Jennifer Hosten was 23 years old when she made history, as the first Black woman to be crowned Miss World. Footage of that evening, on 20 November 1970, was broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall in London to about 100 million viewers worldwide, and shows Hosten, representing Grenada, looking radiantly beautiful and endearingly stunned, as host Bob Hope places the winner’s crown on her head.
Her moment in the spotlight had already been overshadowed, however. Approximately 40 minutes earlier, the proceedings were interrupted when a group of women’s liberation activists began sounding football rattles and throwing flour-bombs in protest at what they saw as an egregious display of sexism.
Hosten, who was backstage at that point, could only hear the demonstrators. “I don’t think I was scared,” she says, “but the sound made us wonder what was going on. People thought the contest had come to an end.” Once order was restored, a visibly shaken Hope returned to the stage and attempted to assign meaning to the melee: “I want to tell you anybody that would try to break up an affair as wonderful as this … with these wonderful girls from the entire world, have got to be on some kind of dope!”
In the half-century since, Miss World 1970 has been touted as an example of the need for “intersectional feminism”, before the phrase had even been invented. Was the contest ever really intended as a celebration of international womanhood? Or was it always just an organised excuse for an ogle? Either way, in the eye of the storm, Miss World herself found some clarity: “It seemed like all these things were supposed to happen, that it was meant to be,” says Hosten, who is now 75, from her home just outside Toronto, Canada. “At that point, I realised how much I had to do on my own.”
Even if the event made her a global celebrity, Miss World was by no means the culmination of Hosten’s career: she would go on to travel the world, meet movie stars and heads of state, obtain several advanced degrees and have a ringside seat for history in the making. She has very much written her own script.
Hosten was born in 1947 in St George’s, the picturesque capital of her Caribbean island home, the youngest of five children. It was an idyllic childhood, characterised by morning sea-swims and evenings spent gathered around the radio, which fostered a patriotism that Hosten has carried throughout her life. “When I look back on my childhood I realise I really was quite blessed,” she says. “We didn’t know about drugs and we didn’t have social media to contend with. We made our own fun.”
As her parents were professionals – her father a prominent lawyer, her mother a schoolteacher – there were standards to live up to, but the family were not part of any island elite, she says. “Grenada is a small community, so the structures are not so defined, not like in England,” although she describes Grenadians at the time as more class conscious than colour conscious. “Most of us were of mixed blood,” she says, and describes her own heritage as including African, Scottish, Flemish and Carib Indian.
The radio was Hosten’s main window into a world beyond Grenada, and after leaving school, she pursued a career in broadcasting, eventually travelling to London, aged 18, to enrol on a BBC training scheme. After nearly two years in the UK, and six months as an au pair in France, she returned to Grenada a cosmopolitan, bilingual, polished woman of 20 – an ideal candidate to work as a flight attendant for British West Indies Airways.
It was in this role that a series of events – “what you might consider coincidences, which I don’t think are coincidences, really” – propelled her towards her date with destiny at the Royal Albert Hall. There was a fateful in-flight meeting with the recently crowned Miss Guyana; happening to pick up a discarded newspaper reporting Grenada’s plans to send a representative to Miss World; and bumping into an old friend whose mother was the head of Grenada’s tourist board. He persuaded Hosten to compete, suggesting Miss World would be no different from the traditional carnival queen contests she had participated in as a teenager. “They were never really about beauty. They were always more about promoting the culture of the island,” she says. “Throughout the Caribbean, you were considered ‘attractive’, rather than ‘beautiful’; and that meant that you had a nice smile, that you presented yourself well.”
Miss World was very different. “The objectification was exemplified by having to turn around for your backside to be judged,” she says. “Even back then, it was shocking, because I never had to do that in Grenada. And it was shocking to my daughter, who later saw the contest. She was embarrassed for me. She said: ‘Oh Mum, I can’t imagine that you had to do that!’” Hosten is also a little embarrassed for her younger self, watching the footage back. “It seems so corny. I can’t believe that’s how I answered questions! It makes you cringe, you know? But that’s what it was.”
Her win made the front pages around the world, but Hosten was disturbed by the tone of much of the reporting. “The first time I ever saw myself as a minority was when I came to England for Miss World, because the day after I won, the headline was: Miss World is Black,” she says. “I found it shocking that your colour or race should be a headline … because even if they thought of me as Black, was that the most important thing for them to be highlighting?”
The same articles often included allegations that the contest must have been rigged, since the judging panel included the Grenadian premier, Eric Gairy. Hosten found this risible: “There were three British judges, there was also an African judge, a judge from Denmark, I think there was a judge from India … and all of a sudden, the one from Grenada should have made the difference?” It seemed to her the fuss was a cover for their true objections: “It was really because there were two women of colour [Pearl Jansen, Miss Africa South, placed second], and the fact that I wasn’t the standard European type of winner. [In their minds] I could not possibly, naturally, have been able to win. It was hurtful.”
Coming face to face with the women’s lib protesters was, by comparison, less disconcerting. When crowds singing the protest song We Shall Overcome accosted an official Miss World coach en route to the Royal Albert Hall that day, she remembers some of the contestants on board joined in the singing. “Well, at one level we thought, this is a women’s demonstration, and we’re women.” Hosten says she agreed with much of what the UK women’s liberation movement had to say, but they made one great tactical error: “They never reached out to us at any point in time, to explain anything about what they were trying to achieve, or who they were against.”
If they had, she would have tried to describe to them her experience – as a woman of colour from one of the smallest nations in the world – and how it might differ from theirs, as white women in the UK. “I was able to represent women that really had not had an opportunity like this. And let’s be frank: it was a stepping stone for most of us. I never saw myself as a beauty contest winner, really. I saw it as an opportunity, which I took, to have an experience, and to make some money!”
At that time, the simple fact of a Black woman being proclaimed the world’s “most beautiful” sent a powerfully countercultural message. While the “Black is beautiful” movement had been challenging internalised racism among African Americans since the early 1960s, in much of the western world the existence of women with darker skin tones or afro hair textures was ignored by the media and the cosmetics industry. “It was always a job to find something that would really complement my skin,” says Hosten. “When I won, no cosmetic companies or hair product companies contacted me to advertise for them, as they had done for previous Miss Worlds.”
Hosten realised she was also carrying a banner for long underrepresented women of colour from all over the world: “I think I was one of the first Miss Worlds to be invited to Africa, for instance. I didn’t accept the invitation to South Africa, during the height of apartheid, but I did go to Nigeria, and pass through Ghana, and they were wonderful to me, just like a homecoming.”
If Hosten’s only goal had been personal advancement, she’d likely have parlayed her Miss World fame into a showbiz career. There was ample opportunity, including all the contacts she made on Bob Hope’s Christmas tour of US military bases. Despite Hope’s self-perpetuated reputation as a womaniser, she describes the man she got to know as an avuncular, if slightly detached figure, who continued to send her a Christmas card every year for decades afterwards. “It was only ever addressed to ‘Miss World, Jennifer Hosten, Grenada’, but somehow it always got to me.” Then there was a teatime tête-à-tête at Joan Crawford’s New York home, which Hosten remembers as a flurry of small dogs and big hats, during which the Hollywood star personally invited Hosten to enrol at her acting school. Instead, after fulfilling her year of contractual obligations, she went a different way.
Many beauty queens claim to strive for “world peace”, but few have put those words into action as literally as Hosten has. A year after Miss World, she married a Canadian IBM manager named David Craig and set up home with him in rural Ontario, where they raised two children and Hosten did the daily commute to her customer relations job at Air Canada on a snowmobile. One day in 1978, however, she received a phone call from Gairy, by then the Grenadian prime minister, inviting her to serve as high commissioner (equivalent to ambassador) to Canada.
Being a woman meant she was expected to be ambassador and ambassador’s wife, combining her diplomatic duties with the full domestic schedule of a mother of two. “I would have to come home and plan the cocktail parties, organise the childcare. I remember an occasion where [former Canadian PM] Pierre Trudeau came to my home and read the children a bedtime story … That was quite special.” Special, but also a nightmare of parenting logistics: “I was the one that had to arrange for them to actually go to bed, and here I was, also the ambassador.”
Any notion that this would be a ceremonial role was soon dramatically disproven. “I was returning from a UN meeting in Ecuador when the government fell,” she says, referring to the 1979 coup in Grenada led by Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement (NJM) and an old acquaintance from her London days. “I had to very quickly use whatever skills I had, and get recognition for the new government. I think I was instrumental in that, actually.” Hosten stayed on until 1981, through what would turn out to be one of her nation’s most tumultuous chapters. She is critical of the fallen Gairy government, describing it as “verging on authoritarian” and presiding over a long discontented populace: “The people wanted independence [from Britain, which happened in 1974], but they didn’t want independence under that government.” The NJM government, however, soon descended into something “much worse … total abuse of power, the doing away of all freedoms”. In 1983 Bishop was executed by dissident members of his own party, triggering a US invasion. These are events that Hosten is still sorting through in her mind. “There is actually much more to that story that I can tell, that I will sometime write about. I don’t know if they’ll ever publish it.”
With their children grown up and their careers taking them to different countries, Hosten and her husband divorced after 28 years of “a fairly good marriage”. She went on to marry – and separate – twice more and accept other high-level diplomatic and trade roles, including at the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and Canada’s High Commission in Bangladesh before, aged 60, retraining once again, as a psychotherapist and counsellor. These days Hosten is a proud grandmother who enjoys a close relationship with her family, as well as keeping in touch with the many friends she has made around the world. Throughout all her reinventions, she has retained the grace and sincerity that won her that 1970 title.
In 2020, the events of the 1970 Miss World were dramatised in the movie Misbehaviour, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Hosten and Keira Knightley as Sally Alexander, the organiser of the women’s rights protest. It was during the publicity tour for Misbehaviour, listening to Knightley discuss her choice of acting roles, that Hosten landed on a useful analogy forher own sense of identity: “She’s played pirates in the Caribbean, and been in Jane Austen adaptations, and lots of other types of movies, because actresses don’t like to be typecast,” she says. “Well, people don’t want to be typecast … I didn’t want to be remembered just as a beauty contest winner, because there are so many other sides to us.”
This plurality of womanhood is what Hosten hoped – and still hopes – to convey: “I don’t know how far [the women’s movement] has come in the sense of really including the interests of a broader section of women,” she concludes. “But I do think they achieved a great deal and I really have to congratulate them. What, it seems to me, is still missing, is asking: who are we to be limiting the roles of other women?”
