Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin

Desert Island Discs

• Episode: Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin
• Website: Desert Island Discs
• Feed URL: http://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/b006qnmr.rss
• Duration: 00:34:38
• Published: 2014-01-19 13:00

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin. The first black woman to be chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen and also to the Speaker of the House of Commons, she's also kept busy with her work in less rarefied surroundings - ministering to two churches in the east London borough of Hackney. It's all a long way from the crystal waters and swaying palms of her birthplace, Montego Bay, where brought up by her Auntie Pet she coped with poverty and separation from her mother. She did however have a sense, from the age of just 14, that her future lay in faith. She wasn't wrong and the combination of her belief and dynamism has taken her to as close to the top as The Church of England will currently allow. If they do eventually permit women bishops it's easy to imagine she'd be a shoe in. She says "Oh I have lots of ambition. You can't be Jamaican and not be ambitious. My ambition is to enjoy life. My ambition is to do everything I do to the best of my ability." Producer: Cathy Drysdale.