In 1943 Alec was able to make his long-delayed visit to the West African colonies. The only extant letters to his daughter date from this time. In the first, written from his rooms in Oxford, he told her that he and her mother were much looking forward to her confirmation, which was to take place on Friday 5th March.

A month later the Colonial Office approached Alexander Maxwell, who was by then Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, with a view to ‘poaching’ Alec for a secondment to report on the penal administration and welfare services of Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia, recommend improvements, and discuss his findings with the respective governors. He was also to make proposals for borstals, juvenile courts and other youth services, and address the problem of prostitution and the welfare of girls in the larger towns. Apart from their appetite for social welfare in the colonies, the British wanted to demonstrate to the world that, unlike the Nazis, they took the rights and welfare of prisoners seriously. He was the obvious candidate. In 1936 he had been instrumental in setting up the Colonial Office's Advisory Committee on Social Welfare, upon which both he and Margery Fry sat. The following year he was appointed to its newly established Colonial Penal Administration Committee, and chaired its Juvenile Delinquency sub-committee, tasked with considering ‘the question of juvenile delinquency in the Colonies and Dependencies with a view to its prevention and proper treatment’. In addition, he had visited many colonial prisons ‘in his holidays and otherwise’, and with his extensive knowledge, and unique ‘combination of idealism with practicality’, had produced reports which had inspired progress and showed administrators how it could be achieved.