My father, Charles Chadwick, who has died aged 92, was a British Council officer involved in a career that took him to Africa, South and North America, and finally to Poland. There, as the council’s director, he administered its Know-How Fund to help pay for libraries in Kraków, Gdańsk and Poznań following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After retiring from the British Council, in 2005 he had a surprise success as an author when a novel he had written more than 30 years previously, It’s All Right Now, was published by Faber and Faber when he was 73.
The manuscript had been rejected on various occasions in the past, but had been taken up again by the literary agent Caroline Dawnay, who managed to get Faber & Faber interested. The story of its final emergence made the national news and gave hope to many aspiring authors.
Charles was born in Swanage, Dorset, to Trevor and Marjory (nee Freeman), who were both schoolteachers; his father volunteered in Prague during the late 1930s to help run Nicholas Winton’s Czech Kindertransport. After attending Charterhouse school in Surrey, where he captained the cricket team and twice dismissed the future England captain Peter May, a fellow pupil, he did his national service with the Royal Leicesters in Korea.
There he trod on a landmine shortly after arriving, and ended up losing his lower leg. After recovering at various military hospitals he followed his younger brother William to Canada, where he studied English and French at the University of Toronto.
After graduation Charles spent nine years working for the Colonial Service in what is now Zambia, first as a district officer reviewing local civil cases, then lecturing at a staff training college in Luanshya and finally teaching administration in Lusaka.
In 1972 he left to work for the British Council, beginning in Nigeria and then spent a year in Brazil (1975-76). After a five-year spell at its London office (1976-81), he worked for the council in Canada (1981-88) and then in Poland until his retirement in 1992, when he was appointed CBE.
Following the surprise publication of It’s All Right Now, Charles had another previously rejected novel, A Chance Acquaintance, released in 2011. Three more, Letter to Sally, My Sister Julie and Josefa, could not attract an English publisher but were accepted by a German company, which translated them for the German market.
In retirement in London, Charles became a school governor and in 1994 was appointed for a short spell as regional coordinator of a European Union election observer team in South Africa.
In 1965, he married Evelyn Ingeborg, a violinist; they later divorced. In 1998 he married Mary Teale.
Mary died in 2018. He is survived by two sons, me, from his first marriage, and Samuel from his second, and two grandsons, Huw and Mackenzie.
