An Accidental Life is a portrait of a man who played a significant role in the history of education and health in the Caribbean. Harold Drayton's passionate and meticulous memoir offers, first, a precious account of colonial British Guiana. He maps the impacton him of his home, into which his birth was an accident, the influence of his working-class autodidact stepfather, of his schools, and of war and politics in the 1940s.