Women’s writing charity founder and recent MBE recipient Sarah Hosking on why ‘empire’ should be scrapped from honours title
Sarah Hosking founded the Hosking Houses Trust 20 years ago after a life-long career in the arts. This combined work saw her awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours. Her charity offers residencies at its Clifford Chambers base to older female creatives. Among its many supporters is Queen Camilla, who has donated financial help. Sarah received her medal from the King at Windsor Castle on 10th December. This is her account of the event.
“THE King has had a dramatic and eventful year,” The Times recently reported, and while I don’t think that meeting me would have intensified this for the King, meeting him was a most dramatic moment for me.
He was well briefed on who I was and what I did. “Where does the money for your trust come from?” he asked as I stood before him in that huge gilded reception chamber on the scarlet carpet and beneath the dazzling chandeliers.
“From many and diverse sources, Your Majesty. And would you please thank Queen Camilla for her donations. They meant a great deal to us,” I replied.
“I will indeed,” he said, and that familiar face implied a kindly and happy man with bluer eyes than I expected and clearly he loved a laugh.
Everything was beautifully conducted from the time we arrived at King Henry VIII’s gate to being courteously decanted out the other end three hours later.
Having no family, I invited three of my closest friends, Wendy Harrison, Charmian Evans and Lizzie Speller to come with me, knowing they would enjoy it mightily.
There must have been security measures in place but these were not apparent as we were welcome by a team of staff, all most egalitarian and clearly involving local people who obviously enjoyed their jobs; male militarianism nowhere to be seen until the final presentation to His Majesty.
Once inside the huge castle, a small orchestra played as we gawped at the Commonwealth presents received over decades, before being ushered from opulent room to room. I asked for the ladies’ lavatories and our designated carer, who was more akin to a friendly hospital assistant than a castle employee, showed me the gap in the arras behind which was a door to modern facilities. The whole event, combining courteous convenience, the King’s personal charm and the ravishing opulence of those state rooms, left me in a whirl for days
And yet… and yet… and yet. … Who pays for all that historic splendour besides the extensive fire restoration? There was a whole room of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, one of my favourite artists; we know how they got there because he was court painter to Charles I and somehow they survived the Protectorate and have been there ever since, but who pays for their immaculate care? No one seems to know and the relationship of royal to state finances remain a closed double-entry book.
It was our head of state who pinned the MBE medal onto my cheap M&S coat and certainly I appreciate the stability that our monarchal system give us, but it depends upon genetic luck. Long may it hold.
And yet... and yet and yet…I am now a Member of the British Empire. Really? When I was a little girl in the 1940s, the atlas showed half the world in pink, which was our Empire. Since then emergent nationalism and other changes in worldwide societal conduct has transmogrified the Empire into the Commonwealth which is itself under scrutiny.
I believe the past Empire is a source of both pride and shame to us today and a verdict on this balance is yet to come. Nevertheless, the subjugation of nations and rule by might is a high price to pay for railways, vaccination, administration and the emergence of English as the language of the internet.
On my medal is an image of two crowned heads and the words: For God and Empire.
I cannot wear this medal and I hear that many potential recipients of the honour refuse it. The French overhauled their honours system in 1973 and the Légion d’honneur is detached from religion and conquest. So why cannot the UK offer the accolade of British Excellence? Is it not time that the British system instituted an honour that a scruffy old feminist leftie like me would be proud to wear?