A chance meeting on a plane with Miss Guyana propelled Jennifer Hosten, an unprepared BWIA air hostess, into the 1970 Miss Grenada beauty pageant.
Within weeks she was standing in front of a crowd at London’s Royal Albert Hall, being crowned Miss World. If she had bet on herself, she could have been rich as well as famous, because the London bookmakers were giving 20-1 odds that she would lose. Even then, or perhaps especially then, there was controversy about beauty pageants, and the contest was disrupted by jeering feminists setting off firecrackers and throwing missiles.
Jennifer was undeterred. In Grenada a public holiday was declared, she soon found her image on a Grenadian postage stamp, and she was feted from one end the island to the other. Soon she was off with Bob Hope on his annual Christmas tour to entertain American troops in Germany, Crete and Alaska, and she travelled day after day by Air Force Helicopter from Bangkok to army bases in Vietnam.
Part of the “prize” was a world tour that subsequently took her through the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the US, where she appeared on the Tonight Show and lunched with Joan Crawford who offered to get her into acting school.
Before the year ended, she met and married a Canadian computer engineer, and soon she was living (and shovelling snow) in a small town outside of Ottawa. While raising a family, she worked first with a travel agency, then Air Canada. To her great surprise, in 1978 she received a call from the Prime Minister of Grenada asking if she would consider being the country’s High Commissioner to Canada. The first year was a learning experience but the following year was something else. In March 1979, Maurice Bishop led a Marxist coup and took over the government. Jennifer continued to represent Grenada, trying to build bridges between Canada and an increasingly truculent revolutionary government. Seeing the writing on the wall, however, she eventually resigned, deciding to study for a master’s degree while working part-time again at Air Canada.
After graduating, she worked for three years on a Canadian government anti-racism campaign before joining CIDA, Canada’s international aid agency. Her children grown and her marriage over, she headed first to St Lucia where she worked as a CARICOM trade advisor.
Eventually, her work with CIDA would take her to Ukraine, Pakistan and finally on a posting to Bangladesh with her soon-to-be husband (and co-author), Shaun Sarsfield. These were tough assignments in tough parts of the world, a far cry from the stage at the Royal Albert Hall three decades earlier.
Things have a way of turning full circle, and in 2007, Jennifer organised a beauty pageant in Grenada that would send a new beauty queen off to the Miss World contest being held that year in China.
Jeered by feminists in 1970, Jennifer makes no apologies for beauty pageants. “True feminism,” she says, “gives women the choice to follow their own desires.”
The contest allowed her to do just that. It opened new doors for her, but most of them she opened all by herself.
Student, traveller, wife, mother, diplomat, development worker, beauty queen: Jennifer Hosten has done it all.
Beyond Miss World is filled with names of the famous and the near-famous who wanted to be close to Miss World, politicians who became embroiled in the Grenada crisis, and the very poor in Bangladesh who had no idea of the life this one-time beauty queen had led.
The book is a great journey; it is about how Miss World became Ms World, how a beautiful women became a beautiful person, travelling, educating herself, serving two countries in turbulent times and doing good in a difficult world.
http://www.newsday.co.tt/
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