Sarah Hosking

Sarah Hosking trained as a painter at St Albans and Leicester colleges of art in the early 1960s and taught art in Oxford in the mid 1960s. Her initiative to preserve the beautiful but threatened college barges gave rise to the Oxford College Barges Preservation Trust. She wrote an excellent book about the barges which was never published, but excerpts of which can be found throughout the pages of this website. 

Her subsequent successful career in Arts administration took her away from Oxford and the barges Trust.  She has published many books during her long and varied career. When she retired she set up the Hosking Houses Trust (an existing legacy from her artist parents) providing accommodation for women writers. 

She was included in the King's Birthday Honours list for summer 2024 and awarded an MBE for services to literature and the arts. This is in recognition not only of her initiation of the Hosking Houses Trust but for innovative work in the world of government arts subsidy during the 1970s/80s and her work in the NHS on environmental issues. 

For many years, the OCBPT assumed that she was dead. Happily, incorrectly as it turns out! 

The Google search early in 2025 went like this:

'In 1963 a young art teacher Sarah Hoskings sponsored by the Marc Fitch Fund, made a study of the Oxford College barges, and in 1965 a group of Oxford undergraduates led by Sarah arranged an exhibition of prints and photographs of the college barges, and issued an urgent appeal to their seniors not to let the barges disappear altogether'. 

Google took us to a writers' retreat website set up by a distinguished looking woman. She looked and sounded absolutely right so we emailed her. The following is her reply. 

'Good heavens...what an amazing piece of detective work. Yes, it is me, I am Sarah Hosking and as a young woman, founded the Oxford Barges Preservation Trust. I had no idea it was still going.' 

We are thrilled to have made this serendipitous discovery on the eve - metaphorically - of our fundraising campaign to lift the Corpus barge out of the water for renovation. 

Sarah has agreed to write down some of her memories ('you'd better make the most of me while I'm here') of the barges in the 1960s and we will add those to this page when they are complete. 

Meanwhile, Sarah has generously shared with us many old photos of the barges, as well as her 1966 manuscript.

The Hosking Houses Trust is based in the Warwickshire village of Clifford Chambers, and was set up in 2002 to offer women writers already established in their careers an opportunity to write. We went to meet Sarah at her home in the same village. 

We discuss the reason for the popularity of the barges, which she attributes to, 'the Edwardian need for fun and frivolity...the status of the Livery...the pomp and circumstance of the barges appealed to the Edwardians, frillified by the Victorian and Edwardian decorative fairground architecture and the appeal of them to the male, boysy Horay Henry brigade ... the smoking and dirty stories,'

The 1966 Trust fundraiser was a huge success, with a marquee down at summer eights, and a mural painted by Sarah, 'there's a little BBC film by Keith Sheather of the event'. 

She goes on to describe how the director of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the time, Bernard Fagg and his wife, took Robert Maccoun under their wing, 'they were kind people. Maccoun was a miserable old sod, very lonely, terrible breath.' 

Having set up the barges preservation Trust with Michael Gee, Sarah tells me, 'then Lady Wheare and Bernard Fagg came muscling in ... I was terribly badly behaved.'

These days she doesn't like having 'blood on the carpet'. It's likely that this wonderfully sparky, somewhat feisty woman has more than one piece of wisdom to impart, and the Trust looks forward to renewing her acquaintance.