There are now three book-length (auto)biographies of April Ashley – Odyssey, The First Lady and Inside Out - and two major newspaper versions written by interviewing April (The News of the World. 6 May – 10 June 1962, and Sunday Mirror, 8 & 15 February 1970). This article compares how they were written, and tells of the very different (but all-male) authors – some gay, some straight.
There are several other newspaper accounts, some based on an interview with April – the 12 May 1982 account in the Daily Mirror with Marjorie Proops is of note – but they did not add anything of significance, and are not discussed below.
Noyes Thomas ( 1916 - 2001)
Noyes Thomas was named after Alfred Noyes the Welsh poet, his uncle.
He became a leading foreign correspondent in the 1930s. In World War II he joined the Ghurkas, served in east Asia, and rose to Lieutenant Colonel. Afterwards, he returned to the News of the World.
In the 1960s, the News of the World, which was a Sunday paper then selling for 6d, was the biggest-selling newspaper in the world normally selling over 8 million copies of each edition. It was known for its emphasis on sex and scandal. Its major competitor was The People, also a Sunday paper, which had outed April Ashley 19 November 1961.
In May 1962:
“The News of the World wanted to buy my story. They weren't the first but they were the most organised. I flew to London and took on as my manager a friend of Ronnie Cogan's. This was my first disastrous contract - but not my last. The paper offered £3,000. I demanded £15,000. They retired, returned, and suggested £10,000 which I accepted. My manager took £3,000 of it, an exaggerated percentage which didn't exactly endear him to me.
Noyes Thomas did the story. It was the classic, six-part sensationalisation of a short ragged life. My aristocratic associations gave it piquancy. England was unbelievably ho-ho in those days and I was pilloried for having the nerve to make friendships among the upper classes. The series, via sex and drugs and violence, but no names, ended with a reference to my liaison with Arthur.” (Odyssey p136-7)
In 1963, during the Christine Keeler/John Profumo scandal, the News of the World paid Keeler £24,000, and Peter Earle and Noyes Thomas spirited her away so that journalists from other papers could not interview her.
“And then the Profumo scandal had broken. I'd been spotted in Madrid with Noyes Thomas and Kim Proctor, the third Profumo girl. The press laid siege to the Villa Antoinette in pursuit of any details of these three stories. I was even thought to have harboured Christine Keeler when she vanished somewhere along the Costa del Sol. Day and night, reporters would pop up from behind bushes when I least expected it and start ranting at me. (Odyssey p144)
However Noyes Thomas had, despite his experiences with April and Christine, a rather old-fashioned attitude to sex:
“In July 1964 the News of the World’s Noyes Thomas warned readers about the ‘creeping menace of homosexuality in Britain today’. There was, he added, ‘a vast “queer” brotherhood with tentacles reaching around the globe’.” (Joyce p167) In August he published a check list in how to spot a homosexual. (Joyce p233-4).
- Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. “My Strange Life”. The News of the World. 6 May 1962.
- Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Goodbye M'sieu, hello Mamsells, the doctor said". News of the World, 13 May 1962.
- Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Roman Scandal – hotel throws us out". News of the World, 27 May 1962.
- Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "The Operation". News of the World, 3 June 1962.
- Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "There, in a crowded pub, Arthur told me he loved me". News of the World, 10 June 1962.
- Noyes Thomas, ‘Into the Twilight World’, News of the World, 26 July
- Noyes Thomas, ‘The Men Behind the Mask’, News of the World, 2 August
- Robert Warren. “Noyes Thomas” Press Gazette, June 26, 2001. Online. Obituary.
- John-Pierre Joyce. Odd Men Out: Male Homosexuality in Britain from Wolfenden to Gay Liberation, 1954-1970. The Book Guild Ltd, 2019:167.
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In 1962/3 when April was paid £10,000, and Christine Keeler £24,000, many were working for £15 a week or less (£800 per annum).
Robin Maugham (1916 – 1981)
Robin Maugham, the gay nephew of the gay writer Somerset Maugham, was educated at Eton and Cambridge and trained as a barrister. During World War II, he declined a commission in the Hussars and instead joined up as an ordinary trooper in the 4th County of London Yeomanry tank regiment bound for North Africa. Later, his commanding officer recorded in dispatches that Maugham had saved the lives of perhaps 40 men by pulling them from destroyed tanks.
He started spending time at Ibiza, which was just becoming fashionable in the mid-1960s. There he met April Ashley. In 1967 he got it into his head that he should write her biography.
The Odyssey version:
“Robin wanted to write my life story. We met at the Ivy Restaurant where I often went with 'Daddy Pat' Dolin, and it was arranged that I go out to Ibiza to discuss it. When I arrived his first question on the subject was unbelievably tactless.
'Mind your own bloody business!' I replied.
He flew into a tantrum and I was banished to the back of the house. Robin often threw tantrums, especially after drinking too much. 'I'm the Viscount Maugham! How dare you speak to me like that!' “ (Odyssey p189)
The First Lady version:
“Robin wanted to write my life story and we agreed to talk about at his house. His first question on the subject was unbelievable tactless. ‘How often do you masturbate?’
‘Mind your own bloody business!’
Robin went into a tantrum of epic proportions. I was banished from the main house to a cottage at the back. It was a short-lived exile. He often threw tantrums, especially after drinking too much.” (First Lady p244)
The Peter Burton version:
“I knew that another friend of mine - the late Robin Maugham - had already relinquished the task after a row with April over a question, asked by Maugham's research assistant Derek Peel ("When you were a boy, April" he had queried, "did you masturbate?"), which Maugham thought vital and April thought an impertinence.” (Burton)
Maugham wrote a mini biography of April for the People newspaper in early 1970 after the divorce trial.
Maugham later came to know Peter Burton:
“Then, in 1968, his friend Colin Spencer introduced him to the novelist Robin Maugham, whose literary talents had been steadily eroded by his fondness for "just another little drink". For more than a decade, Burton learned to cope with Maugham's alcohol-fuelled whims and rages. He helped him complete a number of books and articles, and at least one, Conversations With Willie (WH Allen 1978), was entirely Burton's work.” (Collis, 2011)
- Robin Maugham. “Why I think the judge was wrong over April”. The People, 8 February 1970. Online.
- Peter Burton. “The star who never was”. Gay News, ??. Online
- Rose Collis. “Peter Burton: Writer and publisher who championed gay literature for over 35 years”. The Independent, 19 November 2011. Online.
EN.Wikipedia(Robin Maugham)
Ronald Maxwell
“As April left the court room at the conclusion of Corbett v Corbett, “There was a scuffling press conference but April said little, committed as she was to an exclusive telling of her courtroom experience, in return for five thousand pounds. It was quickly done. … On 8 February 1970, the Sunday Mirror printed conversations with the accomplished interviewer Ronald Maxwell.” (Inside Out p167-8)
- Ronald Maxwell & April Ashley. “I am a woman: April Ashley’s Own Story: I am not a monster”. Sunday Mirror, 8 February 1970. Online.
- Ronald Maxwell & April Ashley. “April Ashley’s Own Story: The next man I marry”. Sunday Mirror, 15 February 1970. Online.
Peter Burton ( 1945 - 2011)
Early in 1973, April made her first attempt at writing her memoirs. The gay journalist Peter Burton was contacted by her solicitor, Peter Madok and asked if he were interested in being her co-author.
“I expressed interest in the project and after initial discussions with both April and Peter, a contract was drawn up. I started a series of interviews with April at her Chelsea flat — but somewhere along the line, I realised, after all, that I was not the right person to co-write the book. April saw her autobiography as bright and glamorous — our working title, I seem to remember, was April: The Star Who Never Was; I saw the book as a tragedy enlightened by moments of high comedy — in cinematic terms, a movie by Bergman rather than Lubitsch. I wrote to Peter and April expressing my doubts, returned a suitcase full of research material and considered the project abandoned.”
- Peter Burton. “The star who never was”. Gay News, ??. Online
Duncan Fallowell (1948 - )
April first met Duncan Fallowell on her first visit to Oxford in the late 1960s. He later said: “I must have been the first Oxford undergraduate to be caught with a transsexual in my rooms. We met through friends and I invited her to dinner at Magdalen.” (Kirby, 2006)
On leaving university in 1970, Fallowell wrote to the Spectator on a hunch asking to write a rock column for them. They accepted on the condition that it be called ‘pop’. He was later their film and then fiction critic. He wrote about and then became involved with the German avant-garde group Can. He also became known from his writings as bisexual.
April re-met Duncan several times over the next decade. (Odyssey 204-5, 219-20, 231, 253, 261)
In 1976, after a heart attack after running a restaurant, after the divorce case, April retired to the bookshop town of Hay-on-Rye on the Welsh border.
“I was in bed for five months. I had just arrived in Hay and I hardly knew anyone, I did not know what to do with my time so I began to write down my life. I sent off the manuscript and though people liked the content, they said I was no writer, which I knew. But Jonathan Cape did show an interest and now the book is being reworked with a professional writer called Duncan Fallowell.” (Williamson)
Fallowell moved in with her in Hay-on-Wye, which caused comments from the neighbours. He stayed for two years, and the book, April Ashley’s Odyssey was the result.
Fallowell later commented:
“I’d known April since my teens and she often asked me to write her life story. So when I burned up in London at the end of the 1970s I moved to Hay-on-Wye to do it. April had moved there when she too had burned up in London, some years earlier. We were both good friends of Richard Booth who’d already started the book business in Hay, which was still in its early, wildly eccentric phase; so the place suited April and me very well. I told April I could never be a ghost writer and only agreed to do it if my name came first as author. She agreed. She had the title set in stone: April Ashley’s Odyssey. I didn’t want to write it in the third person, so interviewed her exhaustively, researched widely, and took all the material to a flat in the Hay workhouse, which I’d rented for the purpose, and wrote it pretending to be April. She was already well into her exiled duchess manner, so I took that and added an educated underpinning.” (Wisniewski)
Anthony Andrew commented in 2000:
“Duncan Fallowell, co-author of April Ashley’s Odyssey, says that in his experience few transsexuals harbour dreams of being a ‘normal’ woman. ‘They aspire to this sort of glamourised ideal of womanhood’ “.
Roz Kaveney’s review:
“April Ashley's Odyssey is essentially a bit of social chit-chat rags to riches to sadder but wiser - but it is readable and amusing and a superior example of its kind. It does convey a sense of time passing and society changing. It also has the major merit of lack of pretension; it is the life of one transsexual whose life has been interesting for reasons other than simply being a transsexual's life. April is more interested in her status as a socialite than in her sexuality and there are times when this attitude becomes a refreshing corrective to too much earnestness. … How much Duncan Fallowell contributed to the book's structure how much he improved April Ashley's memory with research is neither here nor there. His achievement in helping her with the book has been largely to disappear from the end product and leave it recognisably hers. The result is as stylish as the pair of them.”
- Richard Williamson. “The book that will put April Ashley in the news again”. Sunday Mercury, 29 June 1980: 10.
- Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley’s Odyssey. Jonathan Cape, 1982.
- Peter Bradshaw. “The invasion of Tuscany-on-Wye”. The Evening Standard, 2 June 1992.
- Roz Kaveney. “The unsinkable April Ashley”. Gay News, ??. Online.
- Andrew Anthony. “At the court of Queen Lear”. The Observer, 24 December 2000: 12. Online.
- Terry Kirby, “April Ashley: the first Briton to undergo a sex change”. The Independent, 2 February 2006. Online.
- John Wisniewski. “Writer DUNCAN FALLOWELL: On The New Journalism Movement And Upcoming Projects”. AMFM magazine. March 17, 2021. Online.
EN.Wikipedia(Duncan Fallowell)
Douglas Thompson (? - )
In the mid 2000s April spent some time in the south of France with friends where she was introduced to Lesley Thompson and her husband Douglas, who had authored books on a variety of subjects. They agreed to produce a second April autobiography, which was released in 2006.
“April Ashley, the first Briton to undergo a sex change, has co-authored a new autobiography, ‘The First Lady’, with one Douglas Thompson. This has come as a surprise to her old friend (and former lover) Duncan Fallowell, who collaborated with her on an earlier book, ‘My Odyssey’, which was published back in 1982. After all, Fallowell and Ashley are still in touch and she has said nothing to him about it. Surprise has turned to dismay now that Fallowell has seen the new book, for it contains vast swaths of material that have simply been lifted from the earlier book. ‘April has been very naughty,’ he tells me. ‘She seems to think that she owns the copyright to a book of which we were joint authors, which was almost entirely written by me.’ John Blake Publishing, the firm behind ‘The First Lady’, can expect firm action from Fallowell. He has already consulted the Society of Authors and prepared a dossier for his agent Gillon Aitken showing the extent of the alleged infringement of copyright.” (Silvester, August 2006)
“So how come Ashley and Thompson thought they could help themselves to so much of Fallowell's prose? Step forward Robert Smith, Thompson's agent, who describes what has happened as a ‘terrible error’. Three years ago he wrote to the publishers, Cape, asking if they would relinquish the rights to the book. Smith told me last week that Cape said they had already been returned to Fallowell and Ashley, but that he (Smith) didn’t know how to get hold of Fallowell. This is curious, given Fallowell has a website, writes book reviews for national papers and has lived at the same Notting Hill address for more than 30 years. But another question occurs. Why, in his initial letter to Cape, did Smith claim he was acting for ‘the above authors’, i.e. Fallowell and Ashley? ‘I did not claim to be representing Fallowell,’ says Smith. It's all very mysterious”. (Silvester, December 2006)
After taking legal action for plagiarism, Fallowell received damages, costs, and the reaffirmation of his intellectual property rights; and a public apology from the authors and John Blake Publishing was printed in The Bookseller 1 December 2006.
Remaining copies were pulped. However many copies had already been sold, and even today copies are available on the second-hand market.
In 2024 Douglas Thompson released a second book on April, this time written in the third person.
- April Ashley with Douglas Thompson. The First Lady. John Blake Publishing, 2006.
- Christopher Silvester. “A new autobiography, The First Lady”. The Independent, 20 August, 2006: 32.
- Christopher Silvester. “Congratulations to Duncan Fallowell”. The Independent, 3 December 2006: 43.
- Douglas Thompson. Inside Out: The Extraordinary Lagacy of April Ashley. Gemini Books, 2024.
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The First Lady and Inside Out somehow avoid mentioning Duncan Fallowell at all, despite his friendship with April over the years, and avoid mentioning Odyssey.
Both Odyssey and First Lady do not mention the Sunday Mirror interview with Ronald Maxwell.
One thing that I liked about the first two books, unlike so many auto/biographies, is that they have an index, and one can find persons etc. Inside Out does not.
The reviews of Inside Out that I have seen all seem to have never heard of April Ashley before, and certainly do not compare the new book with the previous two. Goodreads.
There are two books that give a history of the News of the World:
- Cyril Bainbridge & Roy Stockdill. The News of the World Story: 150 Years of the World's Bestselling Newspaper. Harper Collins, 1993.
- Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul & Mark W Turner. The News of the World and the British Press, 1843-2011: Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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