Revealed: the hermaphrodite who saved a village from the county set

A true life story about a millionaire philanthropist who saved a Cotswold village from the bulldozer, inadvertently creating a unique society in which people are valued for who they are and not what they have.

This is a remarkable story about a man called Raymond Cochrane.
A hermaphrodite, he was born into a wealthy family at the turn of the last century and brought up a girl, studying at Oxford University's girls-only college, St Hilda's.
Confused with his sexuality, at the age of 40 he had a sex change and later married. Fascinating though this may be, it is however, rather superfluous; colourful decoration for the life of a man whose legacy is far more dignified and accomplished.

In 1958 he arrived in Guiting Power, a picturesque but ramshackle Cotswold village in desperate need of renovation. Eighteen houses had been condemned and there were more in like state. He bought the manorial estate - nearly 50 houses and 1,000 acres of agricultural land - and turned it into a charitable trust. In the Guiting Gazette, a monthly newsletter published by the trust and written by him, Cochrane stated his aims as: "to conserve the houses in perpetuity; to restore them in character and internally modernise them; and to rent them at figures which our tenants could afford."

From the end of the 1960’s, house prices in the Cotswolds rose to such an extent that local people were priced out of the market. Cochrane duly closed the trust’s waiting list, allowing only people from the neighbouring parishes or workers moving to the village to live there, giving priority to "young-marrieds". He built a village hall and playing fields, providing a social hub for sports teams and many other local organisations, and established a team of craftsmen charged with maintaining and modernising the trust’s properties.

Unlike any other village, which has to suffer the erratic foibles of the planners, the trust tolerates very little new building, and then only in a style wholly befitting of the picture post-card, rural image of the village. "Now that over eighty per cent of the country’s population live in towns and suburbs, it seems right that countrymen’s values should be conserved…we have an immortal landowner and an immoral tenant, ensuring continuity and security for the village and the surrounding land," Cochrane wrote, shortly before his death in 1994.

Free as it is from having to pay taxes, the trust provides the means to conserve the village in a way that no individual could possibly do. Cochrane had no grand social agenda for the village and his aims were simple: preserve its bucolic charm and provide affordable housing for local people. He said: "It remains to be seen what grows out of this milieu, in which people are valued for what they are and what they do, and not for what they have."

Such altruism was, however, clouded by rumours of his sex change and unfortunate appearance. As a young boy, my animated memory was of an old man, devoid of facial hair and shrivelled and shrunken from what seemed a hundred years of authority, terrifying my brothers and I with effeminate shrieks of "get off the grass!" while driving endlessly round the village, his head barely over the steering wheel. Only now, in adulthood, can I appreciate the pride he took in such benevolent patronage.

Many villages may think they have their share of weirdo’s, but having lived in Guiting Power for nearly 25 years, I can readily attest to having grown up around a disturbingly strong concentration of misfits. Wherever you go in rural England, you can always find a village idiot or two and a few eccentric types - the countryside would feel strange without them - but it is undeniably disturbing when only a small minority of a village’s inhabitants can be labelled ‘normal’. Not even on a sunny spring morning, when the village looks breathtakingly beautiful, can you escape the stark glares, the eeriness, and sense that something is not quite right, as if a long time ago something unspeakable happened in this small hill village, opening Pandora’s box to habitual high jinks and an unhealthy dose of tragedy on a community of just three hundred people.

This is one viewpoint. What if, pre 1958, this was a village of ordinary rural folk, blissfully content amongst the rolling green fields and honey-tinged cottages that so characterise this peaceful corner of rural England. What if it was actually this outlandish, hermaphrodite outsider, Raymond Cochrane, who arrived in a flurry of controversy, inadvertently giving carte blanche for society’s cranks to seek refuge in the village?