Bradley, Once a District Officer (Northern Rhodesia, Falkland Islands, Gold Coast)

Kenneth Bradley, Once a District Officer. London: Macmillan, 1966.

Hard cover, 210 pages, frontispiece, three maps.

Lacks dustwrapper, covers lightly rubbed, slightest foxing on the endpapers. Very good condition.

This is the author's personal account of his twenty-two years of work in the Colonial Service, chiefly in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and the beginnings of the Commonwealth, the Falklands.

Sir Kenneth Granville Bradley (1904 to 1977) was educated at Wellington and University College, Oxford. He entered the Colonial Service in 1925 and was posted to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). He served as district officer in the bush and in the Secretariat at Lusaka. During the early years of World War II he was information officer in Lusaka when he was offered the post of colonial and financial secretary in the Falkland Islands. He undertook one trip with the Fitzroy to the Antarctic. In November 1945 he left Stanley (Falklands) for the Gold Coast (Ghana) to become under-secretary as that colony entered a troubled period of strikes in the run-up to independence. In 1948 he returned to London to edit a new journal for the Colonial Service called Corona. In 1953 he became director of the Commonwealth Institute and supervised the building of the new institute in Holland Park which was opened in 1962. He retired in 1969, but remained a trustee until l971. He was awarded the CMG in 1946 and created a Knight Bachelor in 1963.
Bradley wrote a number of books on Africa and the Commonwealth, including Native courts and authorities in Northern Rhodesia (1942), and The Story of Northern Rhodesia (1943). His Diary of a District Officer was the most successful of his writings.