PEGGY APPIAH was the youngest daughter of the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. A writer, charity worker and devout Anglican, she spent her life improving British-African relations in the troubled era of decolonisation. She caused an international sensation in 1953 when she married Joe Appiah, a Ghanaian aristocrat, lawyer and political activist working for the overthrow of British rule.

They met in London where he had come to read for the Bar and lobby. The trusted aide of Kwame Nkrumah, Africa’s first post-colonial leader, Appiah was a regular at Speaker’s Corner and at Westminster where he counted Clement Attlee among his friends. Joe’s and Peggy’s passion was buttressed by a shared Christian faith and a belief in social justice that stemmed from it. Unfortunately, neither socialist principle nor the groom’s status prevented some of Peggy’s family from opposing the match. Her mother supported the couple but kept the depth of their relationship from Sir Stafford, fearing it would upset him during his last illness.

A journalist once asked Peggy: “Why are you marrying a coloured man?” Fresh from meeting the Queen at the Coronation garden party, she replied: “Because I love him, and love is a greater thing than colour, or creed, or race — or anything.” British political grandees and several world leaders attended the Appiahs’ wedding at a church opposite Lord’s cricket ground, while hundreds gathered outside. Joe described the event as “a veritable United Nations assembly in session right in the heart of Mayfair”, later adding “we hope that because of us, others will take courage”.

That hope was fulfilled by the letters of thanks Peggy received from people in mixed relationships. Some felt better able to endure prejudice. Others, living secret lives, were emboldened to marry, like the bank clerk from Cheltenham in love with a Nigerian engineer who thanked Peggy, adding: “I am a staunch Conservative” to show that the issue was not a party political one.

For the Appiahs’ supporters, their marriage symbolised the possibility of racial reconciliation in a post-colonial world. For others, it was a threat to civilisation. When the couple’s picture appeared in the international press, Charles Swart, South Africa’s Minister of Justice and one of the architects of apartheid, said: “It is a disgusting photograph of a wedding between the daughter of a former British Cabinet minister and a blanket native. If such a thing were ever to happen in South Africa, it would be the end.” Throughout the Empire, settlers feared that the marriage would undermine British authority. Peggy’s response was: “There will be fewer Christmas cards to send.”

When the couple arrived in the Gold Coast in 1954, a frosty reception from colonial matriarchs was the least of Peggy’s worries. In a pattern repeated across Africa, tribal divisions that the British had exploited in order to rule now shaped party loyalties and threatened civil war. In the north, the Ashanti opposed Nkrumah, fearing domination by Ghas in the south. “After all the idealism of African politics in London,” said Peggy, “it was strange to enter such an atmosphere of violence.” But Joe’s calming influence on the Ashanti helped to ensure a peaceful transition to independence in 1957, and the couple began a fruitful life together, settling in the Ashanti capital of Kumasi.

Enid Margaret Cripps was born in 1921, the fourth child of Stafford and Isobel Cripps, at Goodfellows, the family home in Gloucestershire. They nicknamed her “Peg” as a little girl and it stuck. Much of her youth was spent abroad with her father’s postings to political missions in Jamaica, China, Russia, India and Iran. Declining a place at university when war broke out, she became a secretary in the Foreign Service. As well as meeting statesmen like Nehru, she witnessed the poverty and segregation that most colonial subjects lived under.

On returning to Britain in 1942, she worked in the Russian division of the Ministry of Information. But, as her father rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1947, she had a nervous breakdown, frustrated that in peacetime she no longer had a vital occupation. She found solace in painting, studying under Carel Weight and becoming a friend of Felix Topolski. She also became secretary to the Christian organisation Racial Unity, which had been set up by Attlee’s sister, Mary, a former missionary in South Africa. It was through that work in 1952, shortly before her father’s death, that Peggy met the man who changed the course of her life.

Marriage to Joe was sometimes turbulent. A democrat to his core, he was twice jailed for opposing the corrupt and dictatorial regimes that blighted Ghana until the 1990s. In 1961 Nkrumah imprisoned his former friend in Ussher Fort, from which the British had shipped slaves out of the colony, an irony not lost on the Appiahs. “It was a blow to inter-racialists”, Peggy recalled. “To them our marriage had stood for something. Most people had predicted it would break up. Now it was the Ghanaian Government which was trying to separate us.”

Nkrumah tried to deport Peggy but with typical pluck she said that the airport was quite a distance and she would kick and scream every inch of the way. Meanwhile, Lady Cripps visited her son-in-law in prison and publicised his plight through Amnesty International, one of the first cases the organisation took up. This embarrassed Nkrumah into letting Peggy stay, and he released her husband from prison a year later. Joe resumed his law practice, formed his own political party and, when he died from cancer in 1990, was hailed as a founding father of the nation.

While supporting Joe and their four children, Peggy immersed herself in Ghanaian life. She took up writing, producing 20 books: two novels (notably A Smell of Onions, 1971), several collections of poetry, a number of children’s books based on Ghanaian folk tales and a widely used primer on Aids called, in her distinctive voice, A Dreadful Mistake. Perhaps her greatest literary achievement, though, was Bu Me Be (2002) a collection of 7,000 Ashanti proverbs, the fruit of half a century’s research that she compiled with her son Anthony, a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Peggy worked hard for the poorest of Ghana, funding projects for the disabled and mentally ill. Sometimes she would take to the streets, organising local children to help her to pick up rubbish, or marching into a postal depot with some friends to clear a backlog. Her reputation was such that the desperate often turned up on her doorstep; many received help.

She also helped to found the International Spouses Association of Ghana, a support group for expatriates married to Africans. Her own need for support stemmed partly from Joe taking an Ashanti wife, with whom he discreetly had another family, as was then custom. “It didn’t distress me too much,” Peggy claimed. Whatever the truth, she remained devoted to Joe and her adopted land.

“Over the years, I have come to regard this country as my own and genuinely feel ‘Ghanaian’ ,” she once told Nkrumah. Resplendent in Ashanti dress to the end, she somehow retained her Englishness, from a love of gardening to her cut-glass accent. But it was an outward-looking Englishness, and she was loved and respected in her own right, fondly known to all in Ghana as “Aunty Peggy”. In 1996 she was appointed MBE for services to British-Ghanaian relations.

Said to be an inspiration for the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Peggy Appiah crossed the ethnic divide in an age when racism was virtually unquestioned. Although driven by her Christian faith, she acted not as a missionary or aid worker but as an interlocutor between her culture and that of the man she loved, and she did it without any thought of profit or self-aggrandisement. She is buried next to her husband and is survived by her son, Anthony, and her daughters Abena, Adwoa and Amma.

Peggy Appiah, MBE, writer and charity worker, was born on May 21, 1921. She died on February 11, 2006, aged 84.