LONDON — Professor Geoff Palmer is a teacher and an expert on grains and cereals, a skills he acquired while working as a researcher with the British brewing industry.

But concerned about tolerance and good race relations in the United Kingdom, Professor Palmer, a Jamaican living in that country, turned his attention to penning ‘Mr White and the Ravens’, a book about prejudice and intolerance aimed mainly at young people, but which has a message for all.

“I have been in a race relations work ever since the middle ’60s. The thing that bothers me about race relations work at the moment is that we have a lot of reports, we have a lot of voluntary sector involvement and we have a lot of people involved, but somehow I just don’t feel we are getting the message across to the people who have the power to change things,” he told the Jamaica Information Service.

Professor Palmer says he had always wanted to write something to get his point across and get it into the main- stream. It was only after a stay in hospital and while recuperating from cancer treatment that he actually started writing ‘Mr White and the Ravens’, he added.

The book tells the story of Mr White who is a bigot and a product of prejudiced society, who has a St Paul like conversion.

“From my bedroom I could see the birds in the garden, the way they competed with each other, the way they behaved and the whole concept came to me. And I thought I could use this in a symbolic way to bring across prejudices, injustices, and ignorance. I made the first draft within a week and I kept on working on it bit by bit over a period of about 16 months,” he pointed out.

Professor Palmer has received commendation for ‘Mr White and the Ravens’ from a wide cross section of political, social and religious leaders in the UK and internationally, including the Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Professor Palmer who arrived in the UK as a teenager in 1955, is now a research professor of grain science and technology. He credits hard work and luck for his achievements.

“When I left university in 1964, there wasn’t much to do in London. I went to the labour exchange to look for a job and the guy said, what can you do? I said I don’t know but I have got a degree. He turned to his friend and said this guy says he’s got a degree, I think he’s got a temperature. Because a black person with a degree in Islington was unheard of at the time,” he said.

Professor Palmer now chuckles at the memory, but for six months he peeled potatoes in a restaurant until he applied for a PhD programme in Edinburgh with Professor Anna McLeod, to do research on barley.

“The PhD was three years but I finished it in two and half years, and she kept me on to take up a post doctoral fellowship in Edinburgh,” he noted.

When he finished his fellowship, Professor Palmer began working with the Brewing Research Foundation in Surrey, where research for the entire British brewing industry was done. It was there that he developed the Abrasion Process, which changed how beer is made in many parts of the world.

“One of the things I am known for worldwide, is the process called abrasion. I developed the method to make the grain process faster when you are making malt. In 1968 the process took about eight days, but the abrasion process allowed the grain to be produced in about six days,” he says.

He pointed out that the process was patented in 1969 by the British brewing industry and by 1971, three quarters of the beers were made with it in the UK.

Professor Palmer said while he made no money or received any promotion for this significant development, once the research was written, he gained the respect, regard and the foothold he needed for the industry.

Between 1968 and 1972 Professor Palmer established himself as a leading researcher and had become very well known. He left the Research Foundation in 1977 and returned to Edinburgh and academia.

“Professor McLeod was retiring and I was asked to return as a lecturer. This was very useful for me as it gave me an opportunity to teach,” he said.

His teaching career took him around the world, and in 1978 after meeting the head of Coors Brewery, he received a $100,000 grant to do research on barley for Coors. Because of all the research he had done he was awarded a DSC degree in 1984.

“It’s a very rare degree based on your research and it is judged by four universities other than your own. You have to have a collection of scientific papers,” the professor Palmer noted.

In 1989 his first book on cereals called ‘Cereal Science and Technology’ was published. It has become a standard textbook for the industry and university.

Professor Palmer was also a visiting professor at the University of Kyoto in Japan and taught in Kenya. And he has worked with the brewing industry in Nigeria, helping the sector to use locally grown grain.

Recounting his younger days, he said his interest was playing cricket and even his admission to grammar school was based on his cricketing ability.

“I went to grammar school playing football and cricket. I was good at Scripture but not too good at lots of the other subjects because I did not have a good background. They tested me and said that my education was subnormal,” the Professor says.

He left school in 1957 and unable to get a job, he spent a lot of time in the library. It was there he saw an advertisement for a lab technician at the University of London and applied for it.

Professor Garth Chapman who interviewed him for the job encouraged him to go to university. “I went to night school and finished my ‘O’ Levels and also got two ‘A’ Levels. I applied to many universities but none would take me because I was an immigrant. They had no facilities for taking an immigrant into British universities in 1961.”

However, with the assistance of Professor Chapman, he was able to secure a place at the University of Leicester.