ONE of the defining images of transgender pioneer April Ashley – arguably Britain’s first supermodel – looks limpidly down from the Hay-on-Wye castle walls during its Literary Festival.
Although the giant photograph oozes early ’60s glamour, there is also a tiny hint of Scouse street humour in the slightly upturned smile that reaches deep down into Liverpool deck boy she once was for Furness Withy Line.
Her huge image is projected onto Hay Castle’s towering fortress wall as she lived in the Powys market town for several years in the 1970s, a refuge during her peripatetic life of many fateful ups and downs.
Typical of the high camp she attracted was to be declared ‘Duchess’ and ‘First Lady’ by her close friend Richard Booth, the self-appointed ‘King of Hay’ who attempted to declare the Welsh border town an independent sovereign state.
Booth resided in Hay Castle and was a bookseller, bibliophile, literary publicist, who turned Hay into a national second-hand book centre, laying the foundations for the Hay Literary Festival.
In 1960 in Casablanca, April Ashley was one of the first Britons to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and was made an MBE in 2012 for her campaigning work for the transgender community. It was a long and winding road for someone who started life as George Jamieson in 1935, living in a Liverpool dockland slum.
“I received my award from Prince Charles and said how much I missed his aunt, the late
Princess Margaret. He replied that we all (ie the Royal family) missed her very much too,” she told me when I interviewed her for the Liverpool Daily Post at the Museum of Liverpool exhibition celebrating her life, in September 2014.
This Royal exchange was a glimpse into her dragon fly-brief life at the dawn of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Back then she was an incredibly glamorous model who caroused with high society and was immortalised by the top fashion photographers, including David Bailey for British Vogue, Terence Donovan and Richard Dorman. This heady life ended abruptly when a ‘friend’ outed her to The Sunday People, allegedly ‘for a fiver’.
The Museum of Liverpool exhibition was a stone’s throw away where she grew up in poverty stricken by the South Docks, all long gone. “Called after one of the Pitt family politicians, but we called it ‘Pit Street’, because it was so horrendous and it was very Dickensian, with filthy, dirty flats.
“We were all urchins, we used to pick tar up off the streets and eat it because we thought it tasted like toffee. That’s what it was like. My mother Ada slapped me every day. I was in the middle of six children, my mother had 10 altogether, but some died very early. She had such a hard life she was incapable of loving any of us, but she liked hitting me and she hit me very badly.
“As a child I went poaching on Lord Derby’s estate at Knowsley. I cheekily looked through bushes at his house. I realised that there was another world and not just filth and dirt and outside bogs and only having one bath a week.”
As for the working class experience of looking out for each other, she says: “Not for me, they were looking out for me to see how much they could hit me.”
Gazing over to where she grew up, we both agreed nobody could ever possibly imagine the young George Jamieson embarking on a life’s journey which culminated in this exhibition.
Exuding a gossipy gayness in our talk, even in an ‘anything-goes’ seaport city like Liverpool, being homosexual wasn’t enough and she submitted to the six hour reassignment operation with a 50-50 chance of survival. She said: “I didn’t care if I died.”
From Ashley’s earliest days he suffered the nagging notion of being a woman trapped in a man’s body (seen right as a teenage boy). She says: “I was so fed up with everyone saying ‘Are you a girl or a boy?’, that I thought the only thing to do was to try and toughen up and emulate my whole family who went to sea.”
Son of a Royal Navy seaman, who survived being torpedoed several times in WWII, she recalled: “Aged 15, I was the youngest person in modern times to go to sea. I joined Furness Withy Line and my first job was on the SS Pacific Fortune from Manchester. We sailed to Jamaica, the Panama Canal, Los Angeles and finally Seattle.
“I loved going to sea. When I’ve been in the middle of the Pacific or Atlantic I used to have a little hidden place called the poop-deck. I’d sit up there and look at the stars, the dolphins and whales and I was in seventh heaven.
“Unfortunately, when the men were in port they’d get drunk and the bullying would start. Now those men were marvellous, all Scottish, but once they had the dreaded drink it was different.
“One of them saved my life when a derrick cable snapped and he pushed me out of the way as it whipped across the deck. They were deeply superstitious and watched the Liver Birds in case they flapped their wings – a sign of bad luck!
“Happily I shared the cabin with two young men who were quite protective of me. Sadly, on the second trip I’d had enough and tried to commit suicide with a drug overdose in Los Angeles and that was the end of my naval career.”
After a second suicide attempt in Los Angeles, she was dishonourably discharged from the Merchant Navy, but was sent home in a suite on the world’s fastest liner, SS United States, (whose fate is the subject of a recent Shipping Lines’ blog https://www.elsonshippinglines.com/the-dire-state-of-ss-united-states-the-worlds-fastest-ocean-liner/).
Yet another intriguing curiosity is that she shared seamen’s digs with the future Labour Dep PM John Prescott (right, alongside Ashley), who was a kind supporter throughout her life, exchanging Christmas cards until her death.
By the time we met, she was indeed like a duchess, with big back-combed hair, gliding as if on castors in an ankle length dress. Although she claimed to be stick thin as a young man, by now she was tall, with broad shoulders and large hands and thick wrists.
April Ashley died in 2021 aged 86. I can’t better my pay-off in a Liverpool Echo article celebrating her MBE investiture: “What a gal!”