The British Empire Library


A Passage from India: Reminiscences

by Richard Wollocombe


Courtesy of OSPA


Here is a volume of personal reminiscences with a difference. True, it was conceived, as has been the nature of a number of comparable memoirs, as simply a record for the family, of days that have passed - and never will again be; and it is at that leisurely, discursive and often undiscriminating level that the gentle story continues. But what sets it apart is not so much the narrative contents as their physical context. For what we have, all for under 15 pounds, is 400 well-printed pages, good paper and really generously bound, and with adust-jacket.. and, to boot, spoof press comments from such 'Thunderers' manques as Home and Colonial, the Bath Echo and The Oxford Examiner, the last roundly endorsing the author's vigorous attempt to play down anything that might hint at scholarship - 'an effort that he may not have found particularly demanding'.

But, more seriously, what do we find between these handsome covers? Unlike the reviewers' quoted comments, the author really is who he says he is, and some may remember Richard Wollocombe as an Assistant District Officer in Northern Nigeria (principally in Sokoto and Zaria) between 1954 and 1960 - or, in Oxford, Lagos and Kaduna, as a brilliant cricketer and a notable hockey player. It is this century of pages that constitutes the essence of these memoirs for those interested in imperial history. How commendably determined Wollocombe is not to overlook the full names of this Resident ('a man on whom authority sat easily and with charm') or of that District Officer ('one whose example I would do well to emulate') and this and that fellow ADO. ('relaxed and sure of himself or 'rathere an intense young man'), and of all those other officers, their wives and their pets, whom he encountered in his years in the North ('They're gentlemen up there'. Sir John Macpherson had reassured young Wollocombe on his arrival in Lagos, leaving open just which 'they' he had in mind). Wollocombe is not the only one among ex-Nigerians to have revisited Lagos in the 1980s and to have recalled, wistfully if not nostalgically, our earlier, maybe easier (for all the lack of minor luxury as constituting the basic essentials of life), and certainly tension-freer Nigerian days.

British Empire Book
Author
Richard Wollocombe
Published
1988
Pages
393
Publisher
The author
ISBN
0951343106
Availability
Abebooks
Amazon


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