Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
The main ones that are in her personal gift are the Order of Merit, which is too public and too limited in size (24 living members), and the Royal Victorian Order, which is the right one for this. If there is a list of members online (other than the top grade, who are heads of state and the like), I can't find it.
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I can't find it either. Which is a pity, as it would be a great resource to find real people to fictionalise. Anyone with the right skill set or connections who has gotten an MVO since the late 80s is worth looking into and suitable people who got LVO or CVO in the years after that are
clearly in the know. ;)
The only thing I can find is
Wikipedia and not only is this list very partial, it's also mostly people who died a long time ago.
I suspect that some MPS constables and other officers who work in the Royalty Protection Branch might sometimes get an MVO if they're on the detail long. I don't know if any of them have gotten more substantial honours in the RVO. In either case, finding out the names has proven difficult.
Service as the Queen's Gurkha Orderly Officer (two per year) carries with it the MVO as more or less a matter of course, as well as usually preceding promotion to Major (QGO), until recently the most senior position Gurkhas could realistically attain in the British Army. I wanted to find out if any Gurkha Orderly Officers had received a higher honour than MVO, which would in my campaign
certainly mean that their duties for HM had included more than ceremonial ones. But no luck.
Obviously, if there is a Wikipedia site, reasonably detailed newspaper account or other source on an individual bodyguard, soldier or academic, it will note any honours he has received. But that requires me to already know the name in question and cross-reference it. I suppose I could click the names of any likely academics in several universities, checking if they have royal honours after their names.
But the tediousness of that method brought me here, hoping that some poster would happen to know about British professors or lecturers who had been honoured by the Queen and whose field of study had some relevance to the paranormal, at least potentially so in my setting.