Asthma attack forces ‘Princess’ of folk music Carthy to miss royal date

Singer and songwriter Eliza Carthy was due to receive her MBE at Buckingham Palace yesterday, but instead spent the day at home recovering from an asthma attack.

Taking to Twitter to express her upset at missing the big day, the musician, who is from Robin Hood’s Bay, said: “No London for me. Bed.”

The 36-year-old is the daughter of fellow stars of the scene, Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, who form folk’s first family. The investiture ceremony has now been re-scheduled.

Among those who did make their date with Prince Charles was the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who used the occasion to reflect on the global financial crisis that brought economies to the brink of collapse.

Receiving a knighthood, Sir Charlie Bean described holding responsibility for monetary policy during the crash of 2008 as a “very scary time”.

Sir Charlie, who retired last year, said: “The good things about where the economy is – growth has come back and the labour market has performed much better then we expected. But the flipside of that is because productivity growth has been weak, pay growth has been weak and that means for a lot of households they haven’t really yet seen the benefits of the recovery start to come through.

“But I think we’re now in the position to see faster productivity growth and faster pay growth.”

Meanwhile, food entrepreneurs collected MBEs for their achievements in business. Edinburgh’s Fraser Doherty, who hit the headlines when he set up SuperJam using his grandmother’s recipes at the age of just 14, claimed the honour was down to “hard work”. After selling his produce at farmers’ markets and to delicatessens, he developed a method of producing jam 100 per cent from fruit.

Fellow Scot Alisa Proverbs, founder of The Big Cheese Making Kit Ailsa Proverbs, said she had been “surprised” by her success.