Peter Holmes Canham was born on 24 August 1914 and educated at St. Paul's School and Pembroke College, Oxford; BA (Hons). In 1938 he was appointed a Cadet in the Gold Coast Administration and arrived in the Colony on 10th August. His posts were Assistant District Commissioner, Mampong, 1938-39, Acting D.C. Kumasi, 1940-42 and D.C. Bekwai, 1942-45, all in Ashanti. In this work in the field, he developed a close rapport with Africans and an excellent knowledge of their languages.

After two years as Senior Assistant Colonial Secretary, he was posted to Whitehall for a further two years in the African Department of the Colonial Office. Returning to the Gold Coast in 1950 he was, for a few months, in charge of the Kumasi district with special responsibility for the General Election under the Coussey Constitution, but most of his remaining service, up to the Independence of the Gold Coast as Ghana in 1957, was in central administration - general secretariat duties, 1951-53, regional office, Cape Coast 1953-54, and Secretary to Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the last Governor of the Gold Coast, 1955-57.

Peter Canham left the Overseas Civil Service on Ghana's Independence; he remained in the country in educational work for a time but later went to Headmasterships of secondary schools in Southern Rhodesia and Uganda, to principalships of teacher training colleges in Western and Northern Nigeria, and finally to teaching Third World Studies in the Institutes of Education at the Universities of London and Cardiff. He retired from Cardiff in June 1981, but his retirement was soon clouded by ill-health, and he died in October 1984.