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Sir Ewan Forbes of Craigievar (September 6 1912 - September 12 1991), born Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill and later known as Ewan Forbes-Sempill, was the 11th Baronet of Craigievar from 1968 to his death, as well as a general practitioner and farmer.
Early life
Forbes was born the third and youngest daughter of John Forbes-Sempill, 18th Lord Sempill and 9th Baronet, and Gwendolyn Forbes-Sempill in 1912, christened as Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill and known to the family as "Betty". John Forbes-Sempill was a landowner and soldier, who had served with the Lovat Scouts and then the Black Watch in the South African War, before succeeding to the title of Lord Sempill in 1905; he would later go on to command the 8th Battalion Black Watch in the First World War, and was wounded at the Battle of Loos. Gwendolyn Forbes-Sempill, born Gwendolyn Prodger, was born and raised in Wales, with a Cornish mother, and was an accomplished harpist. The two met at the fashionable resort of Homburg in the 1880s, and were married on 22 June 1892.
Lord Sempill insisted on a "strict Scottish" upbringing for his children, which meant that they were taught to speak and write fluently in Doric as well as English and various European languages. Betty was raised female, but with a childhood dominated by a widespread gender insecurity; after refusing to go away to a girls' school, she was educated at home, and the culmination of this unhappy upbringing was coming out as a debutante in London in the late 1920s. She spent most of her childhood with her cousins Patrick and David, and in many contemporary photographs she can be seen dressed in trousers and a male jacket, unconventional dress for the period. In The aul' days, written many years later, Forbes recalled a hatred of being "made to dress up" for social engagements, and going to great lengths to avoid them.
At thirteen, she visited her uncle in St. Moritz, where she learned to ski and figure-skate, and won a number of bob sled races. At the age of fifteen, she pressed to be allowed to go overseas to attend a pre-university course, and eventually settled on a co-educational institution in Dresden. She studied there for a year, 1929-1930, before travelling with her mother through central Europe, visiting Prague and Vienna. That summer, she won the Scots Verse recital contest at the Aberdeen Music Festival, and was paid by Beltona to make a series of recordings of the poems of Charles Murray. Following this, she continued her studies in Paris, where she attended lectures at the Sorbonne - later noting that the curriculum was "very lax" - and studied the harp under the principal harpist of the Paris Opera. After returning to Scotland, she led a troupe of Scottish country dancers - the "Dancers of Don".
By the time she returned from the Continent, Betty's heart was set on studying medicine, but her father refused to fund her studies - he argued that there was no need for her to study further, since there was more than enough work to be done managing and maintaining the estate. She resolved to fund her own studies, aiming to put aside £1,000 to cover the costs. In 1933, she studied under the psychologist Leonhard Seif in Munich, living with the American novelist Phyllis Bottome. Whilst there, she witnessed the German elections which brought the Nazi Party into power, and heard Adolf Hitler speak.
On the death of Lord Sempill in 1934, both the barony and the baronetcy passed to Betty's elder brother, William; Betty inherited a small farming estate at Brux. Betty took to the new lifestyle with gusto, adopting a broad Doric accent and taking to wearing a masculine kilt.
Medical career
In 1939, Betty was finally accepted as a medical student at the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 1944 and taking up the post she had requested, Junior Casualty Officer at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. After a swift progression to Senior Casualty Officer, she began to work as a general practitioner in Alford, Aberdeenshire in 1945. In addition to the normal work of a rural doctor, she was called upon to act as a medical officer for a large number of German prisoners of war who were held in the area in 1946, due to her command of the language.
The area was one of the largest practices in the United Kingdom, and in the winter months Dr. Forbes often had to travel through ten-foot snowdrifts in a converted Universal Carrier. She did not live in Alford, but remained at Brux; the farm was left in the hands of a small resident staff, and a medical assistant was appointed to live in the town. However, the farm ran quickly into financial troubles, and it became uneconomic to maintain the staff. In order to raise a large amount of money quickly, Forbes sold his practice in Alford, and returned to the farm in 1952.
On moving to Alford, Betty had begun to publicly look and behave like the man he personally identified as being; in 1952, he formally became male by the simple process of requesting a warrant for birth re-registration from the Sherriff of Aberdeen, registering himself as male and changing his name to Ewan Forbes-Sempill. He announced this with a notice in the Aberdeen Press and Journal of September 12, 1952: "Dr E Forbes-Sempill henceforth wishes to be known as Dr Ewan Forbes-Sempill". A month later, on October 10th, he married Isabella Mitchell, his housekeeper for the past five years. The marriage took place at the kirk in Kildrummy, which he had recently joined; he would later be invited to act as an elder of the kirk.
His plans had been known in advance to many of his patients, who were reported as universally supportive. He was equally candid with the press, describing the situation to one reporter as "...a ghastly mistake. I was carelessly registered as a girl in the first place, but of course, that was forty years ago ... the doctors in those days were mistaken, too ... I have been sacrificed to prudery, and the horror which our parents had about sex". He retired from medical work in 1955.
Inheritance and lawsuit
The issue of his gender remained a private one until 1965, when his elder brother Lord Sempill died, with daughters but no sons. The titles were split; the barony passed in the female line to Sempill's eldest daughter Ann, whilst the baronetcy - and the bulk of the estate - passed to the first male heir. The family had assumed that Ewan would inherit, but this was challenged by his cousin John Forbes-Sempill - the only son of Rear-Admiral Arthur Forbes-Sempill, the younger brother of Ewan's father - who argued that the 1952 re-registration was invalid and that, as a woman, Ewan was unable to inherit.
At the time, the legal issue was unclear; the leading case, decided in 1965, held that re-registration of this form was only permitted when "the sex of a child was indeterminate at birth and it was later discovered ... that an error had been made". The matter was taken to the Court of Session, where it was heard in great secrecy - no papers were filed in court, and the judge sat in a solicitor's office to hear the case. The judge ruled in favour of Ewan; an appeal was made to the Lord Advocate, who referred the matter to the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, who ruled in December 1968 that Ewan was the rightful holder of the title. On taking up the baronetcy, he changed his name to Ewan Forbes, dropping the Sempill from his surname; this had been adopted by the family in the 1880s when they inherited the barony, and there was no reason to persist once the titles were seperated.
The level of secrecy of the case, which was criticised by some contemporary observers, meant that it was not properly recorded or published, and the exact facts of the argument were not known for some time. As a result, whilst it sharply differs from later rulings such as Corbett v Corbett , it was unable to be considered in later judgements on the legal recognition of gender variance. The papers were eventually made available to researchers, however, via the National Archives of Scotland, however. A total of twelve medical experts were called to give evidence, and their testimony was taken by the court to indicate that Forbes was a physical hermaphrodite. However, the medical evidence was not conclusive; Professor Martin Roth observed in evidence that he felt Forbes' condition was closer to that of a transsexual, and Professor J A Strong described the medical tests involved as "not wholly conclusive". More cynically, it has been suggested that the judge desired to ensure the baronetcy was inherited by Ewan - the "right" candidate - and was flexible with his judgement in order to obtain this result.
He was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Aberdeenshire in 1969. He died with no children in 1991, and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his cousin John. His widow Isabella survived him, dying in 2002.
References
- ^ Obituary in The Daily Telegraph, October 1, 1991. Published in the Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries, ed. Hugh Massingberd, 1995.
- Forbes, p.5
- Forbes, p.1
- Forbes, p.6
- Forbes, p.31
- Various photographs are in Forbes (1984); none are dated, but they seem to be from c. 1925 or later.
- Forbes, p.31
- Forbes, p.19
- Forbes, p.44
- Forbes, p.54
- Forbes, p.50
- Forbes, p.11
- Forbes, p.79
- ^ 'FORBES of Craigievar, Hon. Sir Ewan', Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007 accessed 9 Nov 2008
- Forbes, p.88
- Forbes, p.11
- Forbes, p.68
- ^ Casely, Gordon (March 5, 2002). "Obituary: Isabella, Lady Forbes of Craigievar". The Scotsman. p. 15.
{{cite news}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help) - Forbes, p.65
- "Isabella, Lady Forbes". The Telegraph. 2 March 2002. Retrieved 2008-11-09.
- ^ Playdon, Zoe-Jane (1996). "The Case of Ewan Forbes". Press for Change. Retrieved 2008-11-09.
- Forbes, p.11
- Barnes, p.166. The papers are reported as being held under reference CS258/1991/P892.
- Barnes, p.166
- Barnes, p.170
- "Sex Changes'? Paradigm Shifts in 'Sex' and 'Gender' Following the Gender Recognition Act?'". Sociological Research Online. 12 (1). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/whittle.html. 2007.
{{cite journal}}: External link in|location=|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help)CS1 maint: location (link)
- Forbes, Ewan (1984). The aul' days. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. ISBN 0080324150.
- Barnes, Lesley-Anne (2007). "Gender Identity and Scottish Law: the Legal Response to Transsexuality". Edinburgh Law Review. 11 (2): 162–186. ISSN 1364-9809.
{{cite journal}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help)
- Reitwiesner, William Addams (n.d.). "Ancestry of Ewan Forbes". Retrieved 2008-11-13.
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