress, with a train no more than two yards (1.8 meters) long and no less than fifty-four inches (1.3 meters) wide at the end, a headdress of three white ostrich feathers worn slightly to the left, and long white gloves. After making his curtsies to King George and Queen Mary, Ewan left their presence by walking backward—not easy in the long dress and train—for even though they were family acquaintances, proper etiquette would be maintained at all times. Presentations began after Easter and were followed by a summer of the London Season’s round of garden parties and events, which Ewan liked even less. He attended one dance and a couple of London parties “under protest and duress,” as he put it, “and after that I made my escape and I never went back.” At home, Ewan was allowed to dress as he pleased and smoke his pipe. But until he was twenty-one, whenever the Auld Laird required it, he was forced to appear in public as “the Hon. Elisabeth,” looking precisely like what he was: a young man forced to wear a dress.
In late summer 1933, Ewan left Munich and returned home to celebrate his twenty-first birthday and to attend the Lonach Highland Games, instituted by Clan Forbes a century earlier. A photograph, taken at the Lonach ten days before his birthday, shows Ewan in traditional male Scots attire, bonnet decorated with the usual Forbes badge of a sprig of broom, cromach in hand, chatting cheerfully to guests in the Craigievar party. He marked his adulthood on September 6, 1933, by choosing three guns to accompany him on a shoot, taking the sixteen-bore gun he always preferred to the usual twelve-bore, and bagging a record “seventy-five brace of partridges.”
Left to Right, Miss Deal, Miss Reynolds and Ewan at the Lonach, 1933
But in 1933, things were changing in Germany. Hitler had become chancellor, the Reichstag had been burned down, and while Ewan and his friends were shooting game birds in the Highlands, a horrific “cleansing” had begun in Berlin. On May 6, 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science and his private home were ransacked and demolished by Nazi storm troopers. Four days later, over twelve thousand books from the institute’s library, along with its collection of thirty-five thousand pictures, were destroyed in the public Säuberung, or book burning, together with thousands of volumes of Jewish, communist and other supposedly “degenerate” literature. A bust of Hirschfeld, who was at once gay, socialist and Jewish, was carried in torchlight procession and thrown on the bonfire: Hirschfeld himself was on a lecture tour in Paris and never returned to Berlin, dying two years later in exile in France.31
The Nazis made no distinction between trans women, gay men and cross-dressers: all were made to wear the pink triangle and sent to camps like Dachau, Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, while trans men, classed as lesbians, were marked by the same black “antisocial” triangle as communists and intellectuals. People with pink triangles were singled out for extreme brutality by both the Nazis and other inmates. They were segregated into “queer blocks” and given the deadliest work assignments. For those with pink or black triangles, death arrived not by extermination in gas chambers but by so-called indirect mass annihilation, a combination of “terror work,” induced starvation and pitiless punishment. Their lives were ended by a few weeks of deliberately prolonged torture, justified by the Nazis’ decision that they were not “real women” or “real men.”32 This was the regime Ewan had narrowly avoided.
The Third Reich’s horrific attitudes reflected a colonial mindset that was centuries old. From Columbus’s voyages to the Americas onward, Europeans had defined countries they colonized as terra nullius, empty lands, and the people who lived in them as Homo nullius, savages, non-people. And they had ranked them: Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, an international classification system for plants, animals and minerals, provided six categories for Homo sapiens, with the sixth being “monster.”33 Similar taxonomies included in the “monster” category “persons who have changed their sex.”34 People are subordinated and dehumanized by this kind of rationalizing, dissociative classification, and Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was a leading expert in it. He gave us the idea of “nature or nurture,” that people might be formed by biologically inherited traits or by education, and he was clear that nature always predominated: that was why the aristocracy was always fittest to rule and why colonial subjects could never be equal to their British masters. Or women to men, for that matter. The best that could be hoped for was turning them into fit servants of empire by eugenics, the process of weeding out the weakest, as one would breed plants and animals. It was an idea popular not only with the Third Reich but with people as varied as H. G. Wells, Winston Churchill and John Harvey Kellogg of cornflakes fame.
Eugenics ranked other people’s appearance and physiology against that of white, European, elite, heterosexual men, creating a violent binary between “civilized” and “degenerate” humans.35 Part of colonialism’s sinister eugenic ranking was “orientalism,” the process of objectifying other people into items for study and display.36 Sometimes this was done literally in human zoos, like the Filipino people displayed at America’s 1904 World Fair, or the African family that Ewan could have seen exhibited at the Berlin Zoo in the 1930s, as if they were animals. Orientalized people, including trans people, were at once thrilling and repellent, fascinating and reprehensible, remarkable and pathetic, imbued with dangerous secrets and knowledge, necessitating control by “superior” Europeans. More subtly, orientalism operated by pseudo-medicine and the law defining specific groups of people as physically, mentally and morally inferior and exhibiting them in the “virtual zoos” of medical textbooks and illicit erotica.
LGBTI people were subjected to this toxic bigotry, formed by “nature” as naturally diseased, or turned by “nurture” into something depraved. They were viewed as tainted and in need of control, cure or eradication. It was as though the colonial eye had turned inward, to gaze on European citizens, and found them as wanting as the “savages” and “natives” of other countries.
Intellectually degraded as it was, pseudo-medicine was closely intertwined with pornography. While Krafft-Ebing was publishing his catalog of sexual practices, an English textile merchant, Henry Spencer Ashbee, was producing a three-volume catalog of erotica. Both works map and classify minority sexes, sexualities and genders as freaks, both use Latin for things they think too indecent to say in English, and both write with a tone of authoritative finality. The only real difference between them is that Krafft-Ebing’s tone is judgmental and reproving while Ashbee’s is an arch, shocked, titillating enjoyment. At least Krafft-Ebing gave a measure of protection to trans people while Ashbee just mocked them, but both of them appropriated LGBTI experience for their own ends.
These were some of the ideas lying behind the Holocaust and Hitler’s demand for Lebensraum, or “living space,” for his master race. Inferior creatures were intruding onto space that should rightly be reserved only for superior, “real” people. Consequently, Nazis were ruthlessly closing down the city’s trans-friendly cafés, clubs and bars, so that in 1933, being associated with Hirschfeld’s institute or Berlin’s gay scene was a death sentence for trans people. It is a stark reminder of what happens when a society defines some of its citizens as not “real” people.
Ewan was still in Munich with Ernan and Phyllis for the first part of 1933, and he would have seen the Nazi banner unfurled on its city hall in March of that year. Phyllis was a close friend of the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and dismissed him as a mere “drummer boy” who “will be extinguished” and whose “startling insignificance” made it inconceivable that he could persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights and make him dictator.37 She realized her mistake too late and went on to write endless articles exposing his brutality. But as Ewan said, in the first part of 1933, “we still thought it was all a joke.” When he visited the Countess von Soden in Munich, she ordered the curtains to be drawn to block the view of a Brownshirt torchlight procession, seeing them as simply a temporary social inconvenience and telling her guests that watching Ewan dancing was far more important. Ewan went with a group of fellow students to hear Hitler speak at Munich’s Exhibition Park, and he noted how orchestrated the events were: “a brown-shirt would rush across an open space shouting, ‘Der Hitler kommt,’ then several others were organized to shout, ‘Where? where? where?,’ followed by more martial music, and further shouting that Hitler was about to appear.” When he did arrive, Ewan said, he screamed into the microphone to crowds that filled the building and spilled over into the snow outside, to orchestrated shouts of Sieg Heil! and martial music. It all seemed contrived and contemptible. But just weeks later, Hirschfeld’s institute was looted and the persecution began.
While we do not know how Ewan reacted to these specific events, both the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Science and the bonfire of the books were reported in The Times, and since the world of trans medicine was so small, Ewan and Gwendolen must have understood their significance. Most of the rest of his life was to be lived within a fifteen-mile radius, between Craigievar Castle and Aberdeen Medical School, in the village of Alford, where he practiced as a family doctor, and at Brux, where he bought an estate. His brother, William, would fly quite literally all over the world, including a solo flight to Australia and back, but Ewan was a homebody, wanting the quiet life, his deeply personal battle fought, won and ended. Or so he thought.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Finding Ewan ix
Part 1 1
1 Childhood 3
2 The Medical Student 34
3 Marriage 57
Part 2 87
4 A Death in the Family 89
5 Margaret's Fateful Letter 110
6 The Medical Examination 133
7 An Audacious Defense 145
8 The Judge's Dilemma 178
9 A Perfect Storm 195
Part 3 217
10 Outlawed 219
11 Another Audacious Defense 238
12 Ewan's Legacy 262
Picture Sources 297
Notes 299
Bibliography 329
Acknowledgments 347
Index 351
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