Theodore S. Clerk

Theodore Shealtiel Clerk, (4 September 1909 – 15 November 1965) was an urban planner on the Gold Coast and the first formally trained, professionally certified Ghanaian architect. Attaining a few historic firsts in his lifetime, Theodore Clerk became the chief architect, city planner, designer and developer of Tema which is the metropolis of the Tema Harbour, the largest port in Ghana. The first chief executive officer (CEO) of the Ghanaian parastatal, the Tema Development Corporation as well as a presidential advisor to Ghana's first head of state, Kwame Nkrumah, T. S. Clerk was a founding member and the first president of the first post-independent, wholly indigenous and self-governing Ghanaian professional body, the Ghana Institute of Architects (GIA), that had its early beginnings in 1963. He was also an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Town Planning Institute. His father, a Basel-trained theologian, was the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932. His mother, Anna Alice Meyer (1873 –1934) was of Ga-Danish descent. A.W. Clerk was a pioneer of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and a leader in education in colonial Ghana, establishing a middle boarding school, the Salem School in 1843. His paternal grandmother, Pauline Hesse (1831–1909) was from the Gold Coast, and was of Danish, Ga and German descent. Theodore Clerk's grandaunt was Regina Hesse (1832 –1898), a pioneer educator and school principal. Among his sisters were Jane E. Clerk (1904 – 1999), a pioneering woman education administrator along with Matilda Johanna Clerk (1916 – 1984), the second Ghanaian female medical doctor and the first Ghanaian woman in any field to be awarded an academic merit scholarship for university education abroad.

Education and training T. S. Clerk attended Basel Mission primary schools in Larteh Akuapem, the boys' boarding middle school, the Salem School at Osu and had his secondary education at Achimota College, as a member of one of the institution's earliest generations of students. At Achimota, Clerk's contemporaries included Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, R. P. Baffour, the first Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as well as Charles Odamtten Easmon, the first Ghanaian surgeon. By 1960, he had led the design, urban planning and development of the post-independent port city of Tema, a project commissioned by Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. The British architects who worked under Clerk were D. C. Robinson, D. Gillies-Reyburn, N. R. Holman, M. J. Hirst, W. D. Ferguson, C. Kossack, G. Rochford, D. B. Duck and H. G. Herbert. A few of these British architects were alumni of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where they had taken courses in tropical architecture.

T. S. Clerk later became the first chief executive officer (CEO) of the Tema Development Corporation when an Act of Parliament, the Tema Development Corporation Act was passed in 1963, making the institution a publicly owned corporate entity. Theodore Clerk was also an external examiner at the Department of Architecture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). On Friday 11 December 1964 at 8:30 p.m., the inauguration of the body took place at the University of Ghana, Legon, where T. S. Clerk was elected the first president of the Ghana Institute of Architects, after which he gave his inaugural speech. Theodore Clerk also authored the first constitution of the Ghana Institute of Architects. Quist was the daughter of Emmanuel Charles Quist (1880–1959), a barrister and judge who became the first African president of the Legislative Council from 1949 to 1951, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Gold Coast from 1951 to 1957, and Speaker of the National Assembly of Ghana from March 1957 to November 1957. Clerk belonged to the District Grand Lodge of Ghana under the United Grand Lodge of England. T. S. Clerk was an organist and also served as a Presbyter and the Choir President of the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church, Osu.

Death and legacy Clerk died on 15 November 1965. T. S. Clerk's funeral service was held at the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church, Osu and his remains were buried at Accra's Osu Cemetery, previously known as Christiansborg Civil Cemetery. The Ghanaian government named a street in Tema, "T.S. Clerk Street", between Akojo School Park and Tweduaase Primary School at Site 6 of Community I, in his honour, in appreciation of his pioneering services to the development of Ghana.