ABSTRACT
It was one of the happiest privileges of my career as a university teacher that during my first ten years I had only graduate students, and all were working for research degrees. In those days research students in most branches of history were rather rare creatures, and their supervision tended to be the jealously guarded monopoly of the senior professors. My first research student came to me when I was twenty-eight, in the person of Richard Gray, who arrived from Cambridge in 1951. Later, after working for some years in Central Africa and the Sudan, he was to be my colleague for a quarter of a century and eventually my successor as professor of African history at the University of London. He was joined the following year by John Flint, Ruth Slade, and Marie de Kiewiet. In 1953 I took on my first African research student, Ade Aderibigbe, a Nigerian who had courageously obtained his first degree at Birkbeck College while working night shifts in the post office. He was to teach African history for many years at the universities of Ibadan and Lagos, where he also became deputy vice chancellor.
