Late Queen’s Order of Merit list revealed

Baroness Benjamin and Dame Elizabeth Anionwu among those favoured in monarch’s parting gift

Baroness Benjamin and Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, a former nurse, have become the first two black women to become members of the prestigious Order of Merit. They are among six notable figures personally chosen by Queen Elizabeth II as her final honours. The others named by Her Majesty just days before she died are architect Sir David Adjaye, geneticist and cell biologist Sir Paul Nurse, molecular biologist Dr Venki Ramakrishnan and historian Margaret Macmillan.

At any one time there can only be 24 living members of the order, so it is a highly exclusive group

BARONESS BENJAMIN and Dame Elizabeth Anionwu have become the first black women to become members of the Order of Merit.

They are among six notable figures personally chosen by Queen Elizabeth II in her final honours list.

The others named by Her Majesty in early September, days before she died, are Sir David Adjaye, a leading architect, Sir Paul Nurse, a geneticist and cell biologist, Dr Venki Ramakrishnan, a molecular biologist, and Margaret Macmillan, a Canadian historian.

Created in 1902 by Edward VII, the Order of Merit is a personal gift from the monarch. At any one time there can only be 24 living members of the order, so it is a highly exclusive group of people drawn from the arts, sciences, culture and military.

Current members include conservationist Sir David Attenborough, artist David Hockney, Baroness Boothroyd, a former Commons speaker, and Sir Tim Berners-lee, a computer scientist credited with inventing the world wide web.

The new appointments, the first since Sir James Dyson was among three members named in 2016, will be awarded by the King.

Lady Benjamin, who was born in Trinidad, first came to prominence as a presenter on Play School, the popular BBC children’s programme and went on to write more than 30 books. Her memoi, Coming To England is studied in schools. She has also become a prominent advocate for the Windrush generation and helped organise the National Windrush Monument that was unveiled at Waterloo Station.

When the King, as Prince of Wales, guest-edited a special issue of The Voice, Britain’s only black newspaper, to mark its 40th anniversary this year, Lady Benjamin, a Liberal Democrat peer, was among those he invited to write an article for it. She wrote about her involvement in the Windrush portraits project he commissioned, in which 10 members of the Windrush generation are captured in paintings.

Dame Elizabeth, a former nurse and health visitor, was the UK’S first sickle-cell and thalassaemia nurse specialist and in 1998 created the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at the University of West London.

She was awarded a damehood in 2017 for services to nursing and the Mary Seacole Statue Appeal, which placed a memorial to the 19th-century pioneer in the gardens of St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Dame Elizabeth was appointed a CBE in the late Queen’s 2001 birthday honours for services to nursing and is a fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and the Queen’s

Nursing Institute. Sir David, the Ghanaian-british architect who designed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, was among the signatories of a letter that condemned the King, when he was Prince, for his “behind the scenes lobbying” of a London housing development in 2009.

The Qatari royal family was forced to scrap plans for a £3billion housing development on the former site of the Chelsea Barracks after he urged the emir of the gulf state to abandon them.

At the time, the King called the design “unsympathetic and unsuitable’’ and proposed a more traditional design by Quinlan Terry, an intervention that provoked accusations that he had overreached his constitutional role.

A letter sent to The Sunday Times by architects, including Sir David, said he had “used his privileged position” to influence “the established planning consultation process”. In October 2020, Sir David was announced as the RIBA Royal Gold Medal Winner for 2021, considered one of the highest honours in British architecture for his contributions to the field internationally.

Sir Paul, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, is chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute. He was named president of the Royal Society in 2010 but had to defend its voting system three years later when the Duke of York was elected as a fellow. Several leading scientists objected to the election, made with just 11 per cent of the vote following a huge number of abstentions, owing to his “over-colourful” past and lack of a scientific background.

Sir Paul said he accepted the voting system was “an anachronism” which had to be changed but highlighted the society’s “very strong historic link with the royal family” and said the Duke had always “had a robust defence” of allegations made against him. Dr Ramakrishnan, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry, is also a former president of the Royal Society. The molecular biologist shared the 2009 Nobel Prize with two other scientists for their work on ribosomes, the structures within cells that synthesise proteins.

Born in India, Dr Ramakrishnan moved to America and spent almost 30 years there before taking up his position on the Medical Research Council at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1999. Margaret Macmillan, emeritus professor of international history at the University of Oxford. Her books include: Women Of The Raj, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference Of 1919 and its Attempt to End War, Six Months that Changed the World and History’s People.