The Forsters and a century of restricted representation

Hughes and Perfect trace Samuel John Forster's rise from Bathurst clerk to rice merchant, with family commercial ties inland. He opposed a proposed British cession of The Gambia to France in the 1870s, and in 1886 was appointed to the Legislative Council. The position was an appointment within a colonial government, not an elected mandate for the whole country. ^{[hughes-perfect-2006]}

After his death in 1906, his son Samuel John Forster entered the council in 1907. The younger Forster, a barrister educated in Britain, served repeated terms until 1940. Their family and political network included nephew W. Davidson Carrol, whose 1941 death ended the expected succession. This was an era when the Protectorate population was largely excluded from Bathurst's narrow council politics. ^{[hughes-perfect-2006]}

The historians describe rivalries among elite factions and the subsequent opening for Edward Francis Small. The story is therefore both a family history of public figures and a history of who could speak in colonial institutions, who could not, and how that changed. ^{[hughes-perfect-2006]}