I had no idea what the West African city of Accra would look like, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the modern, skyscraper buildings that suddenly leaped into view when the pilot banked into a turn and lined the aircraft up for the final approach. I got my first real impression of Africa when I stepped from the air-conditioned plane on to the top step of the passenger ramp. It was like stepping into the boilerhouse of some steamy Chinese laundry – hot and humid and not a breath of wind to cool things down! Halfway down the passenger stairs I was already sweating and shrugging my jacket off as perspiration trickled down my face. I walked the short distance to the terminal building, removing my tie and fumbling to loosen the buttons of my shirt. The vest I had put on that morning was already clinging to me like a wet rag.
I had been a little concerned that I might miss George McFall at the airport, as neither of us knew what the other looked like. My fears turned out to be groundless. Most of the passengers aboard my plane were flying on to Lagos, Nigeria and there were only about a dozen of us disembarking at Accra. As we straggled across the tarmac towards the small, whitewashed terminal building, I noticed a man in the outside waiting enclosure studying the arrivals, as if he wasn’t quite sure who he was looking for. As everyone else seemed to be waving and smiling at someone, I guessed the inquisitive-looking guy must be looking out for me. We smiled tentatively at one another and he stretched his hand towards me as I approached.
‘James Crosbie?’
‘That’s me.’ I smiled and extended my arm, looking him over as we exchanged handshakes. George McFall was slightly taller than me, but his shoulders slumped a little, making him look shorter. Wearing off-white trousers and a white, sweat-wilted shirt, he looked to be in his early forties. Thinning fair hair emphasised his sun-reddened face and his eyes looked tired, as if the heat was wearing him out. When he smiled, the dried lines of his face gave him a distinctly gnomish look. I got the impression that he was a decent enough sort of bloke.
‘I’ll pick you up when you come through to the concourse,’ he said, as I carried on to immigration control and customs.
I passed customs and entry controls without delay and when I went through to the concourse I saw George waiting for me with a friend. We shook hands once again and he introduced me to his friend and colleague Brian Smith, the cocoa buyer for the same company he worked for. Brian was based in Accra and worked out of a large villa in a prosperous suburb not far from the airport. This villa was company property and as well as being Brian’s living accommodation it served as the main Ghanaian office and communications centre for the mother company in London – Gill and Duffus. Other company employees also used it when they passed through Accra on their way to and from Takoradi, or for weekend breaks in the city. George told me that we would be staying at Brian’s place overnight before catching a flight on to Takoradi in the morning.
Later on, after a welcome cold shower and changing into fresh, lightweight clothes, I went downstairs to the lounge where Brian’s houseboy served the three of us with ice-cold bottles of Heineken. It felt a little strange to be waited on by a servant; I sat back in a huge, squashy armchair, held the lager glass in my hand and looked around.
The room we were sitting in was palatial by any standard I was used to. Heavy drapes had been pulled across the window, the maroon, gold-trimmed velvet curtains contrasting luxuriously against the pastel-coloured walls which carried huge, obviously native, oil paintings on any area large enough to warrant a frame. The furniture was all very plush: fat settees and armchairs formed a huge square in the centre of the room around a rectangular, dark-wood coffee table of which the main feature was three carved elephants, their broad backs supporting a polished glass surface that seemed acres wide to me. There were display cabinets and sideboards against every wall and a huge hardwood dining table was placed near the entrance to the kitchen. Where there was space, native ceremonial masks, crossed spears and wood carvings decorated the walls and every flat surface boasted its own explosion of colour as huge displays of flowers contrasted against the pastel shades of the room. I looked around and decided that it was definitely the largest and most luxurious living room I had ever been in.
No mention had been made yet of what work I was expected to do, but I supposed George was waiting until we arrived at Takoradi before bringing the subject up. So I just sat and sipped contentedly at my ice-cold beer, listening as Brian chatted away about collecting soil samples from a cocoa plantation the next day. Part of his job was to extract soil samples from freshly planted fields and send the earth to London so that Gill and Duffus could have it analysed. This chemical analysis enabled the company to estimate the quality and quantity of cocoa beans a particular plantation would yield and armed with this knowledge Gill and Duffus would make a confident advance bid for the crop. It seemed the sort of job I would like, skulking about in fields stealing soil and I suspected it was a form of industrial espionage.
I was politely brought into the conversation with questions about my journey and the weather back home and soon had George and Brian laughing when I told them that I had almost decided to wear my heavy Crombie overcoat for my trip to Ghana because of the cold weather in Scotland. ‘Winter at home is the hottest time of the year here,’ George explained. ‘I don’t think anyone out here as much as owns an overcoat.’
I was feeling very relaxed and asked George about Takoradi. Was it a very big place? Was there much to do there? ‘You’ll find plenty to do with yourself once you’re settled in,’ he told me. ‘There’s the Takoradi Sports Club, which has an excellent nine-hole golf course and a first-class swimming pool to lounge around. There’s even horse riding if you like that sort of thing. It will be one of your jobs to drive me down there every day,’ he said, smiling at his first acknowledgement of my job. Then he looked at me inquisitively. ‘Do you play golf yourself?’
When I told him I had never played the game, he simply nodded and told me he would round up a set of clubs for me and I would soon learn. This all sounded great to me, playing golf, swimming, horse riding, all in the wonderful sunshine of Africa. ‘And then there are some very interesting places to visit,’ George went on. ‘The Volta dam scheme at Akosombo, the diamond fields at Tarkwa and the gold mines at Obuasi. You’ll find plenty to keep you occupied. Don’t worry about that.’
My ears had pricked up at the words I was hearing. ‘I thought all Ghana had was cocoa beans,’ I said.
‘There’s a lot more to Ghana than just cocoa beans,’ Brian broke in. ‘There is a huge timber industry and vast bauxite mineral deposits, as well as the diamond fields and gold mines.’
Diamond fields and gold mines: so far all I’d ever done was read about things like that. Now here I was, actually within striking distance of them. Again I felt that quiver. We sat and chatted away until Brain’s houseboy, Koffi, announced that dinner was ready and we sat down to a lovely meal. Not long after the meal was over and Koffi had cleared up and gone home, Brian excused himself for bed, pleading a pre-dawn start to collect his soil samples.
I felt a little awkward with George as we sat there in the living room, but we just chatted away, George asking me questions about my past education, work experience and that sort of thing. I gave him a highly sanitised and edited version of my life and he seemed quite happy with my answers. I supposed he was more or less constructing an oral CV and I thought that was fair enough. After all, I was going to be working for him. At about ten o’clock I was feeling quite tired and said so to George, who showed me to a bedroom in the upper part of the house.
I had a huge bedroom to myself with en-suite facilities – another first for me (excluding, of course, the in-cell piss pot) – and after a shower I lay back on the bed and considered my situation. I couldn’t help comparing my present conditions to my old cell in Wandsworth and realised I was smiling. Things were looking good to me. I lay in bed listening to the hum of the air conditioner as it blew cool air into the room and I dropped off to sleep with my mind stil
l turning over the tantalising prospects of diamond fields and gold mines.
I was awakened in the morning by the sound of Koffi placing a cup of tea and some biscuits on the bedside cabinet and sat up feeling great, ready for anything in this new life. When I got downstairs, George was already up and about. Brian was long gone on his soil-sampling expedition and by ten o’clock George and I were at the airport boarding an ancient Dakota of Ghana Airways for the domestic flight to Takoradi.
It was a memorable experience, travelling in the venerable old DC3 as it rattled and smoked its way the 120 miles westwards along the coast to our destination. At one stage I was almost on the point of calling the stewardess to point out some rivets on the wing that seemed to be revolving in time with the engine vibration. I felt sure that rivets shouldn’t turn like that, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself and appear a nervous flyer. Other than my concern for the mysterious revolving rivets, it was a flight I enjoyed immensely. The slow old plane droned westwards at no more than 150 miles per hour and just a couple of thousand feet above the coastline, the speed and low altitude allowed for views that were simply sensational.
On the seaward side, I could see line upon line of boiling surf endlessly tumbling, frothy white, into the bluest water I had ever set eyes on. The inland view was even more impressive. From the right-hand windows of the plane, I could see a low range of tree-covered coastal hills that tapered right down to the shoreline, the brilliant green leaves of ancient hardwoods etching a ragged, natural line against the sparkling silver sands of the long beach; every now and again a picturesque fishing village would float into view and appear to drift lazily by underneath our wings.
We began flying over some stone buildings and George pointed out the university township of Cape Coast and then its neighbouring Cape Coast Castle, an old Portuguese-built fortress that had, in the past, held captured slaves before they were shipped off to the West Indies in the diabolical conditions of the ‘triangular trade’. Ironically this ancient fortress, once witness to so much of man’s inhumanity to man, now served as a bastion of law and order as the training college for the Ghanaian Police Force.
Twenty minutes later, the buildings of another large town began to appear beneath us. Sekondi, George told me, straightening up to fasten his seatbelt. ‘This used to be where they loaded and unloaded boats before they built the harbour at Takoradi. We should be landing in about ten minutes’ time.’
A chauffeur-driven company Mercedes met us at the airport. The African driver took my case and put it into the boot of the car, then held the rear door open for me to step in. On the way to the cocoa mill I saw monkeys capering about high in some trees and turned my head to watch them. It was then that it really hit me that I had actually moved continents.
George McFall was the manager of a British-owned company called West African Mills that bought and processed cocoa beans, exporting the produce – fresh cocoa beans, cocoa butter and cocoa cake – all over the world by ship from Takoradi harbour. The cocoa mill was about three miles east of Takoradi on the road to Sekondi and was a fairly big affair. The actual mill was a large, strangely shaped building made mainly from black corrugated iron on a high steel frame, its walls rising about forty feet into the air.
There were other smaller, single-storey buildings huddled around the main structure that contained the offices and workers’ medical centre. A railway spur allowed direct delivery of raw materials and was also the means of getting the finished product down to the Takoradi docks, where it was loaded on to boats and shipped to ports all around the world. I was quite impressed by the size of the place and realised that the cocoa mill was a much bigger operation than I had imagined.
Once through the factory gate the car turned left along a narrow tarmacked road, taking us past the side of the factory and up a steep hill that spilled us out on to a large, landscaped area containing the living quarters for the European employees of West African Mills. I could see several bungalows nestling among the neatly trimmed trees and bushes and was wondering which one was George’s when the chauffeur turned the Mercedes into the second driveway on the left and parked outside a large, white-painted bungalow.
I had expected that George would have good accommodation, but the beautiful stone bungalow we had pulled up outside went beyond my expectations. The front door of the house was reached by twin flights of stairs at opposite ends of a spacious balcony area. The balcony itself was big enough to contain a selection of wrought-iron garden furniture set around a large, circular, glass-topped table and there was still room for a huge cage on a stand that contained, or should have contained, a parrot. When I arrived, Marmaduke the parrot, an African grey as I later found out, was perched on the roof of its home, treading anxiously and cocking its head from side to side, no doubt considering the new arrival. The front door opened before we reached it and a young African man came out to greet us, his face beaming in a wide, welcoming smile. This was Sam, George’s houseboy. I was introduced and we shook hands before he went to the boot of the car where the chauffeur was unloading our luggage.
The bungalow was spacious, its large living room running into an equally large dining area, where open arches led off to two enormous bedrooms, giving the place an expansive, open-plan look. There were only two doors inside the house: one led to the modern kitchen and the other to the bathroom. A house like this was a new experience for me and I was suitably impressed. As for actually having a servant running about after me – well, that was very definitely a first.
There were about seven or eight bungalows in the small estate and only three of them were being used. George Merriman from Hull, the resident engineer for the factory and his rather quiet and retiring wife Frances lived in the bungalow furthest away from the road and deep in the shade of the trees. The only other occupied bungalow was an even grander affair than the rest and was lived in by a Mr Theodore Sloot, his wife, their twelve-year-old son, also named Theodore, and the son’s long-time nanny or nurse, a woman of about thirty-five called Rosemary.
Mr Theodore Sloot was in overall charge of the entire complex and a director of the parent company, Gill and Duffus. He was actually the architect who had designed and built the mill in Takoradi, as well as a ‘twin’ factory in Hull, England. I never did find out what actual work Mr Sloot did in Takoradi. He just seemed to pass his time there without noticeably doing anything. Maybe that’s how it is when you’re the boss!
The other bungalows of the small estate lay empty and unused, only opened up when the odd visitor arrived, such as the annual relief manager, or very occasionally some company representative from Britain. George told me I could stay with him until such time as a bungalow could be prepared for me and when I asked him when I would be starting work he told me to forget it for a week or so until I settled in. The arrangement suited me fine and I happily moved into his place.
Looking back at it, I suppose that time of my life was the nearest I came to what I would call ‘gracious living’. Sam would serve me my breakfast from hot serving plates and wait on me throughout the meal, topping up my tea and tidying up as soon as I finished with anything. It took a bit of getting used to and I don’t think Sam knew quite what to make of me. I’m a very loquacious person by nature and I was treating him just like a pal, chatting away, asking him questions about Takoradi and about himself, his family and so on. Then I gave him all the clothes I had brought with me that I knew I wouldn’t need – heavy pullovers and some long-sleeved shirts. On my third or fourth morning there, I heard a knock at the front door and Sam admitted the local town tailor whom George had sent for to measure me for cotton trousers and shorts. I was amazed. Here was the tailor coming all the way from Takoradi just to measure me up for a few pairs of trousers. I felt really important. This was the sort of thing the gentry did, wasn’t it? With every passing minute, I was getting to like the place better and better.
I was actually quite keen to get started on my work, but it turned out that George didn�
�t actually have a proper job for me; what he was really after was company. I could understand this too, because although George had the use of a company car, he couldn’t drive. Therefore, with walking about at night being out of the question, he was virtually a social hermit, marooned in his bungalow on the factory estate every night. His neighbours were of no help to him. George Merriman, no doubt under the influence of his introvert wife, kept to himself and seldom went out at night unless in her company. The wealthy Mr Sloot had his own social circle among the higher echelon of ex-pat businessmen in Takoradi and had little or nothing to do with the social activities of his underlings.
So it turned out that I was more or less there to keep George company and to drive his car so he could get out and about a bit. It was all very casual and I didn’t get a pay packet or anything, but it suited me very well. If I needed any money, I had George’s permission to help myself from cash he kept in a drawer in the house.
Funnily enough, I hardly ever needed cash. I was allowed to use the mill’s credit number and could obtain everything I needed simply by signing my name. That credit account number, 3M33, is one of the things I will always remember about my stay in Ghana. I could buy almost anything with it. I could even hire cars, which I did when we wanted a decent model to drive through to Accra for the weekend. If I left the house with a pound cash in my pocket, I was loaded!
One evening, we were sitting on the veranda, quietly enjoying our regular evening beer and watching a freighter as it approached Takoradi harbour. ‘You mentioned something about diamond mines, George.’ I finally broke a long silence, keeping my voice casual as I broached a subject that had never been far from my mind. ‘Remember… when I first arrived? You said I would be able to see them.’
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 15