2. Education in England

My cabin companions on the MV Accra to Liverpool that September in 1949 were my old music master, Phillip Gbeho, in whose eyes I never grew up until he died. He always repeated whenever we met and whatever the company that he had taught me when I was that high, demonstrating my short height by his hand, but he always added how clever I was. It was a bit embarrassing but I got used to it. On the boat were the Trade Unionist, Frank Wood, later to change his name to Wudu, as he said that the English had. I was called to the English Bar by Lincoln's Inn in July 1955. I had been a member since I was at St. Bees School in 1950. Why did my father, who was a member of Inner Temple send me to Lincoln's Inn? His argument was simple. Both his old Inn and Middle Temple had been severely bombed during the Second World War. Lincoln's and Gray's Inns were relatively intact. Of the two, he preferred Lincoln's Inn.

As my education in Oxford and my final year at Lincoln's Inn had been sponsored by the Gold Coast Government, I was under an obligation to work for the Government for five years. Why the period of five years was chosen for students' bonds was never clearly articulated. It certainly bore no relationship to the amount of money that Government had laid out on the student's behalf. Nor was it a sufficient deterrent for the man determined to leave Government service. Later, as Crown Counsel, I had to deal with a number of cases where bonded students had defaulted before the completion of their bonded service. One of my senior officers, Johnny Glover, in his dry-humoured way, put forward the theory that the period was determined on the basis that by the end of it the bondsman would have run into a groove which sheer inertia would prevent him from getting out of.

The bond penalty represented a substantial deterrence but it was not the important factor which kept me in public service for so long. An even greater deterrence was a promise I made to Sir Henley Coussey before I was given the Government scholarship that I would, whatever the temptation from private legal practice, work for Government when I qualified. That commitment had no time limitation. The thought of it always decided me in continuing with Government service whenever I was persuaded that it should be better for me to seek my fortune elsewhere. The promise came to be made in the following circumstances.

I first went to England in September 1949. That was when I went to St. Bees School in Cumberland to do my Higher School Certificate, the equivalent of the modern A Level examination. I was a private student sponsored by my father. My father, who had spent some time in his day as a member of St. Catherine Society at Oxford University, was determined that my University education should be at either Oxford or Cambridge. I knew my chances of getting into Oxford were slight because that University at the time required knowledge by the candidate of one ancient and one modern language as a minimum qualification for admission. I had the ancient language, for I had taken Latin for my School Certificate examinations at Achimota School. But English being the official language of the Gold Coast, I thought it would be unacceptable as my modern language by Oxford. Cambridge, on the other hand, did not insist on this two language requirement. So from St. Bees, I applied to Queen's College, Cambridge. In choosing Queen's, I was influenced, to a considerable extent, by the fact that my distant cousin, J.A.K. (Fifi) Quartey, whom I greatly admired, had only recently taken a first class degree in Chemistry at Queen's. I was called to an interview but failed to get in.

The Students' Office of the British Colonial Office which was responsible for placing students from the colonies at the time, found me a place in Exeter which was then a University College granting London University degrees. But when my father heard of it, he advised against my accepting the place. For him, my University was to be either Oxford or Cambridge or I would just have to read for the Bar at Lincoln's Inn and return to the Gold Coast. One could still qualify as a barrister without taking a degree at that time. As he was paying the bills at the time and as I did not in any case know much better, I followed this line laid down by him and duly declined the offer from Exeter. This did not go down at all well with the Students' Office. The extent of their displeasure can be gauged by their attitude towards me after this refusal.

After my failure to get into Queen's, Cambridge, Mr. Reekie, the Headmaster of St. Bees, who was himself an old Cantabridgian, continued his efforts to get me a place there. He told me that Downing College had assured him that they would take me if I was sponsored by the Colonial Office. I approached the Colonial Office. It refused to sponsor me on the ground that I had already got a place at Exeter.

After coming down to London from St. Bees in 1950, I stayed at No. 10 Philbeach Gardens in Earls Court. The cousins K.K. Korsah, now a gynaecological specialist, and K.R. (Roger), who after serving as a High Court Judge in Ghana is now a member of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, were already there. I started taking some of the Part 1 subjects of the Bar Exams and, to supplement the allowance which I got from home, working part-time in the Post Office, in a department which dealt with death records. My companion at the Post Office was Laryea from Accra, who many years later I met again in Ghana when he was on leave from his engineering job at Heathrow Airport. I managed to pass the papers in Roman Law, Constitutional Law and Legal History and Criminal Law. I found working and studying a rather difficult combination and, from that time onwards, gained a healthy respect for all those who managed to combine the two successfully.

I eventually got a place in Jesus College, Oxford, through efforts on my behalf by Mr. Peter Rendall. He was then Headmaster of Achimota School. It was he who had arranged for me to go to St. Bees in the first place. He must have felt some sort of responsibility towards me and when he had heard on his leave in England that I was finding it difficult to get into Oxford or Cambridge, had approached the Principal of Jesus. However, I did not know at the time.

How I got in was like a fairy tale. Some time in August of 1950 when I had given up all hope of going to any University, I found in my morning mail a long brown envelope. When I opened it, I found a blank application form from Jesus College with a slip carrying the compliments of the Tutor for Admissions of the College. I was puzzled. I had not asked for it and I did not know how it came to be sent. I was, however, filled with excitement tinged with the fear that even if I applied I would be disqualified on the ground that I did not possess the required minimum of an ancient and a modern language. I was then living in Philbeach Gardens, Earls Court in London with K.K. (none of his friends called him anything else but few knew what the K.K. stood for) and Roger Korsah. They advised me to apply, nevertheless, as there was nothing to lose. So I did. The application form stated that it ought to be accompanied by two testimonials. I had heard that Mr. Rendall was on leave in England but I did not know his whereabouts. I therefore wrote to Mr. Reekie and asked him to give me one of the testimonials. I also told him of my knowledge of Mr. Rendall in England and asked him, if he knew where Mr. Rendall was, to ask him to give me the second testimonial. Mr. Reekie wrote back to say that Jesus College already had my testimonials.

I was invited to an interview by Jesus College. By then I was in a slightly better position that when I went to the interview at Queen's, Cambridge. By the time of the Queen's interview, I did not have my Higher School Certificate. By the Jesus College interview, I had that certificate. I had taken one instead of the normal two years over it and I had done quite well. To my utter shame, I was late for my interview. I chose to go to Oxford by coach. The coach did not arrive in time. I dashed hot and flustered to the College to be welcomed by the Principal, Mr. J.T. Christie, who just dismissed my apologies with a wave of the hand. But the atmosphere was formidable; it seemed as if the whole array of Fellows had assembled to interview me. The tension that this sight instilled in me was broken by Mr. Christie's first question which was, “And how is Mr. Rendall?” I was so surprised by it that I must have started stuttering. I knew he was in England but I did not know where he was. It turned out that Mr. Rendall had been Mr. Christie's student in Rugby School. The only question at issue at the interview was whether I would want to read some other subject than Law, in which case I could come up that very October. But if I insisted on reading Law, then I would be put first on the list of those to read Law the next year. The Law Tutor that year was already preoccupied with duties as the Senior Proctor of the University and could not take on another student. I needed time to think about it. The College gave me a week.

In the event I decided to stick to reading Law. I needed financial support if I was to take up the place at Oxford. It was quite clear by this time that my father would not be able to pay for it. He had been ill for some time, and further sales or mortgages of his property, which was the way he had been financing my education in England, would not, in my view, now be sufficient. Time was necessary to organize other financial assistance.

I applied to the Gold Coast Government through the Colonial Office for a scholarship to cover both my studies at Oxford and at Lincoln's Inn, which I had already joined. The Colonial Office once more had the advantage over me. Its major weapon this time was that the Gold Coast Government had never before given a scholarship to any student to qualify as a barrister. The late John Kwesi Sagoe, whom I eventually joined at Jesus College, was then holding a scholarship for law but it was to enable him to qualify as a solicitor. The expectation was that, on his return to the Gold Coast, he would work in the Government Lands Department as its lawyer. Barristers, as the political history of the Gold Coast had shown, were a thorn in the flesh of the colonial administration. It was understandable, therefore, that no interest had been shown in a scheme to increase the breed. Besides, striking out on a new path is always much more difficult than following an already well-trodden path. On that estimation, my application, in the view of my Colonial Office friends, stood little chance of success. However, some time later, I was asked to come to the Colonial Office to see Sir Henley Coussey. Sir Henley, the distinguished lawyer who was one of the first Africans from the Gold Coast to be appointed to the High Court bench and who had been Chairman of the Constitutional Committee appointed by the British Government after the 1948 riots to look into a constitutional structure to suit the country at the time, was then the President of the West African Court of Appeal. But even more important, from my point of view, was the fact that he was also Chairman of the Scholarships Board in the Gold Coast. He was on a visit to London and he asked me to the offices of Mr. Walker and Miss Appleyard, the officers in charge of Gold Coast students, at the Colonial Office. I recall that Miss Appleyard was present in the room when I arrived. So was Mr. Amishadai Adu, later to distinguish himself as Secretary to Nkrumah's Cabinet, then Secretary-General to the East African Community and finally as Deputy Commonwealth Secretary General. But at the time he was the officer responsible for Africanisation of the Gold Coast Civil Service.

Mr. Adu was not directly involved in the interview between Sir Henley and myself. He was preoccupied with some other matter. Miss Appleyard produced my file to give Sir Henley a picture of me. It was a bulky file. I remember wondering how they had managed to compile such a record of me in less than two years. But it was also a somewhat disorderly file; for it started in the middle and run first to the end before coming to the beginning to continue its course. Miss Appleyard was explaining the intricacies of the file arrangement to Sir Henley, when she was briefly thanked and told that Sir Henley did not need to read the file because he knew me already.

I was not really interviewed by Sir Henley. I was given a brief lecture, after which he made me swear a personal oath. He told me that the Attorney General's Chambers in the Gold Coast was a last stronghold of the colonial administration in the country. It had seldom had African lawyers. Sir Leslie McCarthy and Justice Manyo Plange had been in it. But the British administration had always resisted lawyers from the Gold Coast joining it, and since Justice Manyo Plange left for Nigeria in the 1940s, the administration had been reluctant to give a permanent appointment there to an African. Mr. E.A.L. Bannerman, later to become Chief Justice of Ghana, had been given a temporary appointment, but was eventually posted to the judiciary. It was necessary, Sir Henley thought, that the country should have African lawyers in the Chambers. He, therefore, wanted to know from me if I would work in those Chambers when I qualified. My answer was a swift and unequivocal yes. There was the possibility that this would enable me to get the scholarship I needed for Oxford. Besides, I had some idea of the risks in private legal practice, as had been shown by my father's inability to keep his practice going on account of his ill-health. “No, no, my son” said Sir Henley, you should not answer so lightly. I would find that the temptation to chuck the Attorney General's Chambers for private practice was greater than I thought. He asked me to promise that, if given a scholarship, whatever the temptation, I would not abandon service in the Attorney General's Chambers for private practice. I gave that promise.

Sir Henley then told Mr. Adu that here was a boy who had on his own got a place in Oxford, which like Cambridge, the Colonial Office was always telling them how difficult it was to get colonial students into. Did Mr. Adu not think they should help me with a scholarship to take up my place there? Mr. Adu agreed.

So confident was the Colonial Office that my application would fail that some time after this interview I met Mr. Walker casually at our hostel in Hans Crescent. He asked me how the interview had gone and after telling him briefly what had transpired he said I should not place to much hope on what Sir Henley said. The Gold Coast Government, said Mr. Walker, had never given a scholarship for the Bar, and there is no reason why it should change this position.

I got the scholarship. Sir Henley had other supporters in the Gold Coast on this issue, notably Justice, later Sir, Samuel Okai Quashie Idun, my class-mate Johnny Quashie-Idun's father. I went up to Oxford in October 1951 to read Jurisprudence. I have often wondered whether under the present day stringent examination conditions for entry into Oxford I would have got there. I am sure that without the advocacy of Sir Henley and other friends I certainly would not. It was, therefore, the promise that I made to him, more than anything else, which kept me in the public services for as long as I stayed. In times of doubt and temptation to leave the service, for on the latter, Sir Henley was far clearer sighted than I was, I remembered that promise and decided that my obligation was to honour it.

But before I went up to Oxford, I stayed in Cambridge for about ten weeks. What led up to that gave me an interesting insight into the conduct of colleagues. I acquired a reputation as a student agitator while waiting for the decision of the Gold Coast Government on my application. This of course confirmed the doubts of the Colonial Office over me. No. 1 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, London, a few yards behind Harrods, was open as a Colonial Students' Hostel in 1950. For colonial students, this was a popular move. They had, for a very long time had problems in finding suitable accommodation at reasonable rents in London. Student hostels were a way of minimising this problem.

I moved from Philbeach Gardens with K.K. into Hans Crescent towards the end of that year. Roger had then gone to Hull University. K.K. and I shared a room in Hans Crescent throughout the time we were there together. I had occasion, many times, to be grateful to him. If for any reason my allowance did not come or was late, he took over the payment of the full rent for the room.

In 1951, all residents of Hans Crescent were given notice to quit as the rooms would be given to a fresh batch of students, some arriving in Britain for the first time. The resident students took the view that the authorities should open more hostels to ease the student housing problem and, as they had new students whom they must house, this was an opportunity for the authorities to do so. The residents, therefore, decided to ignore the notices and to stay on. I had been on the entertainment committee of the hostel. I do not know whether it was because of this but I suddenly found myself elected as the Secretary of the Committee in the hostel to organize and co-ordinate the student resistance to the demand that they quit.

My chairman was the late Adedapo Aderemi, the eldest son of the Oni of Ife, the spiritual head of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. We were quite contrasting characters. Ade, as he was called by his friends, was a much more mature student with considerable experience of radical student politics. I would not, in hindsight, describe him as a firebrand. But he certainly had leadership qualities. He was articulate, purposeful and confident, with a capacity for dispelling other people's doubts. I then, as now, often had doubts about the rightness of the proposed action. Ade had a wonderful sense of humour, his best stories being told in the broken English spoken in Nigeria. I remember walking up a street with him once when he saw a pair of pyjamas on display costing 100 pounds. That was a lot of money in those days. What! he exclaimed; do they mean to tell me that if I sleep in that I will never want to wake up? He was always smartly and expensively dressed, even when casually, turned out. This I found to be curiously inconsistent with his avowed claims to being a communist. I was happy to find to my surprise in October that he had been admitted to Lincoln College, just a few yards away from mine in Turl Street, also to read Jurisprudence. I was distressed to hear a few years after his return to Nigeria that he had died.

However, in the battle for Hans Crescent, he, assisted by me, led a losing battle right from the start. Even as the resident students were meeting as a body to elect us to lead their cause and the cause of the general body of colonial students in London, they were individually making their own private arrangements for alternative accommodation. As and when they found it, they left the hostel without bidding us farewell. Soon the Committee found itself beleaguered, fighting for residents who had left. The popular British press gave slanted notices of our motives in staying on. We were portrayed as a small group of selfish colonial students intent on keeping our privileged accommodation at the expense of more deserving new arrivals. The case we were trying to make, that it was the responsibility of the Colonial Office to ameliorate the accommodation problems of colonial students in London by opening more hostels scarcely received a mention. By July, Aderemi and I found ourselves amongst a handful of stragglers who were staying on. Our position had become untenable. We decided that it was time to pack up and leave.

From the Hans Crescent episode, I gained a cynical appreciation of the value of popular support. I also should have learnt a lesson about the power for perversion of the press. But I did not at that time. It was a mark of my naivete that I did not recognize at the time that my activities in connection with the Hans Crescent sit-in would be noted by the Colonial Office.

I went to stay in Cambridge at No. 56 Eltisley Avenue in a flat belonging to my cousin, Fifi Quartey, who was spending his summer holidays that year in Yugoslavia. There were old friends of mine, like Joe Reindorf, who was reading History at Caius. Like other Ghanaians who were doing extremely well in Cambridge at the time, Joe was expected to get a first and he had the brain for it. But his Tripos II did not come up to that expectation. I believe we were more sorry for this than Joe himself, who had always managed to give that easy-going impression of himself. He delighted my old friend and class-mate, Johnny Quashie-Idun, who came up to Selwyn College~[* ?? college added ]~ while I was staying in Cambridge by saying that in Cambridge one lived on credit and overdrafts. Johnny fell into the spirit of the adventure, and went around opening accounts and buying most of his initial requirements on credit. He did it to such an extent that once when he went to buy some tomatoes from the market, his sister, Frances, asked him whether he was going to do so on credit.

We had an amusing visit to Heffer's, the booksellers. Johnny, whose father was at Selwyn some twenty five odd years before him, thought his father had an account with Heffer's when he was up and he could make some savings by buying his books on that account. So off we went to Heffer's, where he asked whether Samuel Quashie-Idun had account with them. Just a minute, said the attendant, and went away to refer to the books. She turned up a few minutes later with a yes, he owes us twenty six pounds. Johnny signalled me to withdraw quietly. He could not pursue his object of buying into the account. But he mentioned the incident to his father, who did not even know that such an account was outstanding, Heffer's immediately got their money.

It is quite fantastic to think of the richness of talent from the Gold Coast which was at Oxford and Cambridge at the time. It should be interesting to write a serious study of these men and their various contributions to Ghana, Africa and the international world generally. Of the Oxford students, I will speak later when I come to deal with my Oxford days. Of those at Cambridge, Dr. Kwesi Kurankyi Taylor, perhaps the most brilliant law student of his time from the Gold Coast, was at the time sharing 56 Eltisley Avenue with Fifi Quartey and Chris Dade. The qualification to Kurankyi Taylor's supremacy is introduced because there was always a question whether Kuku Sekyi who went to Dublin was his equal or better. Kurankyi Taylor won every scholarship that he chose to compete for while he was at Manchester University. He also won the Barstow Scholarship at the Bar. Kuku Sekyi had the reputation of having a photographic memory which enabled him to recall whole textbooks after reading them once. We were all waiting to the crossing of swords between these two back in the Gold Coast. But Kurankyi Taylor, who went into politics, established a law practice in Kumasi dealing mainly with constitutional cases of the chieftaincy type, fell ill not very many years after his return to the Gold Coast and died relatively young. Kuku Sekyi, on the other hand spent long periods of time in the hospital, and was not able to stamp his personality on to the practice of law as a person like Joe Reindorf did.

Staying with Kurankyi Taylor and his wife was Kwaw-Swanzy, who had also been at Manchester University but at the time was doing an M. Litt in Cambridge. Kwaw read for the Bar, took over Kurankyi Taylor's practice when the latter fell ill and, in 1962, became Attorney General of Ghana, with whom I worked very closely. The other tenant of 56 Eltisley Avenue, Chris Dade read agriculture. After service with the Ghana Government, he went to the FAO. After his retirement, I had the privilege of serving with him as non-executive directors of UAC of Ghana Ltd., the largest commercial concern in Ghana which was a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch Unilever Group.

Joe Reindorf, after his History degree read for the Bar, and for years was one of the leading advocates at the Ghana Bar. Between 1979 and 1981, he was Minister of Justice and Attorney General in the Government of Dr. Hilla Limann. Johnny after Cambridge and the Bar went into private practice where he remained through his practising days, founding the prestigious law firm of Lynes Quashie-Idun in Accra.

Others in Cambridge at the time were equally interesting. Alex Kwapong, who got a first in Classics at King's College, became the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana in 1966 and held that office for quite along time. Later he became Vice-Rector of the United Nations University based in Tokyo. Fifi Quartey, who got a first at Queen's was for many years Professor of Chemistry at the University of Ghana, and later worked with the Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna. Kenneth Dadzie, also of Queen's, in the course of a most distinguished diplomatic career became a Deputy Secretary General to Dr. Kurt Waldheim at the United Nations, Ghana High Commissioner in London, and became the Secretary General of UNCTAD in Geneva. Albert Adomako of Downing College became a Governor of the Bank of Ghana, then a Vice President at the World Bank under Mac Namara. Patrick Anin of Selwyn later read law in London University, was called to the Bar and went into private practice in Accra, and then later in his home region of Brong-Ahafo. He was elevated to the Ghana Supreme Court bench under the Constitution of 1969. He also became a judge of the Court of Appeal in The Gambia, where he was based after the coup in Ghana at the end 1981, performing the duties of Chairman of the Law Reform Commission. Felix Amarquaye of Fitzwilliam College, whose study time I must have wasted as I spent quite some time with him while he was working for his exams, became a Psychiatrist Specialist with the Ministry of Health in Ghana.

I was most comfortable in their company and frankly regretted leaving them for Oxford in October 1951.