Mrs Heather Dalton was the wife of an Education Officer who taught full-time herself for most of her service. This collection of papers was made as an offshoot of the Oxford Development Project on Education in Ghana, to which her husband contributed. Mrs Dalton thought that by concentrating exclusively on the work experience (which was mostly male), the picture was incomplete. She therefore set out to rectify this, initially by asking wives of husbands in the Educational Service to contribute memoirs of life outside the classroom. She subsequently extended this request to wives of husbands in other branches of Government Service. The aim was to cover domestic, family, and social life among expatriate families in the last years of colonial rule on the Gold Coast (Ghana).