The Long Garden Master: Charles Lynn, Agricultural Officer in the Gold Coast

In 1968, while redecorating my grandmother's flat, I came across an old battered brown suitcase containing the letters my father had written to her from the Gold Coast. I had lived in Tamale as a three year old child, and our closest family friends were from that period of my father's life. So I grew up with the stories and affection for Tamale - my first home - and a place called Zuarungu. In later life I encouraged my father to write his memoirs, reminding him of half remembered stories and encouraging him to dig deep into his memory. We discussed shaping these memoirs into book form, but he died in 1985 leaving me to finish the task. My somewhat unorthodox idea was to make it an edited autobiography of his early life, by integrating interesting letters into the text, and further illuminate it with detailed footnotes added by myself. I knew many of the people mentioned in the book, and had inherited many personal letters. The more I read their official letters and papers, along with the critiques of their work by academics, the more intrigued I became. Too often I could not see their all important personalities, or those times reflected in the text. Having known the people and read the letters I knew it was an interesting story. Then there were the small photographs of people and long bygone days, some three hundred of my father's, along with those from two other sources, bringing the total to nearly seven hundred. I digitalised them, adding captions. With the help of Picassa I was able to enlarge faces individually from group photographs, recognising those people I had not met! The agricultural survey written by Charles Lynn in 1937, Agriculture in North Mamprussi, is full of details, but how it came to be written and the way of life at that time is not recorded. It needs to be. After my parents' marriage in 1937 my mother too wrote letters home to my grandmother, and these also deserve a place in the book. So our family book The Long Garden Master came to be written. My father Charles Lynn was born in 1908. As a young child he spent many hours on his grandfather's farm in Lincolnshire, where happy pictures show him sitting on a large horse pulling a plough. Sadly the First World War brought this to an end, when his father and grandfather died, but this love and passion for farming and farmers remained all his life. He spent three years at Wye Agricultural College, followed by a year at St John's College, Cambridge, and finally a year at the newly opened Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, Trinidad. At the age of twenty-one, in December 1929, he joined the Colonial Service and was sent to the Gold Coast as an Agricultural Supervisor. In March 1930 he travelled north to Tamale Research Station. It is from here he began writing his frequent and interesting letters home to his widowed mother, a health visitor for the London County Council. As a farmer's daughter she was interested in farming and the life of her son Charles. In the early days he discusses the negative attitude of the Agricultural Department, and his struggle to build his career amid the social and political change of the 1930s. The Agricultural Department had a low profile in the Gold Coast, was centred on Accra and focused on cocoa. The Agricultural and Veterinary Departments were tackling the scourge of rinderpest and locusts, newly arrived problems from the 1890s onwards. Roving agriculturalists came north to view specific problems at the request of the Provincial Administration, and then reported back to Accra. Apart from those at Tamale Research Station none lived permanently in any part of the Northern Territories in 1930. In 1935 the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Plymouth, paying the area a visit, was amazed to learn that there were only two Agricultural Officers north of Kumasi. The reason for this underdevelopment lay in the lack of finance, hence the introduction of the hated Poll Tax. The two Ashanti Wars at the end of the 19th century were costly affairs and that area needed to be consolidated, with its better educated and more socially and politically aware Africans. …