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Baroness Floella Benjamin: ‘I’m Miss Optimist. I don’t let the bad things eat me up’
From Windrush child to Play School presenter to baroness, Floella Benjamin reflects on her remarkable life
Floella Benjamin could not have picked a more apt venue for today’s interview. Her new autobiography is called What Are You Doing Here? and it documents a lifetime of succeeding in positions where she was asked that exact question: presenting Play School as one of the first black children’s TV presenters, becoming the first female chancellor of colour at a UK university, entering the House of Lords as the first female actor to do so. Shamefully, it’s a question she was also repeatedly asked upon her arrival in England, as a 10-year-old member of the Windrush generation arriving from Trinidad in 1960. The book documents her first decade here, being verbally abused, spat at and beaten. Hoses and dog excrement through the family letterbox were not uncommon.
So it makes sense that today I’ve received an invitation to meet her at the Ritz, where she seems to know all the staff and how to locate the secret nooks and crannies to conduct an interview. It clearly means something to Floella to feel at home in this grand place. “I used to bring my mother here and she would spend two months choosing her outfit,” she tells me as we head downstairs. “And then she would walk in through the entrance, owning the place. She took ownership wherever she went. When I first introduced her to Diana, Princess of Wales, I noticed Diana rubbing my mum’s arm and saying, ‘I wish you were my mum.’”
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