Tag: CBE

  • Delia Smith CBE

    Delia Smith CBE

    “The Delia Effect” is well known and when this English cook taught her viewers how to cook an egg in 1998, sales rocketed by 10% overnight. Worth some £23 million, she’s also endorsed Aunt Bessie’s mashed potatoes and supported the Labour Party. Smith was baptised into the Church of England but attended a Methodist Sunday School. She later joined a Congregationalist Brownie Group but converted to the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 22. Together with her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, she is a majority shareholder in Norwich City Football Club and it is here whilst supporting “The Canaries,” that’s she’s known to get a little carried away with her use of the English language.

  • Susan Hill CBE

    Susan Hill CBE

    Best known for her chilling novel The Woman in White, this writer also did a stint on the BBC’s The Archers and runs a small publishing house named Long Barn Books. Married to the Shakespeare scholar Professor Stanley Wells, Hill lives in a farmhouse with 50 acres of woodland in the Cotswolds and describes ghosts as having been: “Good to me.”

  • Sir Peter O'Sullevan CBE (1918 – 2015)

    “The Voice of Racing” was undoubtedly the most charming gent in England and was the first sports broadcaster to have been knighted. (more…)

  • Vidal Sassoon CBE (1928 – 2012)

    Vidal Sassoon CBE (1928 – 2012)

    He created the “wedge bob” hairstyle and liberated women from the “tyranny of the salon.” Four times married and a Sephardi Jew, Sassoon sold his brand in 1993 to concentrate on philanthropy. The Daily Telegraph once described him as an “anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser” and he will indeed be remembered as a man who led a revolution.

  • John Simpson CBE

    John Simpson CBE

    A Chelsea resident who travels the globe reporting from all manner of war zones. He’s avoided bullets in Tiananmen Square and was punched in the stomach by Harold Wilson on his first day working at the BBC. He freely admits to having had tried hallucinogenic drugs. One resulting hallucination consisted of a 6ft goldfish in dark glasses and a straw hat wrapping itself around his shoulders. At any party, he’s naturally the man guests flock to.