South African restaurateur, chef, caterer, TV host/broadcaster, journalist, cookbook author, and novelist Dame Prudence Margaret Leith, DBE (born 18 February 1940) is a member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). She currently serves as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. She spent eleven years as a judge on BBC Two’s The Great British Menu before moving to Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off in March 2017, when she eventually replaced Mary Berry.

Prue Leith Early life 

Cape Town, South Africa is the place of Leith’s birth. Sam Leith was her father, and he was a director at ICI’s African Explosives division, which manufactured dynamite for use in mines. Margaret “Peggy” Inglis, the woman she was named after, was an actress. Leith attended St. Mary’s School, Waverley, an English independent private boarding school for girls in Johannesburg administered by Anglican nuns, from the time she was five years old until she was seventeen. She left with first-class matriculation and went on to study at the University of Cape Town, but she couldn’t keep her head in drama, fine art, architecture, or French.

 She convinced her folks to let her enroll in the Sorbonne (then called the University of Paris) so that she could take the Cours de Civilisation Française and therefore improve her French. During her time in Paris, she had an epiphany: she wanted to work in the food industry. [quote missing].

Prue Leith Career

After graduating from London’s Cordon Bleu Cooking School in 1960, Leith established a catering company specializing in gourmet business lunches. In time, this developed into what is now known as Leith’s Good Food, a catering service. Her Notting Hill restaurant, Leith’s, which earned a Michelin star when it first opened in 1969, was sold by her. In 1975, she established what is now known as Leith’s School of Food and Wine, where both aspiring and established cooks can learn their craft. In 1993, the company’s revenue hit £15 million, and she decided to sell it. She was a co-founder of the Prue Leith College (now the Prue Leith Chef’s Academy) in South Africa in 1995.

In 1977, she made history by becoming the first woman to serve on the British Railways Board. Her first order of business was to fix the company’s infamously bad food service. Travellers Fare, the catering section, was split off from the hotel business in 1982, and several restaurants were opened, including Casey Jones and Upper Crust.

Leith started writing food columns for the Daily Mail, the Sunday Express, the Guardian, and the Daily Mirror while still running her own business. Her 12 cookbooks include the best-selling Leith’s Cookery Bible, and her seven novels, “Leaving Patrick,” “Sisters,” “A Lovesome Thing,” “Choral Society,” “A Serving of Scandal,” “The Food of Love: Laura’s Story,” and “The Prodigal Daughter,” are also acclaimed works of fiction. The three books together make up what’s called the Food of Love trilogy. In 2013, her autobiography, titled “Relish,” was released to the public.

Her first foray into television was in the 1970s when she hosted two Tyne Tees Television magazine series for housewives, totaling 13 episodes. As a last-minute replacement for Jack de Manio, she found the experience to be frustrating due to her lack of preparation and the director’s preference for scripted scenes and interviews.

The inaugural episode of Channel 4’s Take Six Cooks, and the BBC’s The Best of British, a series on young entrepreneurs, both aired in the 1980s and focused on her life and business. She served as a Commissioner for Channel 4’s Poverty Commission back in 1999. She replaced Mary Berry on The Great British Bake Off, and she then returned to television as a judge on The Great British Menu for 11 years until 2016.

She has worked with food as a teaching tool. She started the charity Focus on Food, which encourages cooking in the curriculum, and served as its head when she was chair of the Royal Society of Arts (now part of the Soil Association). She also co-founded the Hoxton Apprentice restaurant with the nonprofit Training for Life, which served as a training ground for some of the most marginalized and long-term unemployed youth in the area for a full decade. She served on the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s Food Strand until 2015.

She led the government agency responsible for improving school lunches after Jamie Oliver’s televised expose of the dismal status of school dinners from 2007 to 2010. She is a patron of Let’s Get Cooking, a network of more than five thousand cooking clubs in public schools that was founded and is managed by the Trust (now called the Children’s Food Trust). She is the vice president of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, a trustee of Baby Taste Journey (an infant nutrition education nonprofit), and the patron of the Institute for Food, Brain, and Behavior, Sustain’s Campaign for Better Hospital Food, and the Prue Leith Chef’s Academy in her home country of South Africa.

She has also been involved in public education, serving as chair of Ashridge Management College (2002–07), 3E’s Enterprises (an education corporation turning around failing schools and managing academies) (1998–2006), and Kings College (a secondary school in Guildford) (Chair of Governors) since 2002. (2000–07).

In addition to her work with the Royal Society of Arts and Forum for the Future, she has led a wide range of other organizations, including serving as chair of the Restaurateurs Association (1990–1994) and a member of the Investors in People working group (2000–03). She served as a director of the Places for People housing association from 1999 to 2003 and on the Conservative Party’s Consumer Debt Working Group, which drafted the manifesto Breakdown Britain in 2006. (2004–05). She has spoken out in support of Brexit and has defended her decision, albeit she has since expressed concern over the decline in food quality.

She spearheaded the RSA’s successful effort to transform the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square into a permanent exhibition space for works by today’s most innovative artists.

Leith is a director and investor in several early-stage businesses, and he has served as a non-executive director at British Rail, British Transport Hotels, Safeway, Argyll plc, the Leeds Permanent Building Society, Whitbread plc, Woolworths plc, the Halifax, Triven VCT, Omega International plc, and Belmond Hotels Ltd (previously Orient Express Hotels).

She was formally appointed as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh in July 2017.

The charity Beat, which raises awareness about eating disorders, criticized Leith for using the motto “Worth the calories” on The Great British Bakeoff. In May of 2020, she backed “old pals” Dominic Cummings and Mary Wakefield for breaking the virus lockdown. She appeared on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 in 2021 December as a special guest.