Lady Colin Campbell of the jungle who grew up a boy
LADY COLIN Campbell is a fascinating conundrum.
She is certainly the most intriguing celebrity ever to perch around the camp- fi re in the reality television jungle. Even her name is perplexing, especially when you consider her background. Georgie – as she prefers to be known – agreed to take part in the show, which she has rarely watched, to fund the restoration of the roof of the derelict Sussex castle she bought a few years ago. But her accent is unmistakably Jamaican, mixed with hints of upper class vowels.
So who is this exotic and eccentric former model and biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales? And why was she brought up as a boy for the fi rst 18 years of her life? Lady Colin, 66, was born in 1949 as George William Ziadie, one of four children born to Michael and Gloria Ziadie, a family comprised of Lebanese immigrants and old Jamaican money.
“She has made quite a living over the years from suing papers suggesting she was a transsexual or a transvestite,” says society commentator Compton Miller, author of Who’s Really Who. This followed the actions of her ex-husband Colin Campbell, younger brother of the 12th Duke of Argyll who, she claims, sold the story of their disastrous 14-month marriage to the newspapers.
Also published at the time was the inaccurate story that she had been born a boy. “I bitterly resent it, I resented it then, I resent it now and I will resent it until my dying day,” she says. She sued for libel and won – but she kept her title and has used it assiduously to her advantage ever since. “She’s a society lady by marriage who enjoys her title but she’s entitled to do that,” says Compton Miller.
She has made quite a living over the years from suing papers suggesting she was a transsexual or a transvestite
And she is a lady in both senses of the word. The reality is that Georgie was born with a genital defect that led doctors to ascribe to her the male gender, despite the fact she is biologically female. She claims that at the time this was seen as medical kindness to a “disabled girl” – it being more socially advantageous to be raised a boy in the 1950s.
However her parents, whom she described with considerable rancour in her 2009 memoir, Daughter Of Narcissus, were distressed by her physical imperfection and she believes that in reality it suited them for her to be raised as a son not a daughter. Her father was a Jamaican aristocrat in the public eye who hated the idea of a corrective surgical scandal.
And – according to Georgie – her mother wanted to view her child as a girl who could never marry and would therefore remain devoted to her for ever. “She was going to be Queen Victoria and I was going to be Princess Beatrice, the devoted handmaiden,” as Georgie once put it with aplomb. But the problems started when little “George” showed a predilection for girls’ toys and activities.
Even her cousins would ask her mother why Georgie was being bought up as a boy when she was clearly a girl. Being sent to her father’s old school, a traditional boys’ Catholic seminary was, she says, “like a glimpse into the bowels of Hell”. At the age of 13, and desperate to wear girls’ clothes and makeup, while developing obvious female physical traits, she went secretly to see her mother’s gynaecologist.
When her parents found out they arranged for her to be injected, against her wishes, with male hormones. Her voice dropped, her nipples shrank and hair developed on her upper lip. By her late teens however she was living openly as a girl. At one point her outraged father suggested she should commit suicide.
I'm a Celeb 2015: Lady Colin Campbell
“He told me: ‘The one solution to your problem is a dose of rat poison’,” she admitted. Salvation came only at the age of 21 when her grandmother offered the £3,000 needed to correct Georgie’s defect and reclaim her true gender in New York, where she was already working as a model and considered a great beauty. In 1974 at 24 she married Colin Campbell after a five-day courtship.
She may have told him all about her past but claims she did not know until the ink was dry on the marriage certificate that he was a raging alcoholic. Since then she has had several love affairs but has never remarried. Twenty-two years ago she adopted two Russian babies, her sons Micha and Dima, as a single mother – long before such an event was commonplace but she has always done things her own way.
“She surprised everyone by adopting these two Russian boys and raising them as perfect English gentlemen with wonderful manners,” says Compton Miller. She used her earnings as a royal biographer to fund their upbringing. Her 1992 book, Diana In Private, was the first to reveal that the Prince and Princess of Wales’ marriage was in crisis.
“Everyone asked how she could say the marriage was on the skids but she was proved right,” adds Compton Miller. As for her time in the jungle we should perhaps prepare for more revelations. “She’s fairly indiscreet and will soon be spilling the beans on people she shouldn’t,” he adds. “She’s well connected and she knows things…”