Peggy Appiah, who died on February 11 aged 84, was the youngest daughter of the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps and caused an international sensation by marrying an African in 1953.
The marriage, unlike that of the London secretary Ruth Williams and the future president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, five years earlier, did not provoke British government opposition. But the first society match to cross the colour bar was still a big news story when she announced her engagement after a Buckingham Palace garden party.
Sitting in the Regent's Park flat of the artist Feliks Topolski, 32-year-old Peggy Cripps and Joe Appiah coped well with being grilled by a polite press. She explained that she worked for the organisation Racial Unity, and that they had met two years earlier; her father, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had died before he had the opportunity to meet Joe, but her mother approved of her future son-in-law.
Appiah, who was reading for the Bar in England while also representing Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, denied suggestions that he was the son of a chief. With a diamond engagement ring glistening on his fiancée's hand, he jibbed at revealing his age (three years her senior), saying that he did not have a birth certificate. He said he would practise law in the Ashanti confederacy, where his father was chief secretary, and expected no problems over the marriage since there were no racial or religious prejudices in his country.
When the couple were married at St John's Anglican Church, St John's Wood, several weeks later, the Independent Labour Party sent its best wishes. Such Labour figures as Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot joined the Indian politician Krishna Menon and colourfully attired African chiefs in the congregation. But less goodwill was detectable in Africa when the wedding pictures were published.
Charles Swart, the South African Minister of Justice, denounced the match as "disgusting", saying it was an argument for his Bill to keep coloured and native peoples off Europeans' buses and trams. A letter-writer to the Northern News in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, declared that the pictures would "turn the stomach of a pig"; a chairwoman of the Women's Institute and others signing themselves "Colonial", "Settler", "Concerned" and "Disgusted" protested that it was not only an insult to every right-minded European but a dangerous threat to political stability in the British colonies.
Enid Margaret Cripps was born on May 21 1921, the fourth child of the barrister and MP Sir Stafford Cripps. She was brought up at the family home in Gloucestershire, where her father was known locally as "The Squire of the Moated Grange" and banned from reading the lesson at his local church because of his politics. Young Peggy, however, remembered his liking for blue jokes and the future Commonwealth leaders who came to call; she was unselfconscious enough to write a poem entitled Nigger.
After Maltman Green School at Gerrard's Cross, she studied History of Art in Florence before returning home to go to a secretarial school. When the the Blitz began it moved to Dorset, where she was arrested for acting suspiciously while looking for flowers. At the police station she reeled off an impressive list of Latin names for flora, then encountered fresh suspicion by saying that her father was in Moscow, where he was ambassador.
On joining him, she decided that, although Muscovites were shabbily dressed, they seemed more independent than ordinary Londoners. She and her mother visited Finland, where a Russian officer proposed to her, saying he would come to England in 10 years, after the war and the revolution.
When her father left the Soviet Union, Peggy worked in Teheran for the British embassy and then the Army. After the war she had a breakdown, which necessitated recuperation in Switzerland. She studied art in London before setting off with her mother on an aid mission to China, which prompted the Chinese ambassador to predict:
Millions of Changs and Wangs with open arms
The Albion maiden will embrace,
Whose rare benevolence and natural charms
Profoundly touch the heart of an ancient race.
After Joe Appiah completed his Bar finals the couple settled at Kumasi in the Gold Coast, where she satisfied his family by coming from a respectable background and having borne him a son, who was to be joined by three sisters. Joe started off working for Nkrumah, but he fell out with "the Redeemer" as the Gold Coast was about to become an independent Ghana setting off on the "Golden Road to Socialism".
Appiah practised at the Bar while joining the opposition United Nationalist Party, and found himself in jail without trial for 15 months after fiercely campaigning against a Prevention of Terrorism Act. He later formed his own own party to champion democracy; had another spell in jail after being accused of trying to foment a coup; and latterly became a roving ambassador regarded as an apologist for the new regime.
During these years Peggy Appiah learned to wear the local cloth on ceremonial occasions, though she preferred to wear European dress around the house. She started to write a series of children's books, which included The Pineapple Child and Other Tales from the Ashanti, Why There are So Many Roads, Afua and the Mouse and the reader Yao and the Python. There were also a couple of adult novels - Smell of Onions and A Dirge Too Soon - as well as a volume of verse and a collection of 7,000 Ashanti proverbs.
When Joe Appiah was jailed, there were plans to expel Peggy; but this would have caused unwelcome publicity, with the prospect of moving photographs of her at press conferences surrounded by her attractive light-skinned children.
Peggy Appiah bought a house in England to be close to the children when they were at school, but continued to visit Ghana, where she spent her last years gardening and amassing what is arguably the finest collection of Akan gold weights. In 1996 she was appointed MBE for services to Anglo-Ghanaian relations.
When her husband died in 1990 she was asked if she would return to Britain; she replied that her home was in Kumasi. She bought a plot for herself next to Joe's grave, covering it with a concrete slab to prevent anyone else being buried there.
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