First Published: September 7, 2008

She’s as fascinating as she is mysterious, and we’ve wanted this one-on-one since 2001 when we watched Betty Hopkin swan into the lobby of Spice Island Beach Resort in dazzling white. A stunning woman, Betty would turn heads in any metropolis where style, sass and ingenuity go hand in hand and the knowledge of making an entrance par for the course. Little wonder that she stopped her husband of more than two decades, Sir Royston Hopkin, dead in his tracks when he first met her at the International Trade Show in Berlin, Germany. The Nevis-born Betty Grell-Hull was spending a year in the United Kingdom honing her skills in tourism at the Bournemouth Institute of Higher Education. “He wasn’t really my type,” she recalls, “I mean, there he was, larger than life in a suit and just wouldn’t stop talking. He insisted we have coffee and (she smiles at the memory), I almost missed the single train that would take me back to the UK.” The conversation and coffee might not have been the way Betty had envisaged being swept off her feet… but there was, she acknowledges, “something about this encounter… I knew we’d end up together… and that he was the one”. They in fact met up again in New York and at Hopkin’s home in Grenada. “I didn’t recognise him, and he me for that matter… he wasn’t wearing a suit and I (a result of not being able to find a good hairdresser in the UK) had cut off my hair.” Glitch aside, the four-day Carnival jaunt turned into 17 glorious days. The couple got engaged on January 10, tied the knot on February 12, 1983, and have been inseparable since.

Betty, the entrepreneur

Spice Island Beach Resort now boasts two high-end boutiques, both called Gatsby — one caters for ladies; the other, gents. “Everybody is now much more fashion-conscious,” states Lady Hopkin. Indeed they are and both locals and guests enjoy the retail therapy afforded by such labels as La Perla, Gottex and Stuart Weitzman. The men (including Betty’s hubby Royston) can’t buy the shirts quickly enough, and who can blame them when the trendy stripes of Paul & Shark button up so stylishly and the cotton feels so good? Other popular labels are Etro and Bugatchi and Resort One.

— NMW