David Augustus Noel, my father, has been a big influence in my life. At university and later on in life he was known affectionately as DAN. His childhood was quite fractured. He was born in Soufrière in St Lucia in 1923. My grandfather, Ralph Alan SnClair and my grandmother, Alice Leonora, were from Trinidad. My grandfather studied medicine in Edinburgh; this must have been in the latter years of the 19th century. I’m proud of how members of the Hoyte family managed to become educated and better themselves post slavery. I wonder how this happened, what lucky stroke sent them on their way, were some of their children sent to missionary schools, such as Codrington College in Barbados? Or were they adopted by wealthy philanthropists? Codrington College came about as the result of a bequest left by Christopher Codrington, who, in 1710, left two sugar plantations in Barbados for the ‘Propagation of the Gospel.’ The bequest stated that the college was to be for the education of enslaved people, but this was ignored and instead it catered for white boys. It was only much later, in the 19th century, that black people were admitted.
My father was only two when the family emigrated to the Gold Coast in West Africa, later renamed Ghana. it was there, in Accra, that my grandfather established a private medical practice. He continued to live there for the rest of his life. I only know about my father’s upbringing in England. He was sent to England at the tender age of five, along with his brother Ralph who was seven. How confusing and distressing that must have been for these young boys, especially being torn away from their mother whom they never saw again because she died a couple of years later. Who accompanied them on the long sea voyage from the Gold Coast to England? I don’t suppose it was my grandfather as he wouldn’t have been able to leave his practice. Did they have a nanny, or was it one of my grandfather’s siblings?