Robert cowell stable tour
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LGBTQ at Brooklands: Roberta Cowell
Join us this month as we explore and celebrate the LGBTQ+ stories of Brooklands for LGBT History Month. This week we’re looking at Roberta Cowell, the UK’s first woman to undergo transgender surgery, was a successful Brooklands racer and RAF ace.
Born intersex as Robert Cowell, she showed a great interest in mechanics from a young age and went on to study engineering at University College London. She married fellow student Diana Carpenter and had two daughters. Her career in motorsport started with sneaking into the Paddock at Brooklands dressed as a mechanic. By 1939 she had become a prolific racing driver, competing at Brooklands, in the Antwerp Grand Prix and winning the Lands’ End Trial at the age of 18.
Cowell then joined the RAF during the war as a fighter pilot. In 1944, her plane was shot down over Germany where she was captured and spent 5 months interred in Stalag Luft I. She returned to competitive racing after the war and established Cowell, Whittet & Co, Lightwater, to tune and develop cars, but suffered from an increasing re
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21/5/1921 - 11/10/2011
Record updated 21-May-20
Robert Cowell achieved much fame in the sensationally minded press by undergoing a sex-change operation in 1951 and becoming Roberta Cowell. Not only that but she annoyed Patsy Burt no end by taking the Ladies Hill record at Shelsley Walsh a few years later.
Robert Cowell was born in Croydon, the son of famous surgeon who was also an artist, sculptor, writer, lecturer, naturalist and a good violinist. His mother was strongly religious, a social worker, a fine pianist and a would-be singer. He had an older sister and a younger brother.
He left school at 16, and got a job at the General Aircraft Co, at Hanworth, which he saw as good training for a career in motor racing. He joined the RASC to get a flying commission through the ranks which he achieved in 1941.
In May of that same year, Robert married a girl he had known for some years, and very soon they started a family.
Robert was determined to become an airman, however, and was eventually accepted for flying training. He became a Spitfire pilot. Aft
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Roberta Cowell
British racing driver (1918–2011)
Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell (8 April 1918 – 11 October 2011) was a British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot. She was the first known British trans woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery in 1951.
Early life
Roberta Cowell was born on 8 April 1918[1] in Croydon, London,[2] one of three children of Major-General Sir Ernest Marshall CowellKBE CB (1886–1971)[1][3][4] and Dorothy Elizabeth Miller Cowell, Lady Cowell (1886–1962).[1]
Roberta Cowell attended Whitgift School, a boys' public school in Croydon and was an enthusiastic member of the school's Motor Club, along with John Cunningham, who would later be famous as an RAF night fighter ace and test pilot.[Note 1] Towards the end of her school days, she visited Belgium, Germany, and Austria with a school friend. At the time, one of her hobbies was photography and filmmaking, and she was briefly arrested in Germany for shooting a cine film of a group of Nazis drilling. She
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