Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (12 page)

Another time, we were sleeping one night. All of a sudden there was the loudest jazz band bursting into tune outside. We woke up and I looked out of the window and the music stopped. We thought we were dreaming so we went back to bed and, as we were going to sleep, bang, up it struck again. Eddie stuck his head out – nothing. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he shouted. I woke up as it struck up again. There were trumpets playing, drums beating, the whole bloody lot. Then suddenly there was a burst of laughter. Nkrumah was having a rally where he had the Encruba Dance Band to play. He had given them £10 and said, ‘Go and play outside Chapman’s window.’ In the end we got up and gave them all drinks, and some more money.

When he became prime minister, we were invited to the inauguration. We were privileged to watch the ceremony of the ‘Pouring of the Libation’, as it was known. We ended the day at a private party to celebrate his elevation, where only his ministers were present. We were the only white persons there. Nkrumah invited us to a rally of about 100,000 people in Accra one time, and when the Africans saw us sitting in the front row they all started to boo. Krobo Edusie, the government Chief Whip, as well as a great personal friend of Nkrumah, stood up and told everyone that we were good people and friends, and that we were not imperialists, and so at that everyone changed and started to cheer. ‘Fire fire, fire, go fire the Band’ was sung that day, as it was at all special occasions. It was a famous African celebratory song.

Krobo Edusie was also our neighbour, and we liked him a lot. He was a great orator. He was very humorous but sometimes a touch vicious. Once, on the terrace of the Lisbon Hotel, a beefy white chap, a Wimpy (construction company) foreman, said to Eddie, ‘Why don’t you put that bloody monkey of yours on a chain!?’ He was talking about Krobo! Eddie had a few well-chosen words to say in reply and, informing him of who he was calling a monkey, suggested to him that he might be on his way out of the country before his feet could touch the ground. This incident indicated the fairly widespread feeling for the African. When the white community discovered we were installing indoor toilets in the houses we were building, there was a great deal of contempt for the idea. The general opinion was that the Africans would use them as wash basins or store coal or firewood in them. There was equally strong anti-white feeling, yet all clamoured to imitate, whether it be home, style, entertaining, education, etc.

Sir Emmanuel Quist was the speaker of the Ghana parliament known as the Secretariat. He was created OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1942 and KBE (Knight of the British Empire) in 1952. The Speakers Conference Hall at the Ghanaian Parliament House has now been named after him. Lady Quist was an unusual lady to say the least, and once when I was in England she offered me one of their tickets for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. I felt I couldn’t accept even though I was in England for a wedding. Whilst in Ghana, I was frequently invited to their place for tea; I got on very well with them. He was white and she was coloured. Tea in their drawing room was the full works. She always called Sir Emmanuel ‘Papa’ and was seldom allowed to forget her past by Ghanaian society: she had been the delivery girl from the local bakery. One day while delivering bread to Sir Emmanuel she was found having sex with him on the kitchen table. The local saying was that ‘he had his bread every day’ – she was so pretty. There were many years difference in their ages, but it worked out just fine. Being the gentleman that he was, he protected her and sent her to England to do an extensive course which covered how to be a first-class hostess. He didn’t want her to be looked down upon. So she kept a home fit for him and was good at entertaining.

The same friend that introduced Eddie to Nkrumah introduced him to the Dutch firm Schokbeton, with whom we did most of our business in Ghana. Eddie also met Joe Appiah, a member of the government with Nkrumah, and through him they all became buddies. While we were out there, Appiah met the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, mainly remembered for his post-war austerity programme. They eventually got married. We were invited to the wedding but I was on my way back from Ghana and we got delayed so I missed the wedding in Kent. Eddie also introduced Geoffrey Bing to Nkrumah, saying that he would make a good attorney – and he did indeed get the position as the Attorney General of Ghana.

While all of this was going on, Eddie still continued to be Eddie. One time he phoned up a hotel we were staying in and said that he was from the water board and that they should fill up any containers with as much water as possible as they were going to have to cut off the water supply. Eddie returned to the hotel to find every single member of staff filling up hundreds of pots and pans with water! Eddie rang our friend Mohamed Shaban at his brick and tile factory and said that he was calling from the telephone company, and that he’d heard there was smoke coming from his connection – and directed him to give it a tug. Eddie then said that there was still smoke emerging, and that Mohamed should tug harder. In the end Mohamed ripped the connection right out of the wall! One other time, Eddie told Mohamed he was from the revenue and that Mohamed had to pay a tax bill of £30,000, but that it must be paid in 50 pence pieces … by that afternoon! Mohamed actually went and got the hundred-weight plus of 50 pences and took them to the revenue. He was livid when he learnt of Eddie’s trick! Eddie was always up to something.

Practical joking wasn’t the only one of Eddie’s traits that he brought to Ghana. Because I was unable to buy fashions in Accra I had a dressmaker named Maria who lived with a Lebanese. One day I went looking for Maria. Living nearby was a beautiful native woman named Angela. She lived in a mud hut, and men used to sell her to motorists. Many well-known locals were seen entering Angela’s hut. That morning I didn’t find Maria. I found Eddie, with Angela wrapped around him. In my usual style with those ladies, I gave her a dose of my feelings and left. As I got into my car she came towards me, followed by Eddie, and stuck her head in the window spitting out juju, much feared by Africans. Suddenly enough was enough. I promptly wound the window up, crushing her neck. She was screaming and Eddie was telling me to stop. Eddie warned me to back off. I let her go and made a very quick getaway in case Eddie decided to follow. Needless to say, feathers flew when he got home. You would have thought I was the one found wrapped around, the guilty one. Eddie had a great capacity for always turning the tables on me. His favourite expression was ‘Always deny everything!’

Our business in Ghana was construction. We put in two and a half years’ hard work building houses; the first permanent houses the Africans ever had, 238 houses in Ghana. There were eight building sites, and we were building all the time. When the white community heard that we were putting lavatories in, they were horrified. They said, ‘It’s too good for them. They won’t know how to use them. They’ll put chickens or coal or something in.’ They designed and made the house components in Holland and then shipped them out to Ghana. The houses needed permanent foundations, but the buildings themselves were built in sections.

There was a lot of controversy about Schokbeton in the newspapers and Nkrumah said, ‘What can we do about this?’ Eddie said, ‘The best thing we can do is for you to arrange for your ministers and members of parliament to come over to Holland. I can arrange for the company to pay for that.’ So I rang the company up and explained what I wanted. Not only did they think it was a marvellous idea, it was the first official recognition of Nkrumah’s government.

Eddie continues:

They sent a beautiful plane down, and took back a plane load of government ministers. When we arrived the bands were playing, and soldiers lined up. The Africans thought it was in their honour, but it wasn’t. The Queen Juliana of Holland had just arrived as well.

l had asked them to wear their local costumes, which were beautiful. A lot of the material was made of real gold, made up in Ashanti. The Ashanti cloth was very expensive, as you can imagine.

The Queen was inspecting her troops when we landed, and all the reporters saw these Africans arrive, and they left the Queen to photograph us. She was very good-natured about it all, and we were taken down and entertained by her. Her daughters served us tea. It was quite splendid, really. And, it silenced the critics at home.

Betty continues the story:

Then Eddie went to the Middle East, Lebanon and Kuwait, leaving me in Ghana. He went to sell the same housing scheme over there. I had to go out to Holland to learn how the components were made whilst Eddie went to Lebanon. Eddie told me what to do and sent me to Utrecht, where the factory was. He said that I’d have to take care of everything whilst he was away. Nkrumah kept an eye on me and helped me. There were several newspapers coming in to see the things that were going on on our project, so I had to see them, and also to know the processes that had been carried out there. The British and the British government were very unpopular there so there was a lot of sabotage of the materials such as to the units and parts for the pre-fab houses. I had to supervise the building works with 2,000 native workers and only eight Dutch foremen, who spoke limited English and no native tongue. As an incentive bonus to workers, we instituted a daily pack of cigarettes and cigarette breaks. This caused a storm because the Africans all wanted to work for us and not other building companies. The British firms discovered we were giving the cigarette bonuses and they were losing their workmen, saying we were bribing them. So we had to stop it, meaning the workers went on strike to protest the loss of their bonus. When Eddie came back, the strike was still going on. Eddie joked about it and said I’d cocked it all up.

We also tried to do things on our own for local people. One village was right on top of a hill, and we had been walking for a few hours, about 11 miles, to reach it. At the bottom of the hill was a stream and the women would have to come down with their cans, fill them up, and walk back up. There was just one continuous stream of women walking up and down the hill. We met the chief and I said to the interpreter, ‘Why don’t you tell him that if he buys a little pump he could pump the water from down the hill up the hill and store the water up there.’ All they would have to do would be to dig a big hole and cement it out. He explained this to the chief and he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes. How can we do it?’ I said he would have to dig a channel and explained it all to him. I said, ‘If you do that I will send two men up and they will do the rest for you.’ I rang back about a month later and they had done a beautiful job. We put a little petrol engine in, which pumped all the water up and stopped automatically when they wanted it to. They thought it was a miracle. The new cistern right on top of the hill was full of water. They were so delighted it was unbelievable. They weren’t stupid. It’s just that they were never shown how. You got satisfaction in doing these things.

One thing that the Chapmans were unable to do was provide all of their workers with bicycles:

In the promotional film for Schokbeton you saw the bicycles of the people going to work in the factory, and eating in the company canteens. When it was shown in the community centre for our African workers, everybody clapped and got very excited because they thought they were going to have bicycles and free food from the canteen. They couldn’t understand that when the building programme started they weren’t going to get all this. So I got left to sort a lot of this out when Eddie was in Lebanon.

She continues:

When we went on a break we stayed in rest houses. They were a kind of hut built for people that were travelling to have a break. Every now and then you’d stop off at one, and find a snake in your bed! The snakes were terrible, you had to wear snake boots wherever you walked. There were no roads as such, just tracks – there were so many potholes. When the rain came, the potholes would fill with water and in the season of laterite, the red dust storms, the holes would be full of red water and when it got on your windscreen, the wipers couldn’t wipe it away. We drove whatever car that was available for us at that time. Land Rovers were quite popular. I made long trips to places like Kumasi Takaracks. I visited our building sites, which were long distances apart. It was often uncomfortable with the heat and you couldn’t open your windows because the dust would choke you to say nothing of arriving looking like a Red Indian.
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Being youngish and appearance conscious I would suffer to arrive looking good!

I passed through the villages with such mixed feelings, because I caused a bit of a stir with my white skin and long blonde hair. I was frequently referred to as the ‘White Witch’. Often, if I was on foot anywhere, hordes of children would follow me screaming. I learned to carry coins and drop them, to the delight of the children who would scramble in the dust for them.

On one trip we went out gorilla photo-hunting in the mountains. We went out with the man who ran a newspaper called the
Evening News
for the government. It was very scary, way out in the wilderness. Eddie went up with the newsman to the top of a mountain to try and take photos. I got halfway up when a large bird flew right by me and scared me witless, so I ran back down the hill and stayed in the car. I was watching from down below to see if I could see anything and I did see two gorillas on the mountain top.

We built houses up and down the country so we visited various places like Takoradi, the port. Then we built the Tema Harbour in Accra, the capital. A lot still wasn’t completed when we were forced to leave. A factory was under way as well when we left. The reason that they chose to use our method of building was because they had a lot of raw material in the country. The Dutch made the elements (concrete walls etc.) for Ghana to build a factory that could then make its own elements. We were involved in lots of projects while we were there, including a palace for King Premper of Ashanti. The Ashanti are a large and prominent tribe in Ghana, and were subdued by the British only after many battles. The former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, is half Ashanti. They did eventually build it, but only after we left. Eddie also represented the construction company Taylor Woodrow whilst in Ghana.