A Bit Different

Dr. E. Forbes-Sempill, Brux Lodge, Alford wishes to intimate that in future he will be known as Dr. Ewan Forbes-Sempill. All legal formalities have been completed.

So read a paid advertisement last week in the Aberdeen Press and Journal. But more was involved than a change of name. The Hon. Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, second daughter of the 18th Baron Sempill (who is also a baronet), had always been a mannish sort of a girl. A brilliant student who loved to flex her muscles in such masculine pastimes as hunting, shooting and fishing, she deplored the necessity of making a formal debut in London clad in feminine frills. Later on, after getting her M.D., she became the popular local doctor in the Scottish village of Alford (pop. 1,300). Elizabeth exchanged her skirts for the more manly kilt.

Last week Dr. Forbes-Sempill, 40, who had spent an adult life not only emotionally but physiologically on the verge of manhood, was in fact--and law--a man. "I have been a man biologically and socially for several months, leading a bach elor's life and discarding the last remnants of the tedious upbringing as a girl," he said. By an upland salmon stream, the heir to the family baronetcy (but not the barony), Rear Admiral Arthur Lionel Ochoncar Forbes-Sempill, 74, considered his new status. "As uncle of the present peer. I succeed," he told a reporter. "According to Scottish law, a girl can't. But Ewan . . . dammit, that's a bit different, isn't it?"

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