Trans trailblazer who went from Liverpool lad to Vogue supermodel. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Peter O'Toole fell for April Ashley, who claimed… 'I could have slept with all four Beatles!'
So, when would you like to transfer from monsieur to mademoiselle?’ asked Dr Georges Burou at his clinic in Casablanca.
‘Immediately,’ replied George Jamieson. The year was 1960. Aged 25, he was desperate. All his life, he’d known for certain he was a female trapped inside a male body.
Born in working-class Liverpool in 1935, he’d suffered an appalling childhood, with a mother who loathed his effeminacy and bashed his head on the ground like a pneumatic drill while the city was being bombed to pieces. He was bullied so violently in the playground that he was once crippled for four months.
But none of that was as bad as the inner conflict he was suffering.
Aged 17, he escaped and went to work, first as a sailor (during which he was pumped with male hormones and underwent electric shock therapy to try to suppress his urge to change gender) and then in a cross-dressing nightclub in Paris called Le Carrousel. One of his co-workers, Coccinelle, showed him sex change was possible. She’d had it done. She opened her legs to prove it.
Born male in working-class Liverpool in 1935, April Ashley underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1960
Tall, skinny and beautiful, April became a supermodel. Pictured here performing a song and dance act at the Astor Club in London's West End in 1962
April with her mother Ada Jamieson at London Airport on their way to Gibraltar
George decided that he, too, would have to change sex and went to Morocco to meet the Gauloises-chain-smoking surgeon who could help him.
During the consultation, Dr Burou tested his resolve by showing him photographs of blood-soaked, chopped-off body parts, reminding him what the gender-reassignment operation would entail: photos so graphic that, as he put it, ‘only a real transsexual would stay put’.
George didn’t flinch.
‘I’ll book you in for 7am tomorrow morning,’ said Dr Burou.
This was 12 years before that same doctor would perform the operation that made acclaimed travel writer James Morris into Jan Morris. When it came to gender reassignment, George Jamieson — soon to be ‘reborn’ as Miss April Ashley — was the true trailblazer.
The next morning, the operation went ahead. Look away now if you don’t want to know the full details: castration, after which penis skin was inverted into the newly created space, and the remaining tissue used to complete the new vagina. The official name of the operation: an ‘anteriorly pedicled penile skin flap inversion vaginoplasty’.
The post-op pain was excruciating, but there was no question in April’s mind: she was reborn. She’d done the right thing.
From then on, she only spoke of George, the boy she’d been, in the third person. As Douglas Thompson writes in this lively, if rather fawning and gushing, book about her (they were friends, and reminisced in her house in Provence), April would always stress that the operation didn’t ‘transform’ her, it ‘completed’ her.
And then the fun started. The first thing she did was sleep with a muscular dancer at Le Carrousel called Skippy. He’d promised her he’d be the first to have sex with her after the operation — and it worked.
Tall, skinny and beautiful, April became a supermodel. David Bailey and Terry O’Neill photographed her for Vogue, modelling underwear.
April signs the marriage register with her husband Arthur Corbett on their wedding day in Gibraltar in September 1963. The marriage later failed and was annulled in 1970
In 2012, April was awarded an MBE for her services to transgender equality
April died in 2021, aged 86. She was one of Britain's first transsexuals and her lovers included Omar Sharif, Peter O-Toole and Michael Hutchence
Even when she’d been a cross-dresser at Le Carrousel, Salvador Dali and Elvis Presley had been magnetically drawn to her. Now, as a fully fledged woman, she was the toast of London.
‘I could have slept with all the Beatles,’ she boasted. She claimed to have turned down Paul McCartney at Club dell’Aretusa on the King’s Road, escaping his advances in a taxi.
She became friends with a married Old Etonian transvestite called The Hon Arthur Corbett, who wanted to marry her. She told him about ‘Casablanca’, and he claimed not to mind.
The only problem, as she put it, was there were four people in his life: himself, his other self (the nasty person he became when he was dressing as a woman), April, and his wife Eleanor. Also, he was a schizophrenic.
In November 1961, a former colleague who needed money ‘outed’ April’s sex change to the Sunday People newspaper.
‘The Extraordinary Case of the Top Model April Ashley: “Her” Secret is Out,’ ran the headline. That was the end of April’s modelling career and every one of her bookings was cancelled.
She’d been the model for Bournville chocolate, but Bournville said they could not have their name associated with a sex change.
Reading her story, we accompany April on the rollercoaster of her life, soaring and plummeting from victory to catastrophe. She ran off to Spain to be near Arthur, who ran the Jacaranda Club in Marbella. While there, she enjoyed some ‘pleasurable fumbling’ with Peter O’Toole and a ‘full-on affair’ with Omar Sharif. She did go on to marry Arthur Corbett, after he divorced, and became the Hon Mrs Arthur Corbett.
With that title, doors opened again, socially. But the marriage was a disaster, and the next thing April knew, she was caught up in a horrible law case: Corbett v. Corbett (Ashley).
Arthur declared the marriage null and void, and ‘fraudulent’. He was refusing to support her financially, saying that on their wedding day she was a person of the male sex and the marriage was never consummated. April claimed that Arthur refused to, or couldn’t, consummate.
The case rumbled on and, in December 1969, she endured 17 days in court, being quizzed about endless private bodily details, such as the ‘size and activity of her penis’ pre-operation. Nine medical experts were on hand and she was subjected to medical examinations to decide whether she was still a man.
April lost the case. Judge Ormrod decreed: ‘The respondent is not, and was not, a woman at the date of her marriage, but was, at all times, a male.’ Cut adrift, she fell into penury.
It’s pitiful to read what she went through. She escaped to the U.S., married a gay man called Jeff West to get a Green Card, and did menial jobs in restaurants and working for Greenpeace. As she put it, she was condemned to be ‘a freak living in exile’.
It wasn’t until 2005 that she received the document she’d longed for: her birth certificate from HM Government, identifying her as a female. The Gender Recognition Act had been passed in 2004.
Then, as a crowning upwards swoop of the rollercoaster, in 2012 she was awarded an MBE for her services to transgender equality.
The following year, a million people came to see the exhibition, April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady, at the Museum of Liverpool. Her mother, surely, turned in her grave.
April died in 2021, aged 86. At her memorial celebration in St George’s Hall, Liverpool, the place erupted with the singing of her favourite ‘anthem’: I Am Miss April Ashley.
The actor Simon Callow, one of her greatest fans and supporters, gave the tribute, saying that she’d led the way for others.
Against all possible odds, she’d managed to ‘correct what nature had got wrong’, and lead the life she knew she was born to live.
