Roberta Cowell: Britain’s reluctant “trans” pioneer
- Rebecca Jane Morgan
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
For a few days every year, the rural tranquility of Shelsley Walsh in the hills of Worcestershire is interrupted by the fierce rumbling of engines. The Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb, first run in 1905, sees competitors take turns blasting up an old winding bridleway. In the women’s category for the September 1957 race, the roster of stars featured the likes of Patsy Burt, one of the greatest female open-wheel racers of her generation, but all eyes that day were on one Roberta Cowell, an old hand making her dramatic return to racing after a six-year absence.
Wearing racing overalls and sporting a neat page-boy bob, a slender, rather stern-looking Roberta came first in the ladies’ division in a borrowed Formula 1 car, breaking Patsy Burt’s record with a time of 40.41 seconds. In “the most dramatic announcement of the day,” the on-scene commentator declared: “She has done it! She has broken the ladies’ record!” Cowell expressed shock at the result: “I could hardly believe it when they told me. I thought the timing mechanism had gone wrong. … But I could have gone faster. I was afraid I might bend the car. After all, I’ve only borrowed it.”
Born in Croydon in 1918, Roberta was the middle child of Major-General Ernest Cowell, later Director of the Allied Medical Service in North Africa during World War II and Chief Medical Officer for the Control Commission in the British zone of occupied Germany. Catching the racing bug from the novels of Alfred Edgar when she was eight, the well-to-do Roberta was a regular on the racing scene from the mid-1930s to the early-1950s, acquiring a collection of silverware that included a second-place finish in her vehicle class at Shelsley Walsh in 1946. Back then, however, she was known as “Bob,” an unkempt, gregarious grease-monkey – and something of a womanizer.
Last seen on the race track in 1951, “Bob” exploded back into the spotlight in March 1954, when, as Roberta, she revealed that she had undergone what the media called a “complete change of sex” via hormone therapy and surgery. In her autobiography, Roberta Cowell’s Story (1954), she insisted that it was not a conscious choice – her body just naturally started changing after the war, when she had crashed her RAF plane and wound up as a POW in Germany. Through psychoanalysis and physical tests, she reportedly discovered that nature had meant for her to be female, with her body wrongly developing masculine traits due to a glandular malfunction. The medical assistance she received was thus framed by Cowell as finishing a job that her body started.
In 1972, she even claimed to have XX chromosomes, insisting that hers was a “unique” instance of “intersex”, not transsexualism. Surgery made her “normal” by aligning her body with her biology, whereas most who underwent the process in her wake started out normal and became, in her words, “freaks.” She also expressed her distaste for the Women’s Liberation Movement and the so-called “permissive society” (i.e., the more liberal attitudes towards social morality that gathered pace in the 1960s). She wasn’t a sympathetic person, to say the least, and she always discouraged those who sought her advice on matters of medical transition. Nevertheless, she is often repackaged nowadays as a trans “trailblazer.” From books like Liz Hodgkinson’s Michael, née Laura (1989) and Pagan Kennedy’s The First Man-Made Man (2007), to the Channel 4 documentary The Sex Change Spitfire Ace (2015) and Tabby Lamb’s play The Law of Mayhem (2025), Cowell’s transness (and her brief romance with trans man Michael Dillon in 1950-51) is treated as the core of her life.
It doesn’t help that Cowell’s autobiography portrayed the transition as a singular turning point where decades of confusion, dissolution, and disintegration gave way to pure, delirious joy, and where stereotypical masculine obsessions (engineering, racing, flying) were replaced by feminine obsessions (fashion, dieting, gossip). As she put it, when she learned from a psychoanalyst that her mentality was predominantly female around 1948, “the tremendous and all-pervading enthusiasm for motor-racing vanished completely.” Indeed, her narrative implies that she ceased racing in the late-1940s, yet there are records of her competing in major national events as late as September 1951, and she co-ran a race car engineering company until the summer of 1952, over a year after she received an amended birth certificate listing her sex as female. The idea that she suddenly swore off “masculine” pursuits when she decided to transition is simply wrong.
Moreover, as we have seen, she restarted her racing career in 1957 and continued until 1962 (making a second comeback in 1970-73). She took a role flying jet planes for military research in 1956, and in 1958 announced plans for a record-breaking flight over the South Atlantic. The final act in her life as a public figure came in 1973 when she drove an experimental car 30 miles up the wrong side of the M1 motorway. This doesn’t sound like someone who no longer cared for machines.
The trans-centric view is thus a very poor guide to Cowell’s life outside of a narrow window between 1952 and 1956, and it has the knock-on effect of obscuring the things that mattered most to her self-image for the majority of her 93 years on this earth (she died in 2011). For example, none of the recent biographical pieces on Cowell pay much attention to the revolutionary F1 car that she tried to build in the 1940s using Frank Aspin’s rotary valve system, and it is clear from the tone when it does come up that the authors aren’t particularly interested in the subject.
Ironically, the trans-centric view also obscures aspects of her life that could be meaningful for the modern trans community, like the fact that there was little, if any, controversy around her eligibility for women-only races, which seems unthinkable in today’s media environment. She also reminds us that hyper-focusing on “transition goals” as the key to happiness can be unhelpful. Euphoria wears off in time, and as Cowell found out the hard way, it can be profoundly unsettling when you come out the other side of your great quest with a lot of life left to live and no clear idea about how to live it. She protested in 1962 that she did not want to “go on being a gimmick” – indeed, this is largely why she spent much of her life after 1954 chasing a more substantive legacy – and so it is her greatest tragedy that she is remembered now as a “trans pioneer” and little besides that.
On another note, Sabah Choudrey wrote in a contribution to the 2025 Trans+ History Week Workbook by QueerAF that Cowell proves how, in transitioning, you “don’t need to leave behind one part of yourself to find the rest of you.” This is indeed a lesson that can be taken from her story, but only because she shows us what not to do. She tried to leave chunks of her self behind because she bought into the ideology of men and women having different natural affinities, such that a lady ought not gravitate to fast cars. We have already seen that she did not actually lose the need for speed, so all she really did was temporarily alienate herself from her passions.
She also walked out on her two young daughters, Anne and Diana, never responding to their attempts to get back in touch as adults. The loss of a parent caused them great mental pain, yet in conversations with a journalist friend, Liz Hodgkinson, Cowell implied that the children were the product of her ex-wife having affairs. There is no way to “prove” this one way or the other, but it seems unlikely for circumstantial reasons that I will not get into here. The point is that in trying to manufacture a sharp juncture in her life, Cowell left behind a trail of hurt and lost opportunities.
In the process of writing a new biography of Cowell that recentres her racing and engineering work, I have become only more convinced that when an individual’s transness is treated as the very core of their being, it often has the unfortunate effect of lowering the fidelity of everything else around it, as if all that “other stuff” is just a prologue and epilogue to the juicy bit. This, in turn, cheapens trans experiences by detaching them from the emotional and intellectual landscapes that give them their particular meanings. I believe that one of the crucial tasks of the trans historian today is to explore how transness-in-context acts as an experience modifier in different walks of life, not as an isolated characteristic.
Rebecca Jane Morgan is a historian of modern Britain, religion, and trans politics. She is the author of Deviants and Trailblazers: A History of Trans Activism in Britain (Pluto, 2026) and Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Alliance Against Trans Liberation (Pluto, 2023). She graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Nottingham in 2024.
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