Sir Geoff Palmer, who has died aged 85, was a son of the Windrush generation who became a grain scientist of global renown and, in his later life, an equally distinguished campaigner for racial equality and historical awareness.
Most of his career was spent in Scotland, where he arrived in 1964 as a research student, when even renting a room was not easy. “As I walked up the path I’d see the curtain move and by the time I got to the door, I was told the room had been taken.”
Surrounded in Edinburgh by street names and statues which had, from his perspective, unsavoury connotations, Palmer made it a mission to raise awareness of Scotland’s links with the slave trade. He believed these had been downplayed, although the wealth of many Scottish dynasties was founded on slavery and “about 60% of the surnames in the Jamaica telephone directory are Scottish”.
He went on to become Scotland’s first black professor in 1989 and did much to make Heriot-Watt University an internationally recognised research centre for brewing and distilling. In 2021, he became the university’s chancellor. The many accolades he received included, last year, admission to the Order of the Thistle, Scotland’s highest order of chivalry.
Palmer’s crusade to force historical reassessment came to wider attention during the Black Lives Matter campaign, through his focus on Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, who, as a minister in William Pitt’s administration, was known as the “uncrowned King of Scotland” and whose towering monument is the centrepiece of St Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh.
Palmer maintained that Dundas had been responsible for delaying the abolition of slavery by 15 years during which a further half million slaves were transported from Africa to the Caribbean. Under the scrutiny engendered by Black Lives Matter, the Melville monument became the subject of intense controversy.
However, Palmer did not support removing or toppling monuments. He said: “My view is that if you remove the evidence, you remove the deed. Therefore, slavery-related objects such as statues and buildings should carry plaques which tell the truth of links with slavery”. This was the solution eventually arrived at in the case of the Melville monument.
Palmer arrived in London a month before his 15th birthday, which proved a detail of critical significance. His father, Aubrey, had deserted the family in Jamaica and his mother, Ivy, came to London aboard the Mauretania in 1948, leaving Geoff behind to be looked after by aunts until her earnings as a seamstress could bring him to England.
She had arranged a job for him but, as they left for work, a man stopped them to ask how old Geoff was. It was, he recalled, a life-changing intervention. The fact he had not reached 15 meant he had to go to school. Initially, he was branded “educationally sub-normal”.
“On a test they gave me, one of the questions, I can remember it clearly, was: ‘What is Big Ben?’ And I must have written, ‘It’s a big guy’.”
Shelburne secondary modern in Highbury took him in and his cricketing ability meant he was soon playing for London Schools. This led to an offer from Highbury grammar, where he gained an A-level in biology. He found work as a lab assistant and, after adding to his qualifications, secured a place at Leicester University, where he graduated with honours in botany.
Palmer returned to London but the only work the Labour Exchange would offer him was peeling potatoes in a restaurant. Set on an academic career, he saw an advert from Heriot-Watt, then a college of Edinburgh University, offering a PhD opportunity and was interviewed by Dr Anna Macleod, the world’s first female professor of brewing and biochemistry.
“After about 10 minutes, she said: ‘I’m going to take you’. She gave me a dustbin full of barley. I said: “What am I going to do with that?’. She said: “Get on with it. That’s your research material’.” This set Palmer on a course that was to make him a celebrated figure in the evolution of brewing and distilling.
“I then went and read up as much as I could about barley and malt”, he said. “Those references are still in my head because I went to the library at the Royal Botanic Garden, next to where I lived in Edinburgh, and tracked their barley research, right back to the 1800s”. By 1967, he had gained his PhD, for research that proved groundbreaking.
It involved the science and technology of changing germinated barley into malt and produced results which were reported in the scientific journal Nature. The barley abrasion process that Palmer identified accelerated the malting cycle and became of great value to big brewers and whisky companies.
He became senior scientist at the Brewing Research Foundation in Surrey before returning in 1977 to Heriot-Watt where, among his many achievements, he secured £1m from the Scotch Whisky Association to help establish the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling in 1989.
His expertise was in demand from many countries and businesses. One notable legacy was in Africa, resulting from a ban on the importation of European malt and barley by the Nigerian government in the 1980s. Palmer advised on the uses of local grain, an innovation which spread across the continent to the benefit of many small farmers.
While increasingly involved in working for equal opportunities, Palmer continued to teach at Heriot-Watt University until his retirement in 2005 and, in 2014, he was knighted for services to human rights, science and charity. He worked closely with his friend Benjamin Zephaniah to promote opportunities in STEM subjects for disadvantaged communities.
Throughout his career, Palmer experienced and overcame both overt and covert racism while forming strong views on how the only long-term answers lay in education, which must include teaching about Britain’s colonial past and its impacts on the history that followed. Spreading that knowledge became his chief preoccupation.
A courteous, humorous and charismatic man, Palmer relied on reasoned argument and careful research to communicate powerful messages. He published Mr White and the Ravens, a novel about race relations, in 2001 and The Enlightenment Abolished: Citizens of Britishness, a memoir and collection of articles, followed in 2007.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Wood, an educational psychologist, whom he married in 1969, their son, Ralph, and daughters, Susie and Catherine.
