From Miss World to Canadian diplomat

Jennifer Hosten in Ottawa to launch memoirs of her adventurous life

Bruce Deachman, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, October 05, 2008

Beyond Miss World:

An Autobiography of Jennifer Hosten,

Miss World 1970 will be launched on Wednesday in Exhibition Room A of Library and Archives Canada,


When Jennifer Hosten moved to the Ottawa area from the Caribbean in the winter of 1973, her arrival turned a lot of heads.

Never mind that she was from the spice island of Grenada and a bit of exotica herself for her neighbours in Osgoode, where she and her first husband, David Craig, initially settled. But she had also been crowned Miss World just over two years earlier, having won a contentious pageant in London's Royal Albert Hall that featured two Miss South Africa entrants (one black, one white), an onstage protest by angry feminists throwing flour and firecrackers and heckling host Bob Hope, and allegations that Miss Sweden, the odds-on favourite heading in but third-place finisher coming out, deserved to win.

The point was exacerbated by the fact that the judging panel included, along with country singer Glenn Campbell, author Joan Collins and others, Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy, who commented, "The last time Miss United Kingdom was voted Miss World, there were five British judges on the panel, so why all the fuss now?"

Miss Switzerland, meanwhile, was quoted as saying of the then-22-year-old Hosten, "I have nothing against coloured girls, but how Miss Grenada could win, I don't know."

"I didn't know about the controversy until the final night," Hosten recalled in a telephone interview this week from Grenada. "I didn't even know the prime minister of Grenada was going to be a judge. I had no clue!"

Yet Hosten, who was a airline flight attendant in 1970 when a passenger -- Miss Guyana -- suggested she enter the Miss Grenada contest, was, and remains, a staunch defender of beauty pageants as ultimately empowering for women. Her fame as Miss World no doubt played in Gairy's decision to recommend her in 1978 for a posting at the United Nations in New York -- a position she declined -- and another soon after, which she accepted, as Grenada's High Commissioner to Canada.

"The first time they asked me," she recalled, "the idea was an exciting one, but I did have some reservations.

"But I had already seen myself as an ambassadress to Grenada," she added, "through my international travels, and had many opportunities to talk and was quite used to just winging it."

But diplomats, she concedes, rarely just "wing it," and so she undertook a six-week course in diplomacy before becoming Grenada's spokesperson in Canada.


Apart from her High Commissionership, Hosten's career has also included positions with both Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and other Canadian and Caribbean organizations. She received her Master's degree in political science from Carleton University, writing her thesis on how the North America Free Trade Agreement impacted countries in the Caribbean, and to this day she remains a strong and vocal advocate of regional integration there. From 2002 to '04, she served as a Canadian diplomat in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

These experiences are all recounted in Hosten's new autobiography, Beyond Miss World, which she and her second husband, Shaun Sarsfield, spent weekends and holidays co-writing over the past six years. She'll be in town to launch the book on Wednesday at Library and Archives Canada.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the temperate climate of her birthplace of St. George's, Grenada, she had reservations about moving to Ottawa. She'd spent a few months in Canada in her late teens -- her mother was born in Canada -- when she moved from the Caribbean to Montreal and worked for the CBC.

"I wanted to see what Canada was like," she recalled, "because of my mother. So I emigrated to Canada and became a landed resident."

A few transit strikes later, however, she returned to Grenada.

"I was a little dubious about the climate in Ottawa," she said of her return in 1973, when her Canadian husband's desire for a house on a farm brought them here from Barbados. "Canada is such a beautiful country, but I have to admit those early winters were daunting. I often say to people, 'My life is not as glamorous as anybody might think.'"

Hosten's autobiography includes both the exciting and the mundane. In one chapter, for example, she recounts how, living in the country outside Ottawa, she'd park her car near the end of the long driveway in winter and take a snowmobile out to start it before morning light.

In another, she tells of witnessing both brutal and brutally sad events in Bangladesh. She vividly describes surviving a devastating hurricane that ripped through Grenada in 2004, as well as the much more pedestrian task of rebuilding a house in its aftermath.

Hosten's a diplomat to the end, though, and readers will be hard-pressed to find much, if any, dirt in the corners of her book. This is no tell-all tale of catty beauty queens and diplomatic rows. While her time as Grenadian High Commissioner to Canada, for example, included the 1979 coup that saw Gairy deposed by an armed revolution led by Maurice Bishop, Hosten floats effortlessly and without judgment from one regime to the next.

She and her husband now divide their time between Grenada, where they run Jenny's Place apartments and guest houses, and Ottawa. In April, they sold the house they'd lived in for the past decade in Manotick, and are currently looking for new digs. And while Hosten admits that her daughter, Sophia, is urging her to move to Toronto where she now lives, Ottawa retains a strong pull on her.

"I spent all those years there and raised my children there," she said, "and got to be very much a part of the Ottawa community and society.

"I have so many ties in the Ottawa area, still, and, of course, it's such a beautiful city."

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