Born in 1907, Robert Wellesley Cole’s Kossoh Town Boy memoir of childhood in 1910s Freetown, Sierra Leone, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1960. It became a school book and was reprinted and available in both hard and soft covers. Copies are available in 2020 at £9 to £15. Cole migrated to England, qualified in medicine, practised as a general doctor in Newcastle, and qualified as a surgeon. He had retained many documents and photographs, and having his autobiography rejected by London publishers, arranged for what he termed his ‘documented autobiography’ to be printed by Cambridge University Press. His An Innocent in Britain issued in 1988 is an often candid memoir, with countless illustrations. In February 2020 one copy is available on line at £15.

Dr Wellesley Cole died in 1995.

Index to Building Your Library

 

#  1         Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen. Tswana 1895

#  2         Nancy Cunard

#  3         Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson

#  4         Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

#  5         Brew family of Ghana and London

#  6         Booker T Washington; Chief Alfred Sam

#  7         Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy and An Innocent in Britain

#  8         Ira Aldridge

#  9         Paul Robeson, Negro, 1927

# 10       The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol 1

# 11       Jomo Kenyatta

# 12       Langston Hughes The Big Sea (1940) and Rampersad’s biography 1986, 1988

# 13       Percy Chen, China Called Me

# 14       Stimela Jingoes (Lesotho) recalled France in 1917; Herbert Julian Black Eagle memoir of a Trinidad aeroplane fanatic trained in 1910s England

# 15       Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-eight Years a Slave (Bournemouth 1909)

# 16       Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion (1966).