Peggy Cripps

Enid Margaret "Peggy" Appiah (née Cripps), MBE (/ˈæpiɑː/ AP-ee-ah; 21 May 1921 – 11 February 2006), was a British children's author, philanthropist and socialite.

[3] The family had only recently moved into Goodfellows, the home in Filkins where Peggy grew up; a Cotswold-style manor house, whose decoration and development owed much to the influence of Sir Lawrence Weaver, the architect, who was, with his wife Kathleen, one of the Cripps' closest friends.

In 1938 she and her family spent several months in Jamaica, and in the same year Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom Stafford had begun an extensive correspondence as a result of his interest in the development of democracy in the British colonies, visited Goodfellows with his daughter Indira.

She declined her place at Edinburgh University, enrolling instead at Whitehall Secretarial College, which had been evacuated to Dorset with the onset of bombing in London, so she could start work immediately.

In 1941, at the age of 20, with her parents in London, and her sister in Iran, she was left in charge of the evacuation of the British Embassy, with the German invasion of Russia imminent.

Due to the reduced income that came with the loss of his legal practice, the family left Goodfellows and moved into a smaller house at Frith Hill, Gloucestershire, although her brother John eventually took over the running of the farm at Filkins.

She then took up painting in a small studio in the apartment of artist Feliks Topolski and attended life-classes at Hammersmith Art School, under the tutelage of Carel Weight.

With the Labour Party victory in the 1945 election, Stafford had joined the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, where he spent most of his time working on negotiations with the leaders of the Indian independence movement, including Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah.

In November 1947, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and most of the rest of his life he helped to manage the beginnings of the post-War recovery of Britain and the creation of the modern welfare state.

In 1942, her mother had agreed to lead a campaign to raise money for aid to the people of China, who were facing great suffering as a result of the Japanese invasion, floods, disease and famine.

Six years later, the Chinese government invited Lady Cripps to visit their country so that she could see what was being done with the money and express their gratitude for the work of British United Aid to China.

It was through her work for Racial Unity, of which she was secretary in 1952, that she first met Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, who was President of the West African Students' Union.

Much to her surprise, Joe was already at home in Kumasi when she arrived, having flown back urgently on the death of his granduncle, Yaw Antony, whom he was to succeed as head of his branch of the nobility of the Ashanti people.

Together with her future husband's family she met many prominent Ghanaians, including the Asantehene, Mrs. Rose Aggrey (wife of the founder of the Achimota School Dr James Aggrey), the artist Kofi Antubam, paramount chief Nene Mate Kole, as well as such leaders of the independence movement as Kwame Nkrumah, Komla Gbedemah, Kojo Botsio, and Krobo Edusei.

Hugh Gaitskell, Stafford's successor as Chancellor was there, as were Michael Foot, future leader of the Labour Party, Aneurin Bevan,[12] Lady Quist, the wife of the Speaker of the Gold Coast Assembly, and Krishna Menon, India's ambassador to the United Nations.

In May 1954 their first child, Kwame Anthony Appiah, was born (amid another flutter of newspaper publicity) and in November the young family arrived in the Gold Coast to begin their new life.

They built themselves a home in Mbrom (an area of Kumasi), where their neighbours were Victor Owusu, another senior NLM politician, John Brew, and, across the street, Joe Appiah's father, J.W.K.

Other frequent visitors to the house included the traders who brought her the gold weights they had acquired on their collecting trips through the villages and towns of Ghana.

She also took an interest in the education and welfare of a number of young people, who became part of her extended family, among them Isobel Kusi-Obodom, whose father died in Nkrumah's prisons, and Dr Joe Appiah-Kusi of Seattle.

While inspecting the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and President Nkrumah passed by the boy's bed.

Since he had a picture of his parents displayed on his bedside table, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had visited Kumasi previously and had met Peggy Appiah, turned back, as he was leaving, to send his regards.

[citation needed] The combination of her anxieties about her husband and her son put her under a great deal of strain, which was increased by the fact that she was pregnant at the time with her youngest child, Abena, who was extremely ill for much of her infancy.

Nevertheless, she continued to maintain a stable home for her children and to work quietly for her husband's release, with the assistance of her mother, Lady Cripps, who was able to visit her son-in-law at Ussher Fort in 1962.

In the years that followed, as her children were abroad at boarding schools and universities, and her husband was active once more in Ghanaian politics and as an ambassador for the nation, she stayed mostly in Kumasi, providing the base from which he could travel out into the world, secure in the knowledge that Peggy was taking care of things on the home front.

From the mid-1960s onwards, she began to publish a series of volumes of Ananse stories, retold for children, which became widely known in Africa, England and America and throughout the English-speaking world.

In the final years of her life, as she became increasingly limited in her movements, she continued to be the center of a wide network of family and friends, and a caring household led by her housekeeper, Ma Rose.

[19] It has been suggested that the experiences of the Appiahs, as well as the somewhat contemporary case of the Lloyd's underwriter Ruth Williams' marriage to the African aristocrat Kgosi Seretse Khama, influenced the writing of the Oscar-winning feature film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).