The Consolidation of Common Sense Thinking

When the British government gained control over the territories that comprised the Gold Coast Colony in 1874, it secured access to an area long assumed to be full of mineral and agricultural riches. But it is important to recognize that the Colonial Office was in a much better position to imagine - rather than truly know - the realities of the land to which it had just laid claim. In previous decades, British administrators and merchants had gradually increased their presence and influence in the colony, but they had done so almost exclusively within the cozy confines of a few cities along the southern coast. In the mid-1870s, the newly established Gold Coast government remained similarly constrained, meaning that it had little direct knowledge about the expanses beyond the boundaries of Cape Coast or Accra. In part, such isolation was a product of on-the-ground limitations, as the colony had no established system of long-distance communication and an extremely limited network of tenable roads. At the same time, government reclusion was also a conscious strategy designed to preserve a fragile peace with the inland kingdom of Ashanti it had recently subdued via military force. Thus, while resource-hungry British merchants clamored for officials to expand inland and open up the colony to the mandates of “civilization and commerce,” the government favored a conservative approach consistent with the limited human or financial resources it had at its disposal.^{Footnote 19}

While the newly-appointed administration successfully stymied the pace of inward expansion, it had far less control over the rising tide of rumor which framed the colony as a domain of limitless resources. Particularly elaborate tales of riches-in-waiting focused upon Ashanti, which travelers had long touted as a storehouse of limitless gold and unindustrialized mammon. In the decades surrounding the Gold Coast’s 1874 annexation, such characterizations recirculated with considerable fervor. Following a brief stay at Cape Coast Castle in the early 1860s, Richard Francis Burton, the British explorer extraordinaire, offered the testimony of Willem Bosman as well as cartographic and written descriptions about the “Mountains of Kong” (an imaginary range that often appeared on European maps of West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), to confidently declare that Ashanti contained wealth so extensive that it was “impossible to estimate.”^{Footnote 20} A decade later, soldiers returning from the region confirmed such fantasies by reporting that they had seen great hoards of gold in and around the Ashanti capital of Kumasi. When the colony entered a brief but energetic gold rush in the early 1880s, such innuendo enticed many merchants to venture inland to access the mineral as well as anticipated stores of palm oil, rubber, and timber.^{Footnote 21}

In the aftermath of the Berlin Conference, when informed opinion concluded that the colony, as well as much of tropical Africa, was a “new El Dorado,” the nascent colonial government headquartered in Accra moved to obtain more up-to-date estimates about the colony’s untapped wealth.^{Footnote 22} In 1891, Dr. R.A. Freeman, a surgeon who accompanied a diplomatic mission to western Ashanti, reported that while the region was not in fact home to the fabled “Mountains of Kong,” it had relatively few locations “where gold was not to be found.” That same year, George Ferguson, an official sent to report on the gold-mining center of Tarkwa, sent word that area miners regularly unearthed “gold nuggets worth £100.” By the century’s end, such expert testimony had convinced many government officials in Accra and elsewhere that the Gold Coast was in fact a colony teeming with “great mineral and other natural wealth.”^{Footnote 23}

As rumors of the colony’s countless resources waiting “to be discovered and worked by European energy and expertise” solidified into accepted truth, a coalition of mercantile interests lobbied officials in Accra to facilitate their retrieval by making immediate improvements to its dismal transportation infrastructure.^{Footnote 24} Declaring that the Gold Coast’s network of “so-called roads” was little more than a series of ineffective footpaths “blocked with fallen trunks, flooded with water in the rainy season, [and] interrupted with bridgeless rivers,” they complained that they had little means of importing modern machinery, effectively recruiting or managing labor, or reliably transporting their goods to the coast for export.^{Footnote 25} In 1889, a British palm oil lobby concluded that roughly £1,000,000 worth of palm nuts rotted each year because of the colony’s dismal transportation network; a few years later, the African Trade Section of Liverpool’s Chamber of Commerce concurred that the colony’s “primitive means of transport” was its single greatest shortcoming.^{Footnote 26} While the budget-weary Governor balked at such assertions, his counterparts in London became increasingly concerned that these woes had indeed hampered the size and scope of the colony’s trade. In 1893, Secretary of State Ripon instructed the Gold Coast administration to abandon its isolationist attitude, create a Roads Department, and increase its efforts to provide new transportation routes.^{Footnote 27}

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, the Gold Coast government obliged with the Secretary’s demands. It created a Roads Department, sponsored a preliminary survey of possible transportation improvements, and began the formidable task of renovating existing footpaths and building new roads. The final task was by far the most daunting, due both to the area’s environmental “obstacles” as well as a shortage of available labor and machinery. While the nascent Roads Department had little trouble drawing up plans for new roads, it could not actually build them until the government passed the Roads Ordinance of 1894 and the Compulsory Labour Ordinance of 1895, edicts which required chiefs to provide it with a much-needed workforce. Over the next fifteen years, this combination of local labor and Department supervision created hundreds of miles of new roads and converted over 2,000 miles of footpaths into well-maintained routes amenable to the movement of both goods and people.^{Footnote 28}

Unfortunately, such improvements did little to alleviate mounting concerns about the colony’s transportation “problem.” In Accra, many government officials openly questioned if the colony’s ambitious program of road construction had been worth its extraordinary financial cost. Despite the use of local labor, the government spent an average of £93-£227 on each mile of new road; an amount that soared to £500 in areas marked by difficult terrain, numerous water crossings, and virgin forest.^{Footnote 29} Others claimed that these new routes had done relatively little to expedite travel times between the colony’s principle towns. A 1904 report noted that travel from Cape Coast to Accra by hammock carriage - the preferred means of transport for most British residents - and head portage took thirty-one hours, requiring the journey to be spread out over several days. Passage between the interior and coast remained even more arduous as carriers travelling from Tarkwa took four days to reach Cape Coast and nine days to reach Accra (durations that increased considerably during the rainy summer months). Finally, road travel remained extremely expensive. At the turn of the century, the movement of a forty-pound load by head-portage cost an average of 1s. 3d. per day, meaning that a merchant hoping to transport a ton of goods from Kumasi to Accra could expect to pay the handsome sum of £35. In the minds of many traders, such high costs, when coupled with the difficulties of securing reliable labor, threats of absconding and theft, and unstable market prices, rendered commerce in the colony a risky, rather than rewarding, enterprise.^{Footnote 30}

As it became increasingly clear that road construction had done very little to enable British merchants’ utilization of the colony’s great stores of wealth, growing attention turned towards a more modern and ambitious possibility: the railroad. Although a few railway proponents had touted “the magnificent results which [would] follow the iron rails” since the 1870s, government officials in both London and Accra had largely dismissed its feasibility in a region beset with “unhealthy” climatic conditions and considerable environmental obstacles.^{Footnote 31} The dismissal of the railroad’s viability continued until the mid-1890s, when Joseph Chamberlain, the new Secretary of State for Colonies, began to fervently advocate it as a means of transforming West Africa’s future. Insisting that the Colonial Office’s hesitancy to build railroads had prevented British merchants from fully accessing and exploiting the regions’ resources, he openly encouraged his counterparts to embrace it as a revolutionary, rather than impossible, mode of transportation. Although he openly admitted that he did not know what a Gold Coast railroad network might cost, where it might go, or the type or amount of freight it might actually carry, Chamberlain confidently exclaimed that it would spark an increase in the colony’s gold exports, stimulate trade in other products, generate considerable profits, and provide a much-needed boost to Accra’s paltry treasury. A Gold Coast railroad was, Chamberlain insisted, so failsafe an investment that the government’s refusal to build one was akin to consciously stymying the colony’s economic development. If the administration did not erect a railroad in its efforts to solve the colony’s transportation woes, the Secretary stated, then “it would have been better [for the British to] never to have gone there.”^{Footnote 32} When Accra declared that it was willing to cooperate to make the railroad a reality, Chamberlain agreed to authorize a military campaign to “pacify” Ashanti, fund the surveying of possible routes between the coast and resource-rich interior, and secure the loans needed to fund its construction.^{Footnote 33}

In 1898, the Gold Coast government - then under the leadership of Sir William Maxwell - began work on the colony’s first railway, a route that aimed to connect the gold-mining center of Tarkwa to the coastal port city of Sekondi. Three years later, the line was completed and by 1903 it had been extended all the way to Kumasi, providing the colony with a 168-mile route stretching from the coast into the once hard-to-reach interior.^{Footnote 34} And while the new railroad was extremely expensive (the average cost per mile of completed track was £10,314), it delivered results that enthused, rather than concerned, even the most budget-weary members of the colony’s administration. During its first year of operation, the railway accommodated 91,000 passengers, cut travel times for goods moving between Sekondi and Kumasi from eight days to three, and reduced charges for transporting a sixty-pound load from 26s. 6d. to a meager 4 shillings. The following year, it carried over 31,800 tons of freight and helped increase the colony’s exports of cocoa and timber by 600 and 500 percent respectively. Most pleasingly, it did all of this while producing immediate profits, generating £18,147 of revenue in its first year alone.^{Footnote 35}

In relatively rapid fashion, the Sekondi-Kumasi line confirmed that the transformative power of the railroad would, as Chamberlain had argued, prove a great boon to Britain’s efforts to convert West Africa’s “dreadful places” into “valuable possessions” and modern havens of flourishing trade.^{Footnote 36} Throughout the early twentieth century, a growing number of interest groups endorsed the railroad as a failsafe means of achieving colonialism’s ambitious economic and social aims. In 1903, a British commercial lobby proclaimed that West Africa’s new trains were “the best civilizer and trade stimulator extant;” a year later, Sir Alfred Jones, controller of the Elder Dempster shipping fleet, declared that the “iron horse was the best missionary that could be sent” to West Africa, regardless of its cost.^{Footnote 37} Elation for West African railways also spread among the wider British public on account of the growing number of newspaper articles, books, and other publications that promoted the many benefits that industrial transportation promised to deliver to the Empire’s “primeval” locales.^{Footnote 38}

As the railroad became a widely-heralded means of spreading civilization and commerce in the Gold Coast and West Africa more broadly, a new type of common sense thinking began to permeate throughout the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, particularly in regards to the Gold Coast and other West African holdings. At a fundamental level, emerging common sense combined accumulated faith in the colony’s potential riches with a new-found confidence in large-scale modern transportation projects. Spurred by the initial success of the colony’s first railroad, many officials began to assume that building additional lines would deliver proportionally fantastic results. In rather stark contrast with the Colonial Office’s previous conservative approach, common sense thinking also mandated that administrators carry out immediate, and rather ambitious, programs of infrastructural change. Concerned that remaining idle would delay economic growth and progress, common sense advocates echoed Chamberlain’s advice that colonial governments needed to act as the “landlord[s] of a great estate,” envisioning and implementing grandiose projects “in advance of [their] actual need.”^{Footnote 39} Simply put, the Gold Coast administration needed to pursue an aggressive program of transportation improvements that made use of British expertise, industrial technology, and borrowed capital.

Upon receiving such directives, officials in Accra did their best to embrace this new form of common sense thinking. In 1906, the newly-minted Survey Department advised the Gold Coast government to overlook the colony’s slumping economy and build two new railway lines dedicated to the transportation of cocoa and gold, its two most important items of trade. Work on a railroad connecting the emerging mining center of Prestea with Tarkwa began in 1908; the following year laborers struck ground on another route linking Accra to the cocoa capital of Kumasi. In 1911, when the Tarkwa-Prestea railway opened and the Accra-Kumasi line became operable as far north as Pakro, imports flooded northward, the colony’s trade slump ended, and 20,648 tons of cocoa - forty-one times the colony’s total exports of a decade earlier - arrived in Accra in the short span of 125 days.^{Footnote 40} Three years later, when the Accra-Kumasi railroad opened to traffic as far north as Koforidua, 59,000 tons of cocoa (over 77 percent of that year’s export) reached the coast by rail.^{Footnote 41} Although common sense advocates in the Gold Coast government could hardly claim that they had completely solved the colony’s transportation woes or fully capitalized upon its great stores of wealth, they could, and did, maintain that their efforts had garnered fantastic results.

Over the next few years, several persons and interest groups began to request that the Gold Coast government create a master plan of transportation improvements as a means of securing the colony’s economic prosperity. Mercantile lobbies, for example, adamantly argued that the piecemeal successes of the colony’s new railroads all but proved that a holistic program of infrastructural development would revolutionize its wider system of trade. In 1913, timber merchants in the Western Province claimed that if the Gold Coast government drastically improved the colony’s paltry road, rail, and shipping facilities, they would be able to employ roughly “half of the [region’s] adult male population” and provide British markets with over 30,000 high quality logs per year. The future “life of the [timber] industry,” the Manager of the Mendel Mahogany Logging Company declared, hinged on the government’s erection of new railways, harbors, and roads.^{Footnote 42} Similar appeals came from large British firms trading in cocoa, which overtook palm oil to be the colony’s most significant export in 1906. Since most of the colony’s cocoa was grown and harvested in regions beset with transportation shortcomings, such firms argued, a signification portion of their annual crop suffered unnecessary loss and spoilage. Many chiefs in and around Ashanti raised similar concerns and requested that the Accra government take action to ameliorate the high costs and general inconvenience associated with the crop’s carriage to the coast.^{Footnote 43}

While the outbreak of World War I prohibited the colonial government from crafting or implementing such a master plan, the war years solidified Accra’s, as well as London’s, conviction that it should be a crucial economic priority. Despite the fact that the quantity of goods traveling between the colony’s coast and interior declined during the war, its two principle ports, Sekondi and Accra, each became sites of terrible congestion and disarray. As shipping bottlenecks escalated, traders complained that their stores of goods spoiled either in warehouses or alongside the water’s edge: calamities that threw further fuel on the fires of economic hardship wrought by price hikes and drastic import reductions.^{Footnote 44} The standstill at railway stations and maritime harbors became more concerning after the war’s end, when government geologists discovered that various portions of the colony had vast deposits of high-quality manganese ore, bauxite, and diamonds. And while the discovery of these highly-prized resources reinforced officials’ beliefs about the colony’s untapped potential, it simultaneously fueled their conviction that the colony’s dismal transportation infrastructure was the largest obstacle to their successful excavation and export.^{Footnote 45}

Determined to alleviate such concerns, the Gold Coast government approached the war’s end as the ideal time in which to put their common sense ambitions into action. Encouraged both by Chamberlain’s decades-old charge and the Colonial Office’s new hope that the colonies could help fuel Britain’s post-war economic recovery, Alexander Ransford Slater, the Gold Coast’s Colonial Secretary, informed London that the Accra government was determined to improve the colony’s shipping facilities, expand its railways, and sponsor “systematic scientific research” into additional possible sources of agricultural and mineral wealth.^{Footnote 46} Shortly thereafter, the colony’s governor, Hugh Clifford, asked the Colonial Office to endorse, and help fund, a massive program of planned public works. If the colony ushered in a system of new roads, railroads, and harbors, he opined, it would do its part to provide a much-needed boost to metropolitan markets and would bring great relief to the many women and children who continued to deliver sizeable loads of cocoa from the interior to the coast “on their heads.” Insisting that every “progressive colony must expect to find itself in debt,” the governor also reassured London that the Gold Coast’s lucrative resources all but guaranteed that it would repay any borrowed funds in a “rapid and satisfactory fashion.”^{Footnote 47} And while Clifford soon left the Gold Coast to become the Governor of Nigeria, Slater, who was promoted to temporarily replace him, continued to forward such common sense appeals. In July 1919, he requested that the Colonial Office provide the colony with a £3,000,000 loan so that it could carry out wholesale improvements in the colony’s railroads, roads, and port facilities.^{Footnote 48}

To the members of the Office for the Secretary of State for the Colonies, now headed by Lord Alfred Milner, such requests comprised a welcomed solution to post-war Britain’s financial problems. Milner was a staunch supporter of common sense thinking who had long favored a bold program of infrastructural investment in the colonies as a surefire means of sparking domestic growth and many members of his staff, including Leopold Amery and William Ormsby-Gore, were similarly beholden to its emerging tenets. By November 1919, they had considered not only Slater’s appeal, but a range of other similarly “urgent” projects, including the Ugandan and Trans-Zambezi railways.^{Footnote 49} Ironically, however, the Office never granted Slater’s requested loan. In October, Milner instead replaced him with a new governor who had even greater ambitions for using common sense thinking to solve the colony’s ongoing transportation troubles. His name was Francis Gordon Guggisberg.

The Proposing and Planning of Takoradi Harbor

By conventional standards, Guggisberg, who had very little administrative experience and had held no government position of note in London or overseas, was an unorthodox choice for his new gubernatorial post.^{Footnote 50} By those of emergent common sense thinking, however, he was an intriguing and uniquely qualified one. When Milner announced Guggisberg’s appointment, he cited the new governor’s extensive engineering knowledge, years of experience planning and implementing public works projects, and first-hand appreciation of the colony’s transportation problems. Given Guggisberg’s service in the Gold Coast’s Public Works Department from 1902 to 1908, work as Director of Surveys in nearby Nigeria, and command of the Royal Engineers during the First World War, Milner confidently proclaimed him the ideal person to propose and carry out the colony’s much-needed program of infrastructural improvements. Overjoyed at his appointment, Guggisberg unsurprisingly looked to validate the Secretary’s confidence. In his inaugural address to the Gold Coast Legislative Council, the new governor boldly proclaimed that he intended to use his term to “superintend the construction of a broad Highway of Progress” that would completely revolutionize the colony’s economic prospects.^{Footnote 51}

The new governor certainly hit the ground running. As he prepared to depart for Accra, Guggisberg submitted a sixteen-page “Preliminary Report about Transportation” to the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In it, he outlined the basic contours of a bold transportation policy comprised of £8,350,000 of proposed construction works, including a deep-water harbor, an ambitious network of roads, and an elaborate 1,200-mile system of railroads designed to connect the colony’s major agricultural, mining, and mercantile communities. The heart of the new governor’s vision was a deep-water harbor that would enable the colony to receive modern vessels, handle expanded amounts of cargo, and increase the volume of its import-export trade. Arguing that the Gold Coast relied far too heavily on an outdated shipping system comprised of “a number of small ports,” Guggisberg suggested that a centralized harbor would expedite commerce, eliminate the “great losses in stores and waste of labor” experienced during the war, and facilitate the export of recently discovered mineral deposits.^{Footnote 52} While his report estimated that the harbor would cost £2,000,000, it boldly exclaimed that an amount twice that size would still “be money well spent,” because it would generate so much revenue that it would quickly “pay for itself.”^{Footnote 53} Since failing to “provide this transport [a deep-water harbor]” was akin to deliberately “throwing money away” and “handicapping the development of trade in a potentially rich country,” the new governor closed his report by requesting that that the Secretary of State for the Colonies authorize him to hire a Canadian engineering firm, Stewart and McDonnell, to survey of the Gold Coast’s shoreline, propose possible harbor sites, and craft a plan for its construction.^{Footnote 54}

While Guggisberg’s proposals took common sense thinking to unprecedented levels, the staff of the Colonial Office and Crown Agents received and discussed them with considerable favor.^{Footnote 55} With the sole exception of W.D. Ellis, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Colonies, members of each office upheld Guggisberg’s report, which later became the cornerstone of his £24,500,000 Ten Year Development Plan, as a reasonable blueprint for revamping the colony’s economic prospects.^{Footnote 56} Leopold Amery, who became Colonial Secretary in 1924, applauded the exorbitant and comprehensive nature of Guggisberg’s scheme and saw no reason not to approve the harbor’s immediate construction. Sir Henry Lambert and Secretary of State Milner echoed Amery’s support and recommended that the colony immediately commence the deep-water harbor. They were, in fact, so confident in the merits of Guggisberg’s bold plan that they agreed to grant the Gold Coast government, which was already saddled with over £3,400,000 of debt, a loan of £4,000,000 so that it could hire Stewart and McDonnell, survey the coast, and initiate the harbor’s construction.^{Footnote 57}

Over the next several months, the Colonial Office, Guggisberg, and the hired engineers worked to build on this momentum by turning their collective attention to the fundamental issue of the new harbor’s location. Initial considerations focused on the existing lighterage harbor at Sekondi, a facility proximate to existing railways, roads, and resource centers. But after reviewing the harbor’s layout and rather dilapidated state, Stewart and McDonnell declared that updating Sekondi would not satisfactory solve the colony’s shipping woes. Overhauling the harbor, they explained, would require both the dredging of a large expanse of coastline and the wholesale extension of the wharf; actions that would likely cost more than building an entirely new harbor from scratch.^{Footnote 58} Medical experts, meanwhile, expressed concerns about the deplorable state of Sekondi’s urban environs, noting that they were far too congested and unhealthy to serve as the colony’s new economic center. By March 1920, when Guggisberg announced that all considerations for the new harbor should focus on the resource-rich Western Province, Stewart and McDonnell, as well as many in the Colonial Office, had effectively eliminated Sekondi from consideration.^{Footnote 59}

Five months later, Stewart and McDonnell submitted an exhaustive ninety-three page report which outlined, in carefully compiled text, charts, and photographs, their formal recommendations for the harbor’s location, plans for its layout and design, and estimates of its projected economic impact. In rather meticulous fashion, the report proposed that the ideal harbor site was at Takoradi Bay, a locale slightly west of Sekondi which offered natural protection from drifting sand and sediment, seclusion from powerful coastal winds, and waters that, with a bit of dredging, would be deep enough to house modern shipping vessels. Though close enough to Sekondi to be easily linked to its existing railway infrastructure, Takoradi offered the advantage of a “healthy” environment, extensive amounts of open land, and a small population who the government could easily relocate.^{Footnote 60} To give credence to their recommendations, Stewart and McDonnell offered readers an exhaustive amount of data and specialized knowledge, including the tidal depths of Takoradi’s waters, the user-friendly nature of its annual rainfall amounts and average wind speeds, the length and width of the natural reef that would comprise the foundation of the harbor’s main breakwater, and a list of the shortest navigable distances to established ports in Europe, North America, and the British Empire.^{Footnote 61} Encouraged by Guggisberg’s ambitious plans, the engineers then proposed the construction of a £5,000,000 harbor that could berth ten steamships, general cargo vessels, or boats specializing in coal, manganese ore, and timber.^{Footnote 62} After reviewing and discussing the engineers’ report at length, officials in London agreed it to be a “comprehensive and progressive scheme that supplies a satisfactory solution of the question on the provision of a Deep Water Harbor.” ^{Footnote 63} They then gave the Gold Coast government permission to hire Stewart and McDonnell to supervise the building of a £3,500,000 structure that would open to traffic within the next four years.^{Footnote 64}

While London’s approval of Stewart and McDonnell’s report was undoubtedly facilitated by its provision of scientific data and carefully collected facts, official discussions about it often focused on its conscious nods to existing common sense thinking.^{Footnote 65} Several sections of the engineers’ report framed Takoradi Bay as an ideal site because it had long been identified as an area as a location of natural abundance and untapped economic potential.^{Footnote 66} In fact, one of its most colorful descriptions of the harbor site came not from contemporary observations or scientific data, but from Willem Bosman, whose seventeenth-century words painted an optimistic, if rather outdated, picture of the area’s prosperity:

A few months later, when A.E. Kitson, a government geologist employed to survey the Gold Coast for additional mineral deposits, discovered a massive four-square-mile deposit of bauxite a few kilometers away from the proposed harbor site, Bosman’s words, as well as the engineer’s recommendation, proved even more credible. By the waning months of 1920, few colonial officials had any doubts concerning Takoradi harbor’s imminent impact on the colony’s commercial prospects.^{Footnote 68}

Such optimism continued unchecked until early February 1921, when Guggisberg, who had already told Stewart and McDonnell to begin their work, brought the scheme to a sudden halt. The cause of the governor’s dramatic action was the release of the Gold Coast’s 1921-1922 financial estimates which revealed that the colony had begun to suffer from the post-war economic malaise spreading throughout the British Empire. Wanting to ensure that his common sense project could deliver its lofty promises, he appointed a special government committee to review the colony’s short-term economic outlook, Stewart and McDonnell’s plan, and the harbor’s £3,500,000 price tag. Two months later, the committee recommended that the engineers “proceed at once” with Takoradi’s construction, but to do so with a budget of only £1,600,000: £1,900,000 less than they had been originally granted.^{Footnote 69} Though admittedly drastic, such revisions, the committee estimated, would enable the colony to initiate the Governor’s ambitious Development Plan in a fiscally responsible fashion. Endorsing the committee’s recommendation as a sound revision of established common sense, Guggisberg passionately implored the Legislative Council to approve the £1,600,000 proposal. After all, the harbor was the only means by which the colony could ward of future economic slumps, successfully increase trade, and raise the revenue needed to carry out proposed improvements in the colony’s education, social services, and wider infrastructure.^{Footnote 70}

Once the Council had approved the reduced price tag, Guggisberg turned his attention to London, where he directed additional appeals about the merits of the cheaper, but no less efficacious, solution to the colony’s transportation difficulties. In a nineteen-page letter to Winston Churchill, Milner’s recent replacement as Secretary of State for the Colonies, he maintained that “a Deep Water Harbour [was] a vital necessity to the Gold Coast,” and that the £1,600,000 scheme would still provide the colony with a much-needed boost to maritime trade.^{Footnote 71} The only major change, he declared, would be that the harbor would no longer have berthing wharves and that lighters would have to transfer incoming vessels’ cargo to the pier. Since these wharves could be easily added at a later date, Guggisberg encouraged the Secretary to approve the altered scheme at the “earliest possible moment,” so that his government could safeguard the expansion of the colony’s future commerce and ensure the “retention of [its] existing trade.”^{Footnote 72}

After reviewing the governor’s lengthy letter, many members of the Colonial Office, including Churchill and Under-Secretary of State Amery, elected to approve the proposed changes.^{Footnote 73} And while their written deliberations expressed surprise at the drastically reduced budget, they evidence little critical engagement with the thorny question of how Stewart and McDonnell might rectify their original plans in order to meet it. Content that their charted solution to the colony’s transportation ills would still be able to bring “sweeping changes in the [colony’s] system of trade” and contribute to the “progress of the local races,” they bypassed such concerns and quickly granted it their approval.^{Footnote 74} Guggisberg proved equally unbothered by such minutiae, consistently iterating his steadfast belief that the £1,600,000 harbor would give the colony a welcome alternative to its current cornucopia of “primitive” ports.^{Footnote 75} Rather than scrutinizing the new plan, those in London and Accra held fast to the idea that the structure they decided to build was necessary, revolutionary, and entirely infallible.

The shortcomings of such common sense thinking came under a brief, but ultimately unsuccessful, attack in November 1921, when Captain E.A. Bagley, a Parliamentary Member from Lancashire, a region that produced great quantities of textiles bound for West African markets, voiced concerns about both the Takoradi project and its newly-approved £1,600,000 budget. In the Palace of Westminster, Bagley questioned Churchill at length about the harbor’s origins and rationale, the engineers’ selection of Takoradi over Sekondi, and the shifting estimates of its total expenditure. After fielding Bagley’s broad inquiries, Churchill simply regurgitated the assumed truths central to the harbor’s gestation. He characterized the Gold Coast as a place of untapped wealth, noted the success of its recently erected railroads, and confirmed that the Colonial Office thought it wise to preemptively invest in a colony with such a promising volume of potential trade would. When pressed for further details about the colony’s economic projections and harbor’s purported benefits, the Secretary could do little more than curtly state that the export tonnage at neighboring Sekondi had increased from 23,000 to 97,000 tons from 1914 to 1920 and that “further proportionate increases are to be expected in the future.”^{Footnote 76} Far from satisfied, Bagley submitted a string of written inquires to the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies in which he articulated a range of concerns, openly challenged official optimism, and encouraged a halt to the “ill-advised scheme.”^{Footnote 77}

Bagley’s chief opposition to the Takoradi harbor project was his firm belief that the harbor was not a failsafe means of stimulating economic growth in the colony and wider Empire. In a twenty-four-page letter addressed to Under-Secretary Wood, he openly questioned if the population of the Gold Coast was large enough to “justify a Deep Water Harbor” or produce the economic growth that his Office so confidently expected.^{Footnote 78} Were there, he asked, enough people to build the structure, keep its new facilities running, or yield the dramatic increase in agricultural and mineral goods that Guggisberg had optimistically forecasted? The colony’s Chamber of Mines, he noted, had recently found it difficult to recruit a stable work force and even Guggisberg’s appointed committee had noted it would have to import two-thousand foreign laborers to build the £1,600,000 structure. Second, he questioned the assumption that Takoradi would be a great boon to the colonial and British economies. What measures, he asked, had been taken to ensure that Takoradi would attract British and Gold Coast merchants? Would trading firms flock to the “state-of-the-art” structure if storage and duty rates at nearby Sekondi, as well as many of the colony’s other “primitive” ports, remained less-expensive?^{Footnote 79} How many of the hundreds of traders who had well-established operations adjacent to existing outlets would elect to abandon their current locations, purchase new property at Takoradi, and rebuild their stores adjacent to the new harbor? If the Colonial Office could not guarantee that established trade would relocate to Takoradi, then how did it expect the Gold Coast pay for the structure or live up to its forecasted economic growth? If officials in London and Accra could not definitively prove that the new harbor would incentivize traders to alter existing practices, Bagley exclaimed, it was a ridiculous rather than revolutionary project.

Bagley reserved his most rampant criticisms, however, for the newly-approved £1,600,000 harbor scheme. Unlike his contemporaries in the Colonial Office, he openly questioned how Stewart and McDonnell could possibly erect a deep-water harbor originally tabulated at £5,000,000 for less than one-third of that cost. Even if the engineers found a way to use the £1,600,000 to complete all of the necessary preparation work and erect the harbor’s basic components, including the breakwaters, dockyards, and cranes, would they actually have sufficient funds with which to pay for the many other components, including offices, customs houses, storage sheds, bungalows, roads and railways, central to its daily operation? To answer his own question, Bagley provided the Secretary with calculations - compiled with information compiled by those familiar with the current harbor at Sekondi - which concluded that the colony could not possibly build a fully-functional deep-water harbor for much less than £4,000,000. Insisting that Guggisberg, his appointed committee, and the Colonial Office had endorsed a plan that was financially impossible, Bagley declared that they were either simple-minded or practicing some sort of fiscal deceit. To that end, he ended his lengthy letter requesting that the Secretary supply him with copies of the documents proving that the newly-approved changes had, as Guggisberg insisted, incorporated the input of “hundreds of witnesses,” including representatives from various banks, trading companies and engineering firms.^{Footnote 80}

Unsurprisingly, Bagley’s letters held little sway among the common sense advocates who had already approved the harbor’s original and revised plans. In a very brief response, Under-Secretary Wood informed Bagley that he had forwarded his concerns to Governor Guggisberg, but that he saw little useful purpose in halting the project or completely considering his appeals for caution. Guggisberg proved more engaging, compiling a twenty-six-page memorandum that refuted Bagley’s claims and adamantly insisted that the new harbor would allow for the opening of virgin territory, the export of at least 80,000 additional tons of cocoa per year, and tripling of the colony’s annual trade. In private communiqués, many in the Colonial Office chided Bagley for “flogging a dead horse;” others encouraged the Secretary to inform the persistent M.P. that the revised harbor scheme was a done deal.^{Footnote 81} Common sense thinking, it seemed, could not easily be swayed.

The Persistent Power of Common Sense Thinking

At the end of 1921, a confident Colonial Office and enthusiastic Gold Coast government willingly left the harbor project entirely in the hands of Stewart and McDonnell, their hired crew of 3,400 laborers, and the colony’s Residential Engineer. For all intents and purposes, those in London elected to simply stand by and wait for the hired experts to implement their common sense plan. But in January 1923, when the Secretary of State for the Colonies received a brief two-page letter from Guggisberg updating his office on the harbor’s progress, this hands-off approach came to an abrupt end. According to the optimistic governor, Takoradi’s construction was proceeding as “satisfactorily as far as can be seen:” Stewart and McDonnell had cleared and graded areas for the harbor and accompanying railway, lain portions of railroad track, erected several roads, dredged large amounts of sand from the bay, began quarrying the rock for the main breakwaters, and nearly completed a workers’ camp, mess building, and hospital.^{Footnote 82} Many in the Colonial Office and Crown Agents, however, found the report to be a bewildering and considerably disappointing update about the harbor’s progress. A dumbfounded Sir H.J. Read openly questioned if Stewart and McDonnell actually had a plan for the structure’s completion. Rumors emanating from the colony, including a note from the Gold Coast’s Secretary of Native Affairs which declared that “money was being thrown away” at Takoradi, made many other officials worry that Stewart and McDonnell, as well as Guggisberg, had become “hopelessly confused.”^{Footnote 83} When the Colonial Office pressed the governor for more details about the harbor’s progress, he confessed that communication between his office and Takoradi had been sparse, needed machinery and materials difficult to obtain, and work on the harbor’s basic elements, including the breakwaters and central pier, troublingly slow. In fact, the harbor was so far behind schedule it would not likely open to traffic until 21 March 1926.^{Footnote 84}

Outraged that their common sense project had made so little headway, members of the Office of the Secretary of State and Crown Agents elected to reevaluate existing plans for the harbor’s completion. And while they dedicated the next eight months to the task, they focused their energies not on reconsidering their outlook or expectations, but on how to best deal with the “problematic” personnel they had employed to oversee them.^{Footnote 85} In early 1924, the Office decided that the best way to move forward would be to cease the present operations and start afresh under a different engineering team. Guggisberg did much to spur this decision by confessing that Stewart and McDonnell had “let him down very badly,” informing London that they would not be able to finish their work until December 1926 or under their £1,600,000 budget, and suggesting that they might be replaced with a more qualified firm who could oversee an expanded project costing between £2,500,000 and £3,000,000.^{Footnote 86} Agitated at the “helpless impotence” and “contemptuous defiance” contained in Guggisberg’s recommendations, the Colonial Office elected to take matters into its own hands.^{Footnote 87} In February 1924 they sent an independent consultant, Frederick Palmer of London’s well-known firm of Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton, to Takoradi so that he could directly review the completed works, obtain updated information about the colony’s shipping needs, and propose a concrete plan for completing the project.^{Footnote 88}

Palmer’s report, which he submitted three months later, provides important insights into how Takoradi’s hired experts served to perpetuate – not challenge – established common sense thinking. Much of the document levied a targeted critique towards Stewart and McDonnell’s efforts. Unapologetically adamant that the harbor-in-progress needed to “be brought to an end at the earliest possible moment,” he argued that the engineers had spent nearly two years on a program of unfocused work, committed egregious acts of “wasteful expenditure,” and repeatedly failed to produce evidence that they had a master plan for the harbor’s construction.^{Footnote 89} These actions, coupled with their overall “lack of experience and ability,” confirmed that they should immediately be relieved of their duties.^{Footnote 90} While staunch in his criticisms of Stewart and McDonnell, Palmer made little effort to problematize or question officials’ conclusion that Takoradi harbor would revolutionize the economic future of the Gold Coast. Having reviewed the colony’s fiscal data and projected trade estimates, he confirmed that the colony needed a deep-water harbor at the soonest possible moment and would benefit most from one more ambitious and expensive than that proposed in the 1921 altered scheme. To effectively move forward, Palmer summarized, the Colonial Office need not revisit or critically engage the basic harbor idea, they merely needed to remove the existing contractors, invite accomplished firms to submit tenders for an expanded project, and create a contract that would ensure its timely and high-quality construction.^{Footnote 91}

Convinced that the harbor’s failures-to-date could be exclusively attributed to a small cadre of irresponsible persons, the Colonial Office and Crown Agents decided to take complete control over the harbor’s future. In June 1924, they chose to heed Palmer’s recommendations and replace Stewart and McDonnell with a “first-class firm” who had “the correct know-how and expertise needed” to deliver their lofty vision.^{Footnote 92} After informing Stewart and McDonnell that their contract would be terminated (at which point they promptly tendered their resignation), J.H. Thomas, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, also extended a disciplinary hand towards Governor Guggisberg, who he accused of irresponsibly endorsing the ousted engineers, failing to supervise events at the harbor grounds, and jeopardizing the Gold Coast’s economic future.^{Footnote 93} Insisting that the harbor’s failings were a moratorium on Guggisberg’s capacity for effective leadership, Thomas also informed him that he had done irreparable damage to his professional reputation and would not be recommended for a future administrative post. Finally, the Secretary informed Accra that major decisions concerning the harbor’s future would now come from London, where those in the Colonial Office could best oversee the implementation of their common sense plan.^{Footnote 94}

Having seized the reigns for the harbor’s completion, the Colonial Office and Crown Agents’ first point of order was to identify and appoint a new team of engineers. Uniformly impressed with Palmer’s grasp of the project’s past problems and future potential, officials agreed to hire him, and his firm of Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton, to serve as the harbor’s consulting engineers: the experts who would design its layout, oversee its implementation, and maintain regular contact with London.^{Footnote 95} They also agreed to solicit tenders from a pool of potential constructional engineering firms - those who would actually build the harbor - that Palmer had taken the liberty to personally recommend. A few weeks later, representatives from each office met with McAlpine and Sons, the company that had offered the tender “most advantageous” to their desire for high-quality but cost-effective work.^{Footnote 96} After approving Palmer and McAlpine and Sons’s hiring and sending them to Takoradi so that they could concoct the blueprints for its construction, Thomas, who remained convinced that “no one in the [Gold Coast had] any practical knowledge” that would be of use to the planning, construction, or “working of a harbor,” asked Guggisberg to send the colony’s Assistant Director of Public Works, William Miller, to assist the newly-hired experts and serve as its Chief Residential Engineer.^{Footnote 97}

On 15 September 1924, roughly two months after Stewart and McDonnell’s resignation, the new team of experts began their inspection of the incomplete harbor works, surrounding environment, and available equipment and resources. Members of the Colonial Office and Crown Agents, meanwhile, turned their attention to fiscal matters, including settling the outstanding remittances claimed by Stewart and McDonnell and securing the loans needed to expand the harbor’s budget to somewhere between £3,000,000 and £4,000,000.^{Footnote 98} And while he was essentially cut-off from directly participating in any decisions concerning the harbor’s future, Guggisberg continued to flaunt its inevitable successes. In February 1925, he reassured the Gold Coast Legislative Council that Palmer was “one of the most eminent harbor engineers in the world” and promised that the colony was “going to have a [deep-water] harbor” by 31 December 1927.^{Footnote 99} The enthusiastic governor even worked to quell concerns about the harbor’s newly expanded budget, insisting that the inheritance of additional debt would actually facilitate the Gold Coast’s genesis as a “self-supporting and respecting country.” Using the colony’s previous transportation improvements as proof about the efficacy of common sense thinking, he unabashedly proclaimed that large-scale expenditures, coupled with a bit of patience, were surefire stimulants for economic growth: “In 1894 - 30 years ago - the British West African colonies had no debt at all; their import trade was 1 2/3 million pounds. (…) In 1923 their debt was 23 million pounds and their import trade was 42 million pounds. In other words, you cannot increase trade without incurring debt.”^{Footnote 100}

While offered as a show of support for the continuation of London’s common sense thinking, the governor’s appeals for patient goodwill proved well-offered. It was not until January 1926, fifteen months after his initial arrival at Takoradi, that Palmer provided the Colonial Office and Crown Agents with a finalized plan for the harbor’s erection. The slow pace of progress, he explained, was due to the unsatisfying, and now deteriorating, situation which Stewart and McDonnell had left behind. In addition to concocting a poor design and building strategy, the previous engineers had acquired very little of the machinery or materials needed to erect the harbor’s main breakwaters, wharves, or pier. Since he, and by extension London, had been so thoroughly misled, Palmer declared that McAlpine and Sons would need either a four-year extension on the contracted completion date - pushing it back to 31 December 1931 - or some sort of financial incentive that would enable them to take expensive measures to expedite its construction. Eager to see their common sense project up and running, the Colonial Office and Crown Agents drew up a contract that offered McAlpine and Sons a straight 3.5 percent commission, a firm deadline of 31 December 1930, and a bonus of £1,500 per week for its earlier completion.^{Footnote 101}

Within a few months, the progress reports reaching London suggested that the much-impaired harbor had experienced a complete reversal of fortune. In late March 1926, Palmer informed the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies that work on the breakwaters, parapet wall, west lighter wharf, and rest of the works was proceeding at such a momentous pace that the harbor was on track to open on 31 December 1928. Nine months later, the news was even more extraordinary, as McAlpine and Sons had used a “world-record pace” of stone extraction to nearly complete the breakwaters and promised Palmer that they would finalize their work within the next two years.^{Footnote 102} In March 1927, both Palmer and McAlpine and Sons penned London to announce that the harbor would be finished by 31 February 1928, a mere two months after the provisional deadline stipulated at the time of their hiring. William Miller, the Gold Coast’s Chief Residential Engineer, proved less optimistic, but agreed that the harbor would be fully operational by September 1928, just in time for the colony’s annual cocoa harvest. A few months later, when both McAlpine and Sons and Palmer informed London that the harbor would be done by January 1928, the Colonial Office was completely overjoyed.^{Footnote 103} Rather than pausing to scrutinize how this pattern of good news was actually possible, officials instructed the Gold Coast government to begin preparations for the harbor’s opening ceremonies. The Accra administration, which was equally anxious for the harbor to open, scheduled the gala for 3 April 1928: roughly five full months before the colony’s peak trading period.^{Footnote 104}

Convinced that the harbor’s completion was now imminent, common sense advocates began to openly celebrate their hard work, foresight, and persistent dedication to the Gold Coast’s economic development. Though not fully recast here, the harbor’s opening ceremonies were little more than a series of well-publicized acts of self-congratulation. While a wide-range of people, including various groups of Gold Coast residents as well as delegates from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and London, came to witness the speeches of Thomas, Governor Slater, Palmer, and others, the colonial government marked the occasion with the release of a seventy-seven page book, Takoradi Harbour and Railway Terminus, 1921-1928, which offered a rather selective history of the structure’s completion. Glossing over the details of the many ups and downs of Takoradi’s construction, the book flaunted its modern characteristics, featured countless photographs and maps, and contained charts full of innocuous details such as the number of cranes, cubic yards of rocks, and tons of steelwork used therein.^{Footnote 105} Like Thomas’ speech, Takoradi Harbour and Railway Terminus, 1921-1928 portrayed the harbor as a flawless example of common sense thinking and shining example of Britain’s efforts to deliver development to its imperial holdings.

A few short weeks later, however, the harbor suffered an unanticipated, and rather serious, setback. In early July 1928, Governor Slater telegrammed the Colonial Office to report that a team of government engineers had discovered that some of the cylinders which comprised the foundation of Takoradi’s general cargo berth - the location of most of the harbor’s railroad tracks, cranes, storage sheds, and roads - were structurally defective. Early investigations suggested that many of these cylinders contained loose rubble instead of concrete, rendering them unstable and susceptible to rapid deterioration. A more thorough examination uncovered that at least 90 of the harbor’s 246 cylinders were similarly faulty and would need to be fully replaced before it opened to commercial traffic. Subsequent investigations also revealed that both Palmer and McAlpine and Sons had known about these deficiencies since March, but had made no efforts to inform London officials about their existence or proactively repair them. When an outraged Colonial Office confronted McAlpine and Sons, the firm blamed the night-shift team they had employed in their efforts to complete the harbor “at the soonest possible moment.”^{Footnote 106} Noting that these laborers had been under the supervision of the colony’s Residential Engineer, the company insisted that it – like the Colonial Office – was the victim of deceit. And while it later agreed to repair the cylinders and ensure Takoradi’s “satisfactory” completion, common sense advocates in London concluded that they had once again been duped and that their much-ballyhooed harbor was little more than “a mass of inherent defects which defy permanent remedy.”^{Footnote 107}

Over the next several months, officials’ common sense thinking dissolved into a string of pessimistic appraisals and incredibly tempered expectations. Shortly after the Colonial Office made the embarrassing announcement that Takoradi harbor would need to indefinitely close on account of its constructional defects, government engineers telegrammed with news of additional flaws, including cracked lighter wharves, corroding steel bar reinforcements, leaky roofs on many of the transit and storage sheds, and faulty concrete on the slipway and main wharf. The Gold Coast’s newly-appointed Residential Engineer, W. Hewitt, later reported that both McAlpine and Sons and Palmer had asked him to overlook such defects and declare the project complete: news which, at least to ears in London, confirmed that the two firms had endeavored to “get as much bonus as possible” rather than to see the project to a satisfying end.^{Footnote 108} As it stomached these on-the-ground realities, the Colonial Office also struggled to ward off mounting pressures from merchants eager to put the new harbor to use.^{Footnote 109} When the harbor finally opened to commercial traffic on 3 December 1928, officials’ written correspondence no longer exuded excitement or jubilation, but a sense of reluctant caution hardened under months of embarrassment and disappointing news. In fact, the Colonial Office and Crown Agents marked the occasion by hiring another consulting engineer, E.J. Buckton, to conduct a thorough investigation of the harbor’s condition, history, and likely impact.^{Footnote 110}

In March 1929, Buckton submitted a lengthy and detailed report which summarized the harbor’s past, present, and anticipated future. To a large degree, the report upheld officials’ conviction that the once-promising structure had been thwarted by deceitful contractors and defective workmanship. Like many of his colleagues, J.W. Flood found the report to be “a very interesting document [that] proves abundantly that the [disappointing] work was caused by the contractors.”^{Footnote 111} And while Buckton did in fact openly declare that the “same work properly executed” would have resulted in a better, and much cheaper, final product, he took aim at much more than the guile and greed of the hired experts.^{Footnote 112} In many places, his report openly leveled criticism at the Colonial Office’s persistent embrace of common sense thinking. London’s decision to supervise the harbor’s future, he declared, had not necessarily been a bad decision, but it had made a poor showing of it, repeatedly bypassing opportunities to scrutinize the particulars of its design, supervise its implementation, or address emerging problems. In fact, officials’ failure to look beyond the end goal of the harbor’s completion had led them to ignore a string of perplexing questions, including how Stewart and McDonnell could move forward following a £1,900,000 budget reduction, how a Parliamentary Member could obtain disconforming information and use it to effectively question the entire scheme, or how McAlpine and Sons could suddenly made remarkable progress after securing an extended timeline and early completion bonus. Common sense thinking night have accorded those in the Colonial Office and Crown Agents with considerable confidence in their utopian vision, but it had, in Buckton’s estimation, encouraged them to try “to do the impossible,” particularly when presented with looming practical problems and obvious conceptual flaws.^{Footnote 113}