Peggy Cripps

Enid Margaret "Peggy" Appiah, MBE (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.

Enid Margaret Cripps was born in Goodfellows,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 youngest of four children.

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 country, in the care of her mother and 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 and the fruits and mushrooms that grew in the hedgerows and meadows of the 500 acres (2.0 km²) of her father's farm and the 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 of them. She was to transfer this interest in later years to the flora of Ghana. This love of the countryside was something that 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-middle-class family. Her paternal grandfather, Lord Parmoor, was a lawyer who had been ennobled in 1914, when he became a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Her paternal great-great-grandfather, Joseph Cripps, had been MP for Cirencester. Lord Parmoor had represented Stroud in the House of Commons.

...
Wikipedia