Two more Bermudian awardees on the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List have told The Royal Gazette of their joy at the accolade: Stan (Lord Necktie) Seymour, and Kathleen Ford.

“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” said Ms Ford, who was among the four to receive a Queen’s Certificate and Badge of Honour for her decades of community service.

Feeding programmes for the Island’s needy have been much in the news over recent years, but Ms Ford, 78, has been opening her Smith’s home to give meals to the community for much of her lifetime.

“I’ve been doing this for 50-odd years, although it has grown over the years with the recession,” Ms Smith said.

“I am just carrying on with my mother’s legacy. She taught all of us children — and there were ten of us — to do good for others, and that’s what we are doing.”

She added: “But I tell everybody that congratulates me, and especially those that come to the house, that if it wasn’t for them I would not have received this award.”

Commendations haven’t been the only thing Ms Ford has been given since the awards were announced on Tuesday. “Someone gave me a turkey just this morning, and a big one too. Last night, someone bought me all these pawpaws and a pumpkin — I was preparing a casserole.”

Another well-wisher dropped around “five bags of cassava” to go in her celebrated farina pies. Ms Ford feeds 40 to 50 people at a time each Saturday: relatives and children along with friends and those in need.

She has help with her work nowadays, but remains the driving force in the kitchen — saying simply “I love to cook”.

Ms Ford still makes the rounds across the Island, looking for anywhere that needy people congregate so that she can invite them to have a meal on the day she views as the Sabbath.

“I can say it’s not really about the recession for me, because I live how the Lord has asked me to live,” she said. “Give, and it shall be given to you.”

Congratulations have also poured in for Mr Seymour, known as the King of Calypso.

“It’s a very good feeling — I can’t explain how I felt to learn that I had received this award. I imagine there are some people who should have got it and didn’t for some reason,” he said.

“But when I think of all the years I put into music, composing and touring, it’s so rewarding to get this. It makes my heart feel good.”

Asked if we planned to turn his legendary songwriting skills toward this latest recognition, Mr Seymour said: “Well, I’ll see what comes up. Writing songs is about the moment and the feeling. It’s tricky sometimes.”

Mr Seymour recalled the congratulatory phone call from his brother Al Seymour after the news was announced.

“My brother said, ‘Man, think of how we started out with nothing but the ambition to be something, and finally something’s happened like this’.”

A famous local performer during the heyday of the Island’s entertainment circuit, Mr Seymour, now 84, laughed as he remembered penning the song “Diddly Bops” in homage to Bermuda’s mopeds.

Musician Hubert Smith told him he didn’t think the song would amount to much.

“I was working a cruise boat one night doing a show and I turned to Hubert and said I was going to sing it. And it was successful,” he said. “But that’s life, isn’t it?”

He added: “I would say finally that I just hope youngsters trying to start our can see what I have done and be inspired.”