Remembering Peter Aspinall

1. Beginnings

I first met Peter in the early 2000s when I was a PhD student at the University of Bristol. I was researching the racial classifications of the UK Census and came across his name on the list of advisors shaping the ethnicity category. I emailed him, asking if I might have half an hour of his time. ‘Of course’, he replied. ‘Why don’t you come and visit me?’

Memory is fickle. I cannot recall the exact date or location of that meeting, but I remember Peter surrounded by towering piles of books and papers, so likely it was at his office at the University of Kent. More vividly, I remember that, four hours later, I was still there, bombarding him with questions, which he answered willingly and cheerfully. The next day, he sent more replies, thoughts, and advice. Over the following years, he would go on to provide mentorship, collaboration, and, eventually, a two-decade-long friendship. Together, we undertook research that laid the foundation for the BBC series Mixed Britannia and, ultimately, The Mixed Museum (www.mixedmuseum.org.uk accessed on 30 August 2025), which we co-founded with Bradley Lincoln of the social enterprise: Mix-d.

This generosity of time and wisdom was characteristic of Peter. He gave freely of his expertise, particularly to students and early-career scholars. No query was too small, no request too insignificant. When I shared news of his death in January 2023 at The Mixed Museum, the response was overwhelming. Messages arrived from across the world, from academics, colleagues, students, and others, each offering their own memories but always echoing the same sentiments: an incredible intellect, a generous soul, a kind man.

2. Shared Interests

Peter and I never worked in the same institution. This meant that months, sometimes years, would pass between our in-person meetings. However, we corresponded extensively. Our initial shared interest lay in the official recognition of mixedness in the 2001 Census, when ‘Mixed’ was introduced as an ethnic category, a process Peter had advised the Office for National Statistics on. We were fascinated by how the media framed mixedness as a ‘new’ social phenomenon embodied, as they saw it, by young celebrities like Lewis Hamilton or Leona Lewis.

It was interesting to us how those social discussions often gave the impression that Britain’s mixed-race population had emerged overnight. We knew from our respective academic research that Britain’s history of racial mixing stretched back centuries. We were both familiar with early colonial framings of mixedness and how this would later inform the nineteenth century ‘race science’ that positioned those of mixed race as liminal and marginal people possessing either ‘hybrid degeneration’ or ‘hybrid vigour’. We were also aware of the moral panic of the early twentieth century that labelled interracial couples and their children as a ‘problem’ requiring intervention. On this, our thinking was deeply shaped by Paul B. Rich’s exploration of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children (Rich, 1984, 1986), which highlighted how officialdom conceptualised—and condemned—ideas of mixedness in the interwar period. We saw the mid-twentieth century as a crucial period in shaping the narratives around mixedness, narratives that persist into the present.

Having also read Half-Caste (Dover 1937)—the Anglo-Indian scholar Cedric Dover’s polemic against these representations—we were also aware of the contrasting complexity and insight provided by insider voices, that is, people who had lived experiences of mixedness rather than the ‘outsiders’ who commented on them. Reading Professor Lucy Bland’s research (Bland 2005, 2007), we became even more aware just how much mixed-race families were written about during the interwar period but rarely heard from directly. Their voices continued to be absent in many contemporary understandings of the period. This realisation and the desire to build better knowledge of historical racial mixing and mixedness became the foundation of the work that Peter and I undertook together.

3. Creating the Mixed Museum

In 2007, we successfully applied for British Academy funding to explore how mixedness had been understood in Britain, both in official records and in first-person accounts. The resulting research1 attracted the attention of the BBC and would go on to form the foundations of Mixed Britannia, the BBC2 series fronted by George Alagiah. Broadcast in 2011, it was critically acclaimed and widely watched. Yet Peter and I were acutely aware of how ephemeral public attention could be. Mixed Britannia was available on BBC iPlayer for only a short time and, while years later it found a home on YouTube, the programme offered just an overview. The more detailed accounts and the stories we had uncovered in archives remained inaccessible to most people.

This led to our second major project. In 2012, we collaborated with Bradley Lincoln of the third sector organisation Mix-d to launch The Mix-d Museum, an interactive digital archive preserving the histories of Britain’s mixed-race communities. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council,2 the project was particularly successful among young people, who engaged deeply with its material and accessible digital format. By 2019 when the project became The Mixed Museum—an independent heritage organisation—Peter had retired from Kent and was experiencing health issues. Nevertheless, he remained an essential team member, supporting exhibition research and the museum’s broader development.

4. Evolving Projects

Peter and I worked together on a range of projects relating to our initial British Academy research, including an article on Anglo-Chinese families for a wonderfully creative edition of The Asian American Literary Review (Aspinall and Caballero 2013) and editing a Special Issue on mixedness and representation for Genealogy (Aspinall and Caballero 2021). We also finally published the book based on the original research findings—Mixed Race Britain in the Twentieth Century (Caballero and Aspinall, 2018). After George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, we worked with the publisher Palgrave Macmillan to make the digital version of the publication free of charge in perpetuity. Years later, we would both connect with Professor Lucy Bland, whose work on the ‘brown babies’ of WW2 has also greatly helped shape The Mixed Museum. Just before Peter died, the three of us had embarked on a project that built on our respective scholarship into mixedness in the interwar period.3 Lucy and I share an article from this project in this Special Issue, dedicated to Peter, who initially suggested mapping the connections between key public figures of the ‘moral condemnation’ era.

5. A Quiet Intellect

Across all these projects, I remained in awe of Peter’s scholarship. His knowledge was vast, his reach extraordinary. His expertise was sought at the highest levels, from advising the Office for National Statistics on Census classifications to contributing to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and Ireland’s Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants. His work extended into health and social care, shaping policies in Scotland and informing research at the London Health Observatory. But more than anything, Peter was the authority on official data relating to ethnicity and mixedness. So many people—academics, journalists, policymakers—relied on him. ‘Nobody interprets Census data like Peter,’ they would say.

Peter’s meticulous approach was shaped by a career that bridged academia, public health, and government advisory work. Beginning in regional and district health authorities, he later became a leading researcher at the South East Institute of Public Health, which relocated to the University of Kent in 2000. There, he remained for two decades, retiring as an Emeritus Reader in Population Health. He was a powerhouse of scholarship, working alone and collaboratively to produce over 150 academic publications, many of which explored a wide range of topics around racial mixing, from terminology to representation (some of his longstanding co-authors on mixedness have contributed to this collection, including Miri Song and Zarine Rocha). His willingness to support colleagues and students in making their work public was unparalleled. Rarely, I think, did he refuse an editor’s request to provide feedback on a journal article, or a student’s request to take part in interviews for their dissertation project, whether undergraduate or PhD. During his time in hospital over the autumn before he died, he was still undertaking reviews from his bed.

He was also a historian at heart. His passion for filling in archival gaps was evident in so much of his work, from tracing the evolution of the term ‘half-caste’ (Aspinall 2013) to correcting long-held misconceptions about demographic trends. During his seven-year tenure as a trustee at People in Harmony (PIH), Britain’s longest-standing charity supporting mixed-race families, he meticulously pieced together the organisation’s history for its 40th-anniversary booklet.

Peter had a particular interest in the life histories of twentieth-century social scientists who had shaped, for better or worse, Britain’s understanding of racial mixing. It was a great source of disappointment to him that he never managed to find out what became of social scientist Muriel Fletcher after she was reportedly driven out of Liverpool in the wake of her notorious and inflammatory report from 1930 on racially mixed dockside families.4 We were both fascinated by Sydney Collins—the Black Jamaican sociologist who so sensitively and gently reported on the lives of interracial Black, Arab, and Chinese families in postwar South Shields. I remember Peter’s excitement when he thought he had found that Collins was still alive and living in a nursing home in the US, though he was unable to verify this.

Another topic that attracted his attention, though as a result of frustration rather than interest, was the widely repeated (but incorrect) claim that appeared after the introduction of the ‘Mixed’ category: that this population was the UK’s fastest-growing ethnic group. Journalists, politicians, and even academics clung to the phrase long after Peter had debunked it. ‘One of the fastest-growing,’ he would correct, again and again. When I said that I thought people were using it because it made ‘good copy’ for reports and proposals, he was exasperated that people would deliberately repeat such an error. But he never scolded those who did so; he just kept patiently explaining, one misquote at a time (Caballero and Aspinall 2018; Aspinall 2010).

6. Beyond the Academic

That patience had limits, though. For all his generosity, Peter could be stubborn! When we were writing Mixed Race Britain in the Twentieth Century, we disagreed over a lengthy quotation he wanted to include. ‘It’s way too long,’ I argued. I wanted to trim it down. Peter refused. ‘It shows the full perspective,’ he argued back. It was one of the few times during our collaborative writing process that we differed. In the end, the lengthy quote was included and, looking back at it now, he was right. But at the time, I ended up happy to acquiesce even if I did not overly agree as it was so rare that Peter insisted on his way in our collaborative work. Others, I have since learned, saw the stubborn side of Peter far more often. At PIH, for example, a dispute over a small issue led, in part, to him walking away from his trustee position in 2013, though relationships with the organisation remained good.

Few stories of his stubbornness were known to me directly; they have been told to me by others in conversations, mostly sparked by writing this piece. Peter was a profoundly private man. Despite the hours of conversation we had over the years, I knew very little about his personal life other than details of the health issues he had faced, his love of buying books (he made a weekly trip to Tunbridge Wells to do so), and his enjoyment of cycling abroad solo. I dedicated our book to my parents, while Peter’s dedication was to a name I had never heard him mention before. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, just a friend,’ he said. I never knew any more.

After he left the University of Kent and was experiencing some health issues, I worried after receiving no replies to emails and phone calls. It was only then that I realised I had no way of contacting a next of kin if something was seriously wrong. When he recovered, I asked him if there was anyone I could reach out to if needed. ‘Oh, my sister,’ he said casually. All those years and I never knew he had a sister! He put us in touch and, through Pat, I came to learn more about him—not just as a scholar, but as a brother, a son, and, as she revealed with amusement, a man quite capable of holding grudges. Before he died, he reportedly told her, in no uncertain terms, that no one from his village was to attend his funeral! The reason seemed to be that he had never warmed to the place, and in typical Peter fashion, once a line was made, he was determined it would stay drawn (though in the end, as with many of Peter’s rules, there was a little room for quiet exception).

Peter was renowned as a quiet speaker. He disliked presenting as everyone always harangued him to speak up. Pat told me that during one talk, a colleague resorted to repeatedly dropping a shoe on the floor to make Peter look up. It did not work. Afterwards, Peter said he thought the presentation had gone well, though he had been very distracted by an unexplained banging noise.

At conferences, he was often the quietest in the room, despite often knowing the most. During my time at London South Bank University, Professor Ros Edwards and I, with a series of academic colleagues and partner organisations, ran a series of events and seminars that took place over several years focused on ‘racial mixing and mixedness’.5 Peter came to most of these, including I recall presenting on some of his work (again with the cries from the audience to speak up!). His analysis of what was said by the speakers was incredibly insightful, and his views were sought out by those present in the coffee breaks where his voice could be heard. After the talks, a raucous group of us—mainly scholars and grassroots leaders of mixed racial heritage groups—would gather in pubs or cafés, debating ideas, laughing loudly. And there would be Peter, a quiet, middle-aged white man, sitting happily in the centre of the din. There was such incredible affection and admiration for him from this group. To an outsider, he might have seemed out of place. But to us, he belonged.

My fondest memories of Peter, though, are from the very smallest of the gatherings I had with him: the three founders of The Mixed Museum—Peter, Bradley, and me—at our usual meeting spot, the Old Thameside Inn in Southwark. Always the same meal: fish and chips, orange juice for Bradley, a Guinness or two for me and Peter. We would make grand plans for the museum, discuss the state of the world, and, most of all, laugh. Bradley and I fancied ourselves funny, but Peter was the one who always landed the final, devastatingly sharp punchline, delivered with a giggle and an innocent look. And then, he would be off, back to Kent, ready to tackle another stack of statistical queries with his characteristic kindness, generosity, and rigour.

7. Endings

It is of great sadness to me that I do not have a single photograph of me and Peter together. Back then, taking photographs at meet-ups with colleagues was not as ubiquitous as it is now that smartphones are to hand, even as the working relationship slides into friendship. If you have these relationships, I gently remind you: take photos.

They say the quietest people have the loudest minds. Peter was such a person. His mind, his work, his impact reverberated across disciplines, across borders, across generations. Thank you, Peter, for all you gave. You continue to be incredibly, deeply missed.