Recognising his geological talents Professor J. W. Gregory recommended him for a post as Principal mineral surveyor in Southern Nigeria[5] where he went on to discover coal[6] and lignite.

The town of Port Harcourt was built in 1912 as an outlet for this Nigerian coal and was linked with Enugu via a railway line that extended northwards to Kaduna.

[8] The Nigerian coal turned out to be of poor quality and was used mainly for domestic consumption within the colonies, providing an important power resource for the railways and electricity.

[9] Although Kitson's mission was to discover mineral deposits which might be exploited by the British colonial authority he always combined this with a paternalistic concern to improve the material situation of the local populations.

Kitson travelled round the colony by train and bicycle and discovered sizeable mineral deposits including bauxite[11] and manganese.

During the last year of the war 32 000 tons of manganese, used in munitions production, were shipped to Britain from the deposits Kitson had found in the Gold Coast.

[19] In 1915 he was the first to recommend building a dam at Akosombo on the Volta River to generate hydro-electricity,[20] hoping to use this to process the bauxite deposits that he had discovered in the Kwahu plateau the previous year.

It was not until 1965 that the idea of the dam was put into effect when Ghana's first black president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, decided to generate hydropower as a means of modernizing the economy.

[22] After his retirement from the Gold Coast in 1930 Kitson moved to Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where he called his house "Benalta" (a reference to the original name of Benalla), as an indication of his enduring passion for Australia.

In particular he reported on goldfields in Kenya during the so-called Kakamega Gold Rush of the early 1930s where gold-mining once again showed its disrespect for the rights of local communities and the environment.

[23] In his report for the Colonial Office Kitson suggested that possibly as much as half of the gold being prospected was wasted by amateur techniques.

[24] In an article for the magazine The Spectator, Kitson compared the influx of amateur gold-prospectors to a similar situation in Klondike in Canada in 1897-8 : "The road to Kakamega now resembles a miniature 'trail of 98' without the snow.

Kitson was also noted for his keen amateur interest in archeology, finding numerous artefacts which he made available to Museums in Africa and England.

He was quite strict as J. N. F. Green makes clear: "Lifelong self-discipline gave Kitson exceptional powers of endurance and concentration in difficult and trying conditions.

"[24] L. J. Spencer, formerly keeper of minerals at the British Museum, described Kitson as "a most energetic little man; his constant companion was a small prospecting pan".