Adisadel College, situated on a hill a few miles north of Cape Coast, Ghana, with breathtaking views of the Atlantic ocean, was founded in 1910, under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), an English missionary body tracing its origins to 1701. First called SPG Grammar School by the founders led by Nathaniel Temple Hamlyn, then Anglican Bishop of Accra, it had lost its missionary bindings by the late 1920s when it was renamed St. Nicholas Grammar school, adopting the friendly prelate from Myra, Turkey, as its patron saint and took its current name “Adisadel” from the hill on which it has been situated since 1936 and the little village adjacent to it. “Adisadel,” as the story goes, is a corruption or anglicization of “Alice a da” in Fanti, or “Alice is asleep.”
The Clock Tower
The School moved from Topp Yard in Cape Coast, to its present site on a commanding hill near Adisadel Village in the 1930s. Tradition has it that the schoolboys, hearing of the monks of Buckfast Abbey, Devon, England, who had built their monastery with their own hands, determined to do the same, inspired by their Headmaster Alan John Knight, in an “epic in concrete”, they proceeded to build on the hill what is now a boarding school with a population close to 2000, distributed into ten (10) Houses which include Ebiradze, Knight, Canterbury, Le Maire, Aglionby, Thomas, Hamlyn, Elliot, Quaque, and Jubilee houses. Adisadel College is 113 years old now.
The competitive nature of Adisadel students can be found in the school motto “Vel Primus, Vel Cum Primis”, a Latin phrase which translates “Either the first or with the first.
The School has a mission of; producing high profile men who would be outstanding as they take up their rightful positions in the field of work to add to the gains of their predecessors, through the provision of a conducive environment and with the active involvement of all stakeholders to motivate both staff and students to achieve their best and a vision to be the first-class educational institution excelling in all fields of endeavours.
