‘The British do race better than other people’
Peaches Golding, Britain’s first black female Lord-Lieutenant, tells Joe Shute why we need to remember why we are good
Peaches Golding was always prepared to brush shoulders with royalty. Before setting off on adventures through the dusty streets of North Carolina, she and her sister would “christen” their bikes in the same manner they had watched Queen Elizabeth launch ships on the newsreels. “We used to say: ‘God bless these bikes and all those who ride on them,’” she grins, adopting a cod English accent.
And then there was the insistence from her mother, a primary school teacher, that at mealtimes she remember the exact order of the table setting as one day, she ‘‘might eat with kings and queens’’.
That observation has proved remarkably prescient. This week it was announced that the Queen has appointed Peaches Golding as Britain’s first black female Lord-Lieutenant.
The 63-year- old, who has been made an OBE for services to black and minority people in the South West, previously made history in 2010 by becoming Britain’s first black female High Sheriff. From April she will assume the position as the Queen’s personal representative in Bristol. Golding, who has lived in the city with her zoologist husband Bob Golding for 35 years, blushes with pleasure. “Somebody had to be first,” she says. “But I am humbled and absolutely thrilled.” Much has been made of Golding’s family background. Her father, Dr Charles Brady Hauser, was a prominent civil rights campaigner who, eight years prior to the famous protest by Rosa Parks, refused to sit at the back of a segregated Greyhound bus and was threatened with lynching. He later sued for wrongful arrest and won $2,000 compensation. Golding is descended from a slave and grew up under the shadow of Jim Crow segregation laws. But she refuses to define herself, or others, by their race. “People should be judged on the content of their character, rather than the colour of their skin,” she says.
In a week where new sentencing guidelines deemed the social and ethnic backgrounds of Britain’s young offenders should be taken into account by the criminal courts, Golding insists we must understand better what “privilege” means.
“I don’t mean ethnicity or what class you are from but those critical success factors that make things work or not: books on the wall, a place to do homework, encouraging parents. Those are enormous privileges. If we can understand that we can spread [opportunity] more widely.”
As we sip tea around the living room table of her beautifully appointed home in Leigh Woods, she shows me a photograph of her great, great- grandmother Bethania and documents from her sale to a white plantation owner called Theophilus Hauser for $426 in the mid-19th century.
Bethania was the slave owner’s housekeeper and, following the death of his first wife, lover, bearing him three children from whom Golding is descended. “One doesn’t marry one’s slave,” she says. “She was somewhere between a mistress and a bed warmer.”
Golding was made acutely aware of her connections to slavery early on in life during reunions of the Hauser estate, where the white and black sides of the family ate separately after attending church (the reunions still take place and today are an entirely mixed affair).
“It was something that parents didn’t talk about,” she says. “As a child you just accept the world as it is.”
Despite her years living in the West Country, Golding retains her soft North Carolina accent. Her childhood home was Winston-Salem, a tobacco town. Her father, a veteran of the D-Day landings, taught at Winston-Salem State College and was later elected to the North Carolina General Assembly. Her mother, Lois, taught first grade. She and her sister roamed the environs of their expansive middleclass house and played piano in the basement.
Still, there were stark divisions: segregated cinemas where black children sat upstairs and parks that were still only open to white families. In 1966 her parents, along with several other families, successfully challenged the law for them to be the first group of black children allowed to attend the previously white-only Brunson Elementary School. When she was 13, Peaches decided to invite some school friends to a sleepover and none of the white girls came.
“That was the real wake-up call for me when I realised: there might be some differences here,” she says.
Golding came to Britain in 1983 after meeting her husband in Nigeria, where he worked as curator of the zoo at the University of Ibadan. Together they have a son, Charles, 40, a graphic designer.
They first bonded over a mutual love of snakes; as a child, she kept an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake as a pet. In their living room is displayed part of the skeleton of a 17-foot Burmese python that died at the zoo.
In Bristol, she established a successful marketing business, and has sat on numerous boards. In 1996 she began working on the Prince of Wales’s Business in the Community Trust to help improve diversity in the workforce.
There has been an acknowledgement in recent years of the need to widen the pool of Britain’s public appointments. Some 30 years ago, of the 55 Lord-Lieutenants (the now ceremonial position was created by Henry VIII to muster county militias for the defence of the realm) 20 were peers and most of the others retired military officers.
At the last count there were 16 women Lord-Lieutenants in England and Wales. In 2015, the prominent businessman Ken Olisa was appointed the first black Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. Having spent time in boardrooms across Europe, the US and Canada, Golding says it is “abundantly clear that the British are not only are more tolerant, but also do race better”.
Despite the increasingly polarised level of debate we are experiencing on both sides of the Atlantic over issues of race and identity, she insists we will not return to the divided times she experienced in early life. Still, she sounds a note of caution.
“I think history never repeats itself, it rhymes,” she says. “One of the things we now know is where certain types of behaviour leads us. We need to recognise good and evil. And not be afraid to express that.”
Of her new boss, whom she has already met twice, Golding has nothing but the warmest words. “The Queen has demonstrated very clearly the values of this nation and personifies them,” she says. “It’s about remembering the reasons why we are so good.”
In her new envoy from the Deep South, our monarch has chosen another woman displaying the best of British values. And a celebration of the fact that whatever has gone before, the great greatgranddaughter of a slave can still end up dining with a queen.