Peggy Cripps

Enid Margaret "Peggy" Appiah (née Cripps), MBE (ˈæpiɑː ; 21 May 1921 – 11 February 2006), was a British children's author, philanthropist and socialite. She was the daughter of the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps and Dame Isobel Cripps, and the wife of Ghanaian lawyer and political activist Nana Joe Appiah. The youngest of four children, Enid Margaret Cripps was born at Goodfellows in Gloucestershire, just across the county border from the home of her parents, Stafford Cripps and Isobel (née) Swithinbank, in the village of Filkins, Oxfordshire. 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. Lady Weaver died in 1927 of pneumonia. When Sir Lawrence also died in 1930, their two sons, Purcell and Toby, were, in effect, adopted by the Crippses. In later life, Peggy always regarded them as her brothers. Growing up in the countryside, in the care of her mother, her beloved nanny, Elsie Lawrence, and with the companionship of her sister Theresa, she spent much of her childhood exploring the English countryside, collecting the wild flowers, fruits, and mushrooms that grew in the hedgerows and meadows of the of her father's farm and surrounding woods and fields. As members of the British Wildflower Society, she and her sister learned how to identify plants and got to know the common and Latin names of many. She would go on to transfer this interest in her later years to the flora of Ghana. This love of nature united her family. Her brother, Sir John Cripps, not only farmed at Filkins, but edited 'The Countryman''' and was later the European Countryside Commissioner. On her father's side, the family had long lived in Gloucestershire: they were a solidly upper class family that claimed direct descent from William the Conqueror.