T. S. Clerk had eight other siblings and was a member of the historically important Clerk family.[8] His older brother, Carl Henry Clerk (1895 – 1982) was an editor, agricultural educationist and church minister who served as the fourth Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1950 to 1954 as well as the Editor of the Christian Messenger newspaper between 1960 and 1963.[16][17][18][19] 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.[20][21][22]
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.[2][9] He also took draughtsmanship or technical drawing lessons at the then Achimota College Engineering School where he was taught by Charles Deakin.[23][24] 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.[23]
Clerk secured a government scholarship for a diploma course in architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art, a constituent college of the University of Edinburgh where he attended from October 1938 to June 1943.[2][4] Records of his nomination for admission to the professional associations for architecture and town planning suggest that he also completed a diploma in town planning in 1944.[4] Theodore Clerk's nomination papers are housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[4]
During the Easter term of 1941, Clerk was in Manchester on a vacation scholarship and later that summer in 1941, he undertook measuring work for the Scottish branch of the National Buildings Record.[4] In the summer of 1942, he carried out a housing survey assignment for the Department of Health for Scotland.[4]
Theodore Clerk passed the intermediate examination in June 1941 and the final examination in June 1943, and was admitted as an associate (ARIBA) by the Royal Institute of British Architects on 1 October 1943, with Frank Charles Mears, Leslie Grahame Thomson and John Ross McKay listed as his proposers.[4] Furthermore, Clerk was also an Associate Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (AMTPI).[4]
He joined the Town and Country Planning Department in Accra in 1946 and was later transferred to its Sekondi office from 1948 to 1953.[4][25] For a time, Clerk was the only Ghanaian architect in the country and later, one of three Ghanaian architects in the late 1950s.[23][26][27] He had been appointed the Chief Architect and Town Planner in the parastatal, Tema Development Corporation by 1954.[4][28] 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.[2][4] In planning the first three Communities at Tema, Theodore Clerk led a team of English architects to design affordable, middle class, standard houses, with four out of every five houses reserved for industrial workers, especially, low-income dockworkers at the harbour, who were facing a housing shortage at the time.[26][27] 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.[26][27][29] 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.[30]
Sometime in 1963, a group of about fifteen mostly British and American-trained Ghanaian architects came together to streamline the architectural practice, education and accreditation through a professional body, the Ghana Institute of Architects (GIA) as the successor of the pre-independence Gold Coast Society of Architects, a colonial social club for Gold Coast-based architects founded in August 1954.[6][7] These architects were T. S. Clerk, D.K. Dawson, J.S.K. Frimpong, P.N.K., Turkson, J. Owusu-Addo, O.T. Agyeman, A. K. Amartey, E.K. Asuako, W.S. Asamoah, M. Adu-Donkor, K.G. Kyei, C. Togobo, V. Adegbite, M. Adu Bedu and E. Kingsley Osei.[6][7][32] 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.[6][7][33] Theodore Clerk also authored the first constitution of the Ghana Institute of Architects.[33] T. S. Clerk had previously served as the president of the erstwhile Gold Coast Society of Architects during the British colonial era.[7] Kwame Nkrumah later reassigned Theodore Clerk to the Ghanaian presidency as a senior advisor.
Clerk died in 1965 of complications relating to stomach cancer.[8] 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.[5]
^ abcClerk, N. T. (1943). The Settlement of West Indian Emigrants on the Gold Coast 1843-1943 - A Centenary Sketch. Accra.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^ abcDebrunner, Hans W. (1965). Owura Nico, the Rev. Nicholas Timothy Clerk, 1862-1961: Pioneer and Church Leader. Accra: Waterville Publishing House.
^Clerk, Nicholas, T. (5 January 1985). Obituary: Dr. Matilda Johanna Clerk, MBChB, DTM&H. Accra: Presbyterian Church of Ghana Funeral Bulletin.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Patton, Adell Jr. (13 April 1996). Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa (1st ed.). University Press of Florida. p. 29. ISBN9780813014326.
