The ultimate honour - impressive list of those who refused to bow to the s

The ultimate honour - impressive list of those who refused to bow to the system

Tania Branigan
Monday December 22, 2003
The Guardian

It is an impressive list of the great and the good, packed with scholars and sportsmen, authors and artists. Many of the most eminent names of the last 50 years are there. Yet the leaked Whitehall documents do not detail Britain's knights and dames, but almost 300 top figures - from David Bowie to Isaiah Berlin and from Helen Mirren to Lucian Freud - who snubbed the establishment by rejecting honours.

"It's a very impressive list. Perhaps we could have an alternative honours list: a roll of honour for all those people who have turned them down," said Tony Wright, Labour chairman of the Commons public administration committee, which is to examine the awards system this spring.

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The poet Benjamin Zephaniah made the headlines last month when he broke that rule by explaining why he had turned one down: "OBE me? Up yours, I thought," he wrote in the Guardian.

"I get angry when I hear that word "empire": it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality."

And the secrecy has been blown apart by the leak to the Sunday Times, which yesterday listed an extraordinary array of what it dubbed "refuseniks".

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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/whitehall/story/0,9061,1111643,00.html

http://www.couragetorefuse.org/defaulteng.asp

but only 1 in our senate.

That is impressive. I had no idea. Graham Greene, David Bowie, Honor Blackman...the list goes on.