Still None The Wiser

About the Book

‘Still None the Wiser’ is the final instalment of a memoir sub-titled ‘A Mid-Century Passage, 1932 – 1967.’  Part travel, part biographical memoir, part history.  It is as much a social and political record of the closing period of colonial West Africa as an account of the quirks and foibles of the British (and other) expatriates at the end of Empire.  In 1954 the author aged 22, thwarted in love in London, joined an often eccentric group of expatriates who ran the oldest colonial Bank in West Africa.  In Ghana and in Nigeria he experienced the passing of an era.  Eric Robson the TV presenter wrote of ‘None the Wiser’ and its sequel “… set against an historical background of Britain at war and mislaying an Empire (he) gives us a fascinating glimpse of a lost world.” This final part of that memoir ends as Harold MacMillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ blow the white man out of Africa.

The setting is a long-gone Africa which at its passing was known to few.  In earlier centuries of European contact the West African ‘Coast’ became ‘The White Man’s Grave,’ when the author arrived it had become ‘The White Man’s Headache.’

As the author rightly says, this book is not for the faint-hearted or the nervously disposed.  It is probably unsuitable for vegetarians and ‘political correctness’ remained an unknown concept when many of the incidents he describes occurred.  It took many years in the writing and perusing of old notes and diaries, names had to be changed not so much to protect the innocent (who as always are few in number) as much as to avoid offending the survivors among that fast dwindling band of those who were once known as ‘Old Coasters.’  It perhaps describes a more honest world than we live in today. 

About the Author

Paul Adamson was born in Cheshire in 1932, the youngest child of a prospering English middle-class family.  Until September 1939 he had a conventional upbringing when after moving to London the outbreak of war blew the family apart as effectively as one of Hitler’s bombs.  Evacuation, a series of sometimes traumatic boarding schools, growing up during the wartime American ‘occupation,’ rationing, air-raids, D-Day and final victory.  All this and more were recalled in the first volume of his two part memoir ‘None the Wiser’ (first published in 2004, Hayloft Publishing Ltd. UK) which culminated in 1952 on the author’s return to England following two year’s National Service with the RAF in the Far East during the Malayan Emergency.

            His second volume ‘Still None the Wiser’ takes up the story when in 1954 as a young man of 22 he went off to seek his (modest) fortune with a colonial bank on the Gold Coast in West Africa.  He remained in Africa for most of the next thirteen years.  He lived in both the major cities of Accra and Lagos and also in remote up-country stations until finally leaving Nigeria in early 1967 on the outbreak of the Biafran War: by then married and with two small children.  In 1968 after briefly emigrating to Canada the author returned to Britain.  From 1969 until the present time he has lived happily with his wife in the English Lake District where for 22 years until he retired he worked for The Outward Bound Trust, a charitable organisation dedicated to bump-starting the minds and bodies of young people throughout the world.