Dr Andrew Bamji’s amply illustrated talk: A Strange Story of Surgical Success and Unrequited Love at Rye Museum on March 14 was possibly the most “different” we have ever had but it was also one of the most fascinating. This is the speaker’s own summary of the tale for which another title might be: How Laura Dillon and Robert Cowell became Michael Dillon and Roberta Cowell.
Laura Dillon, brought up by two parsimonious maiden aunts, escaped to Oxford but at an early age felt she was the wrong sex. She threw herself into sports, rowing stroke for the ladies’ Dark Blue crew and rejuvenating an almost moribund rowing club.
After Oxford she drifted, ending up working in a garage and finding a doctor who prescribed the newly available testosterone. Having developed male characteristics and now calling herself Michael, in 1946 she approached Sir Harold Gillies and over the next five years had a series of operations to change gender, meanwhile training in Dublin to become a doctor. None of her fellow students knew the secret.
Gillies had invented a technique which he had used in the 1930s to create male genitals for patients with congenital absence, or traumatic loss. Dillon was the first ever female-to-male reassignment in the world.
Dillon had written a short book titled Self which outlined in simple terms some of the issues faced by people who felt they were, as Gillies was to put it, “in the wrong sex pen”.
Gillies was later approached by former fighter pilot Robert Cowell, a married man with two daughters. He’d read Dillon’s book and Dillon arranged for him to see Gillies. But there were two complications.
First, it was illegal in the 1950s for orchidectomy (removal of the testes) to be performed except for medical reasons. Secondly Dillon became infatuated with Cowell. The consequence was that Dillon, still a medical student, agreed to do the orchidectomy in Dublin and got Cowell to sign a disclaimer lest anything went wrong. Cowell then went back to Gillies who performed the first male-to-female surgery done in England. He also re-shaped Cowell’s nose and chin to make them more feminine.
Dillon’s passion for Cowell was not reciprocated, and Dillon realised that his life as a transsexual would be risky if he was found out. He went to sea as a ship’s doctor. He had managed to have his birth certificate altered, and approached the editor of Debrett’s Peerage to have his entry changed; as the child of a baronet, with a childless older brother, there was the possibility that he could inherit the baronetcy.
Cowell meanwhile had sold her story to Picture Post. But Dillon’s secret emerged; Debrett’s Peerage had failed to change its entry, the discrepancy was the subject of a gossip piece in the Sunday Express and Dillon was doorstepped when his ship arrived in America.
Dillon fled to India, joined a Tibetan monastery, became a monk with the name Lobsang Jivaka, tried to sustain himself by writing, but gradually became malnourished and died of pneumonia in 1962.
Cowell was to live a solitary life until her death in 2011. She had been befriended by journalist Liz Hodgkinson who wrote a biography of Dillon based on Cowell’s records, which was revised after Cowell’s death to include details that could not have been revealed in her lifetime.
Both stories were of sad introverts; how different it might have been for both of them in today’s more accepting culture.
Footnote:
Dr Andrew Bamji, of Rye, a retired rheumatologist, is perhaps better known – thanks to a previous talk at Rye Museum – for his expertise on the pioneering era of facial surgery set in motion by the medical challenges of First World War battle injuries.
Having discovered the case files from Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, he developed an interest in the work of the pioneering surgeon Harold Gillies, who developed and fostered at Sidcup the innovations which enabled the rapid strides in that field a century ago.
Dr Bamji has since done much to promote wider international understanding of Gillies’ achievements. In the Second World War Gillies continued his work at Rooksdown Hospital in Basingstoke, and when those case files were going to be sent to permanent storage Dr Bamji collected some of the ‘fat files’ among which was that of Michael Dillon.
Image Credits: Dr Andrew Bamji .