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12/ Bobby Corbett [ Back to excerpts ]
I saw in the New Year, 1984, at Bardrochat. Shamefully deserting my own family for the New Year's festivities, I went to Ayrshire and listened to the chimes at midnight with Sophie's. It was a tradition with the McEwens to have a large family celebration, lasting two or three days, at the big house.
Aside from the immediate family, the quests were a colourful mix of the more eccentric members of the British upper class. It was here that I first met Bobby Corbett, the dissolute son of Lord Rowallan. Bobby was a crimson-faced, carbuncled alcoholic and Master of Foxhounds. He was a man whose spoken English was so impeccable as to render it unintelligible. His vowels were so strangled you feared that he was about to give painful birth to a sentence rather than speak it. Bobby was a man of infinite learning and taste, but of dubious personal hygiene. Even in his fifties he was still admonished by his nanny for his lack of having even a passing acquaintance with soap and water.
He spoke in a staccato patois, impenetrable to those who didn't know him, and not much less so to those who did. Like a savant, his conversations and observations would be peppered with metaphors and symbols, which, while clearly conveying the appropriate meaning for Bobby, would often leave his listener open-mouthed and bewildered, as if he had been the victim of verbal mugging. I remembered that the Rowallan family had been in the national press when I was about eighteen or nineteen, when Bobby's brother, Arthur, was seeking a divorce. The entire Rowallan family were attempting to find a way to dissolve the marriage and avoid the inheritance issues that would normally arise. Needless to say the details of the case were less than straightforward. The case was constructed on the premise that the marriage had never been legal in the first place.
In 1963 Arthur, the heir to the title, was a married man with four children, and a complex sexuality, who was given to homosexual activity and an interest in transvestism. He started to dress more and more frequently in female clothing, but loathed himself for the way he looked once dressed. He started to frequent drag bars and transvestite clubs, and was eventually introduced to a young female dancer who had undergone a sex-change operation and worked at one of the best known female impersonator's clubs in Paris. The dancer's new name was April Ashley.
Ashley, born George Jamieson, was a former merchant seaman, who joined The Navy at the age of 15. He had left the service on grounds of depression, after a suicide attempt due to problems of a psycho-sexual nature. Moving to France, he ended up in Paris, where he was fascinated by the transvestite bars and clubs, and in 1956 he joined the resident troupe at le Carrousel. Convinced that he was a woman trapped in a man's body, the former seaman first started a course of oestrogen to develop breasts and hips, and eventually, in 1960 at the age of 25, he had the full, traumatic sex-change operation in Casablanca, with subsequent hormone therapy.
Thereafter she lived the life of a woman, and was indeed considered so beautiful that she frequently was used as a catwalk model and as an underwear model for Vogue, and was photographed by David Bailey and Terence Donovan.
On meeting Ashley, after an introduction by a mutual friend, Arthur Corbett found his ideal partner, and fell in love with her. Her left his first wife and eventually, in 1963, he married April Ashley in Gibraltar. It was a short but wretchedly unhappy marriage, with a minimum of physical contact. On the rare occasions that he did try to penetrate his bride, Arthur would withdraw almost immediately in hysterical tears.
Eventually suing for divorce in 1969, on the grounds that his wife was born male, the Corbett vs. Corbett case established that a surgically constructed vagina was not a vagina for purposes of the law. Arthur won the case, and April withdrew from public view.
For a pre-wedding ball, Arthur made his entrance by descending the grand staircase of his baronial pile near Kilmarnock in full female attire. His exasperated butler, Mr. Moog, turned to Bobby and, distraught, muttered, 'It's not what I laid out for him, Mr Bobby, Sir.'
The final thing I shall say about Bobby for the time being is that, when I asked him where he stays in London when he visits, he replied, 'Brooks'. Brooks is a particularly fine and discreet gentleman's club in St. James's. I had recently been there myself for tea with a friend who is a member and was charmed by the old-world tranquillity of the place. I commented to Bobby, 'I loved the library. It is the most civilised place in London.' 'My grandfather died there' he replied, quick as a flash. 'Really?' I asked. 'Yes. Trouble is, the place is so fucking discreet that no-one noticed he was dead for three days. They all thought he was taking a nap and didn't want to disturb him. Then he started to smell'.