𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"It's the 18th of November, 1944, and the world is at war. Second Lieutenant Roberta Cowell of the British Royal Airforce has been assigned to No. 4 Squadron, doing aerial photo-recon of Nazi forces on the outskirts of Antwerp, Belgium.
On this particular day, she is flying a Typhoon fighter-bomber that has been retrofitted with camera equipment on a low-level sortie near Bocholt, Germany. Southeast of Kessel, she spots enemy ground forces and attacks. It's a mistake. The Nazis respond with a blanket of anti-aircraft fire. Her engine is shredded, and both her wings knocked full of holes so wide she can hear the wind whistling through them. The plane starts entering an uncontrolled descent.
Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell was born on April 8th, 1918 in Croydon, London, into a military family. Her father, Major-General Ernest Marshall Cowell was a surgeon who served in France during the first great war, and later, would serve again in the second and earn a knighthood for his wartime efforts. Ernest also had a lifelong love affair with fast, loud, expensive cars.
That's probably where I got it from, Roberta thought madly to herself as her plane's propellor spun slowly to a stop. She considered her options. A bail-out was out of the question. She was flying too low for the chute to open. But a landing might be just possible, if she could just find an open stretch of land within gliding distance. She popped the canopy of her airplane to increase visibility, and scanned the lightly forested German countryside beneath her.
Roberta's childhood was relatively normal, all things considered. She attended Whitgift Public School like all the other little Croydon boys whose fathers could afford it. She was a chubby child, and wore large glasses, and so earned a few unflattering knicknames like "Circumference" and "Bottom". But she enjoyed school nonetheless. She joined the school's Motor Club, which allowed her to indulge in her dream of driving very fast, very expensive things with very large engines. On one trip with the Motor Club in Germany, she was caught photographing a group of Nazis performing drills. She was threatened with arrest but was released on the promise that she would hand over the film to be destroyed. However, she was able to substitute stock footage instead, and smuggled the offending film back to England.
Roberta spotted a clearing and wrestled with the controls to aim for it. She wondered briefly if any Nazi patrols had seen her plane go down and were tracking her. If so, there was nothing she could do about it now. This airplane was going down one way or the other. She concentrated on landing it as safely and quickly as possible. Quickly wasn't a problem. It was the safely part that worried her. The horizon rose. The wheels touched down. The plane rolled to a stop. Roberta took a wild look around her, absolutely astounded to be in one piece. Breathlessly, she radioed back to her partner, confirming that she was unhurt. Hopping out of the cockpit, she saw the first Nazi enter the clearing. He was aiming his rifle right at her. She raised her hands in surrender.
At the age of 16, Roberta left Whitgift Public School to join Aircraft Limited, as an apprentice aircraft engineer. This job didn't last long though, and she soon quit and enlisted in the RAF. She became an acting pilot officer on probation in August of 1936, but was soon discharged because of airsickness. Later that year, she went back to school, this time studying engineering at University College London. Also in that year, she began motor-racing, winning event after event in her class at the Lands End Speed Trial in Riley. It would seem her dreams were finally coming true. By 1939, she owned three cars and had competed in the 1939 Grand Prix at Antwerp.
As a POW of the Nazi regime, Roberta knew that her chances of rescue were slim, and getting even slimmer the deeper into Germany she was taken. If she was going to attempt an escape, it had to be now, while she was still close enough to the front line. Perhaps Lt. Draper was even mounting a search and rescue operation right now. She waited for her moment, and made a break for it, running for her life. But she was quickly recaptured by Nazi troops. She tried twice more in the following days, but gave up as she was dragged further and further into the heart of Nazi Germany.
When war broke out with the Nazis, England needed anyone who could theoretically fly to get behind a cockpit. So, despite her airsickness, Cowell was posted to the RAF on the 24th of January, 1942 with the rank of pilot officer (temporary). She completed RAF flying training at RAF Ansty. Roberta served a tour with a front-line Spitfire squadron, then a brief stint as an instructor, but by June of 1944 she was assigned to the task of aerial reconnaissance, flying an unarmed, camera-equipped version of the Supermarine Spitfire.
Roberta had lots of time to think about the events which led her here, as she spent several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied aircrew, before being moved to Stalag Luft I, a prisoner of war camp in northern Germany. Far, far away from the front lines. Far from any hope of rescue. Months passed. She passed the time by teaching classes in automotive engineering to her fellow inmates, of whom there were about 9,000. Towards the end of the war, food began running short. Cowell dropped about 50 pounds from her already lightweight frame as starvation rations took their toll. Roberta would later describe in her autobiography that she was forced to kill and eat some of the camp cats and eat the meat raw just to survive.
On the 30th of April, 1945, allied Soviet forces liberated Roberta's camp, and two weeks after that, Roberta landed once more in London, England, courtesy of the United States Army Air Forces.
After demobilization, Cowell returned to civilian life, founding a motor-racing team and competing in events all over Europe. However, Roberta remembers this time as one of great stress and clinical depression. Racing very fast, very expensive, very loud cars did not hold the same joy it once had for her. She also experienced traumatic flashbacks while watching a film called "My Own Executioner", in which the hero is shot-down by anti-aircraft fire while flying a Spitfire.
She sought out a leading Freudian psychiatrist, but was unsatisfied with the help he offered. But sessions with a second psychiatrist revealed, in her own words, that her "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and that "the feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed."
By 1950, Cowell was taking large doses of estrogen, but was still presenting as masculine. She convinced a close friend, physician, and trans man himself, to perform an ingual orchiectomy on her. This was done in secrecy, as UK law at the time banned the procedure. Cowell then presented herself to a private Harley Street gynaecologist and was able to obtain from him a document stating she was intersex. This allowed her to have a new birth certificate issued, with her recorded sex changed to female. This new birth certificate in hand, Roberta had a vaginoplasty performed on the 15th of May, 1951. The operation was carried out by Sir Harold Gillies, widely considered the father of plastic surgery. At that time, vaginoplasty was a completely novel procedure, which Gillies developed using his experience of reconstructing the genitals of soldiers who had endured injuries from explosive blasts. The name on Roberta's birth certificate was changed on May 17th of that year.
After this, Roberta returned to motor-racing and even attracted some publicity for winning the 1957 Shelsley Walsh Speed Hill Climb. However, as a woman, Roberta found it increasingly difficult to earn gainful employment. None of the jobs she was qualified for wanted to hire a woman. And none of the jobs which were hiring women were anywhere near her areas of expertise. In later years, she largely dropped out of the public eye as money troubles increased. However she was still an active figure in British motor racing all the way up through the 1970s.
Sometime during the 90s, Roberta's dwindling finances forced her to move into government housing, though she continued to own and drive very fast, very powerful cars. She died on October 11th, 2011. Her body was not discovered until weeks later by a cleaning lady. Her funeral was attended by only six people and (on her instructions) went unpublicised. Her death was not even publicly reported until two years later, when a profile of her was printed in The Independent in October 2013. Her official obituary was not published until June 5th, 2020, in the New York Times, almost a decade after her death.
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