Order of the British Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Order of the British Empire was born on the 4th of June 1917, in the middle of a world war that had turned the idea of honour upside down. King George V looked at the existing British honours system and saw a blind spot. The Orders of the Garter, the Thistle, and St Patrick were for royals, peers, and eminent commanders. The Order of the Bath was for senior officers and civil servants. The Order of St Michael and St George went to diplomats. But none of these orders recognised the hundreds of thousands of people across the Empire who were doing something just as essential: keeping things running behind the lines. What makes this order unusual is how wide its net was cast from the very beginning. Men and women alike were eligible from day one. Service at home counted the same as service abroad. And the first person ever invested with the order's highest honour was not a general, not a minister, but the chairman of a Scottish war savings committee. The first medal went to a munitions worker named Lizzie Robinson. More than a century later, the order has over 100,000 living members worldwide, making it the largest of all British orders of chivalry. How that came to be, who pushed back against it, and what it actually means to hold a GBE, KBE, or simple MBE, is what this documentary explores.

• 2. A Civilian Order Goes to War

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  Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow was an unlikely setting for the first investiture ceremony of a new British order of chivalry, but that was exactly where Alexander Ure, 1st Baron Strathclyde received his GBE during a royal visit to the Glasgow shipyards. The ceremony signalled from the outset that this order was meant for the working world, not the parade ground. The order had been conceived as a civilian award, and its earliest statutes reflected that intention. But in August 1918, not long after it was founded, the military began receiving appointments too. A formal Military Division was then added, distinguished from the civil awards by a central vertical red stripe on the purple riband. The two divisions, Civil and Military, would run in parallel from that point forward. A rule introduced in December 1922 cemented the civilian character of the order: in the Civil Division, senior awards were required to outnumber Military Division equivalents by a proportion of six to one. The 1922 revision also placed formal limits on the total number of appointments, bringing what had been a wartime surge of awards onto a more regulated peacetime footing. An unusual early chapter involved gallantry. In 1920, the first MBE awarded specifically for an act of bravery went to Sydney Frank Blanck, who had pulled an injured man from a burning building that was storing explosives. Gallantry awards would eventually develop their own distinct insignia: two crossed silver oak leaves worn on the same ribbon as the badge, introduced after the 14th of January 1958.

• 3. The Medal Below the Order

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  Running alongside the order since its foundation in 1917 was a separate but related award: the Medal of the Order of the British Empire. Recipients of the medal were affiliated with the order but were not members of it. The 1922 statutory revisions introduced a split in what the medal could recognise, distinguishing awards for gallantry from those for meritorious service. Each version was inscribed differently, and the gallantry medal carried laurel leaves on its clasp, while the meritorious version bore oak leaves. By 1933, holders of the gallantry version, by then known as the Empire Gallantry Medal, were permitted to use the postnominal letters EGM. Seven years later, in 1940, all holders of the EGM were instructed to exchange it for the newly created George Cross, a more prestigious gallantry award that replaced the EGM entirely. The remaining medal, recognising meritorious service, was renamed the British Empire Medal in 1941. The following year, its recipients gained the right to use the letters BEM. During World War II, the BEM was used to recognise acts of bravery falling short of the threshold for a George Cross or George Medal. That function continued until the Queen's Gallantry Medal arrived in 1974. A significant break came in 1993, when John Major's reforms to the honours system led the United Kingdom to stop awarding the British Empire Medal altogether; those who would previously have qualified were made eligible instead for the MBE. The medal returned in 2012, with 293 BEMs awarded to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.

• 4. Redesigned for a New Reign

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  In 1937, ahead of the coronation of King George VI, the entire visual identity of the order was revised as a tribute to the reign of his father and Queen Mary. The change ran deeper than sentiment. At the centre of every badge, the figure of Britannia was replaced with crowned images of the late George V and Queen Mary. The reverse of the medal gained the inscription "Instituted by King George V". The riband, which had been purple from the order's foundation, was replaced with a colour that Queen Mary had originally proposed back in 1917: rose pink. The switch was not made then because purple was chosen instead. But when Queen Mary became Grand Master of the order in 1936, a change became possible, and since the 9th of March 1937, the riband has been rose pink edged with pearl grey, with a pearl grey central stripe added for the Military Division. The star worn by the most senior members also changed in 1937: the gold medallion with Britannia at its centre was replaced by effigies of George V and Queen Mary within the crimson circlet bearing the order's motto, "For God and the Empire". Mantles, hats, and collars had been added for the highest class, the GBE, only in 1929. The 1937 revisions changed the mantle from purple satin to rose-pink satin lined with pearl-grey silk, and the plumed hat that accompanied the mantle was changed from purple to black. The collar, made of gold, alternates six medallions of the Royal Arms with six showing the Royal and Imperial Cypher of George V, all linked by gold cables depicting sea-lions and crowns.

• 5. Pushback and Principled Refusals

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  John Lennon was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1965, alongside his fellow Beatles. His justification for accepting the award was characteristically direct. He pointed out that recipients who had complained about the band's MBEs had received their own honours for wartime service, which meant for killing people; the Beatles, he argued, received theirs for entertaining people. Four years later, on the 25th of November 1969, Lennon returned his MBE insignia to Buckingham Palace as part of his peace protests. The honour was not formally annulled. It remained officially his, because only the monarch can annul an honour, acting on the recommendation of the Honours Forfeiture Committee. In 2003, The Sunday Times published a list of notable people who had turned down the order. The names included David Bowie, John Cleese, Nigella Lawson, L. S. Lowry, George Melly, Elgar Howarth, and J. G. Ballard. Ballard did not stop at simply declining; he described the honours system as "a preposterous charade". That same year, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, of Jamaican and Barbadian descent, publicly refused appointment as an OBE. He said the name of the order reminded him of "thousands of years of brutality" and the suffering of his ancestors. The author C. S. Lewis had turned down an honour on different grounds. Named on the last list of George VI's reign in December 1951, Lewis was a monarchist but declined to avoid any association with political controversy. In 2019, the comedian John Oliver also declined an OBE, which would have appeared in the Queen's New Year Honours list, saying simply: "Why on Earth would I want that?"

• 6. Reform, Criticism, and the Name Problem

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  In 1993, Prime Minister John Major set out to overhaul how the honours system operated. The reforms targeted automatic awards first. The GBE that had been given each year to the Lord Mayor of London as a matter of course came to an end. Civil servants lost the Imperial Service Order as their standard award and were redirected to the OBE. The number of MBEs awarded annually was significantly increased, opening the order to a wider pool of recipients. Nine categories of eligibility were eventually introduced to ensure consistent representation: arts and media; community, voluntary, and local service; economy; education; health; parliamentary and political; science and technology; sport; and state. The largest share of awards was reserved for community and voluntary work. A deeper challenge came in 2004, when a Commons select committee published a report called A Matter of Honour: Reforming Our Honours System. The committee argued that the order's title was "now considered to be unacceptable, being thought to embody values that are no longer shared by many of the country's population". The committee proposed renaming the order to the Order of British Excellence, replacing the rank of Commander with Companion on the grounds that the former had a "militaristic ring", and abolishing knighthoods and damehoods altogether. The government declined to act on any of these recommendations. The order's name remained unchanged. The case of Chin Peng showed how membership could also be revoked on political grounds: appointed as an Officer for resisting the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II, he later led a Communist insurgency against British rule, and his OBE was withdrawn by the British government. His name, however, is a reminder that the order's history contains genuine complexity, not just ceremonial tradition.

• 7. The Chapel and the Living Order

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  St Paul's Cathedral in London became formally linked to the Order of the British Empire in May 1957, forty years after the order's foundation. A chapel was dedicated in 1960 in the far eastern end of the cathedral crypt. Only the heraldic banners of the Sovereign and the Grand Master are normally displayed there. Religious services for the whole order are held every four years, and it is at those services that new Knights and Dames Grand Cross are installed; these ceremonies now take place in the nave of the cathedral rather than in the crypt chapel. The order today is limited to 300 Knights and Dames Grand Cross, 845 Knights and Dames Commander, and 8,960 Commanders. No equivalent cap applies to the fourth and fifth classes, though annual appointment limits do: no more than 858 Officers and 1,464 Members may be appointed in any given year. The current Grand Master is Queen Camilla, who took up the position in 2024. She is the fourth person to hold the role, following Edward, Prince of Wales, who served from the order's foundation on the 4th of June 1917 until the 20th of January 1936; Queen Mary, who held the post from March 1936 until March 1953; and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who served from 1953 until 2021. The centenary of the order was marked in 2017 with a service at St Paul's Cathedral, 100 years after Lizzie Robinson received her medal and Alexander Ure took his GBE on that first remarkable day at Ibrox.