The term at Fourah Bay College was to begin in October 1953 so we had a little time to re-acclimatize, which we spent visiting relations. I squeezed in a small class for second year repeaters, one of whom I had casually met in the city and who had asked for help. My enterprise agreeably surprised Mr Grant, then head of the university department and later Principal, but it gave me a little taste of what I was to be engaged in for practically the rest of my working life.

Fourah Bay, when I left for Oxford was already beginning to grow but it had been given a transfusion by the 1950 Fourah Bay College Act by which, for the first time in its more than a century's existence, the Government had taken over responsibility for the financing of the institution from the Church Missionary Society which nobly, and at great sacrifice by individuals, had struggled to keep it alive. The tens of students in the 1940s had grown into hundreds and the college was now set for the thousands which make up the University of Sierra Leone as it later became.