One of the most celebrated of the liberated Africans of Calabar was a P. J. C. Thomas, who owned the largest non-European trading enterprise in the city. His company, S. Thomas and Company, strongly disapproved of the consumption of alcohol by its workers, as it took their welfare seriously, and operated a compulsory savings scheme to give them the capital to set up a small business on their retirement from the company. Thomas himself has been described as:  
[^0]
[^0]:    3 Oral interview with Asuquo Effiong, aged over 78 years, conducted at 58, Big Qua Town Road, Calabar, on 19 June 2013.  
[A] philanthropist and lover of his kind [...] S. Thomas and Company invested in the society and their workers. The company took the welfare of workers seriously and provided for rainy days. Even reckless persons who worked for S. Thomas and Company had something to fall back on in difficult times. (Interview with Asuquo Effiong, 19 June 2013).  
Macmillan (1968) goes further:
Superlative encomiums can, with every justification, be given freely to this important and prominent firm that upheld the best traditions of commercial procedure and rectitude, conducted on lines harmonizing with commercial welfare and equality of opportunity for every ambitious member of its staff of nearly fifty clerks (Macmillan, 1968, p. 95).  
Another, equally outstanding, liberated African was Samuel Herbert Pearse, who is remembered by the elder Efiong U. Aye as having been 'an enormous towering trader in colonial Calabar'. ${ }^{4}$