Thomas Babington Macaulay occupies a distinctive place in the history of education in Nigeria. Born in Sierra Leone to a family shaped by the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, educated within the Church Missionary Society network and later transferred to the Yoruba Mission, he became the founder and first principal of CMS Grammar School, Lagos, which opened on 6 June 1859 and is widely recognised as the oldest secondary school in Nigeria.
His importance is sometimes overshadowed by the later fame of his son, Herbert Macaulay, one of the leading figures of early Nigerian nationalism. Yet Thomas Babington Macaulay had already established a formidable legacy in education, Christian ministry and Yoruba translation long before his son entered public life.
His story also illustrates a larger history that cannot be contained neatly within modern national borders. It connects nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, Abeokuta and Lagos through the lives of liberated Africans and their descendants, Christian missions, African merchants, teachers and clergy.
Thomas Babington Macaulay and the World of Sierra Leone Recaptives
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1826 at Kissy, near Freetown, Sierra Leone. He belonged to a generation whose lives were profoundly shaped by Britain’s campaign against the transatlantic slave trade and by the settlement of liberated Africans in Sierra Leone.
Historical biographical records identify his father as Ojo Oriare, a Yoruba recaptive. Ojo had been enslaved, liberated and resettled in Sierra Leone, where the family lived at Kissy and where he became known as “Daddy Ojo”. Thomas was the eldest of three sons.
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The Sierra Leone into which Macaulay was born was home to a diverse population of liberated Africans and their descendants. Many had ancestral connections with territories that later became part of Nigeria, especially Yoruba-speaking areas. These communities developed new identities in Sierra Leone while maintaining, recovering or creating links with their ancestral regions.
During the nineteenth century, some Sierra Leoneans of Yoruba ancestry moved to Lagos and towns in the Yoruba interior. They became known in Lagos as Saros and played important roles in commerce, Christianity, education and professional life.
Macaulay’s life formed part of this wider circulation of people, ideas and institutions across the West African coast.
From Fourah Bay to the Yoruba Mission
Macaulay was educated through institutions associated with the Church Missionary Society. He attended the Fourah Bay Institution in Sierra Leone and was later sent to the Church Missionary College at Islington in London for further training.
After returning to Sierra Leone, he worked as a tutor at the CMS Grammar School in Freetown. He was subsequently placed in charge of pastoral work at Regent, one of the settlements near Freetown associated with liberated Africans.
In 1852, a major transition in his career took him to the CMS Yoruba Mission. Missionary activity had already become established at Abeokuta, and Macaulay was placed in charge of the Christian Institution there. The institution combined Christian instruction with practical and industrial education.
He later worked with CMS mission stations at Igbein and Owu in Abeokuta.
These assignments placed Macaulay within one of the most important networks of nineteenth-century African Christianity. The mission brought together European missionaries and a growing body of African clergy, teachers, translators and assistants, many of whom had strong Sierra Leonean connections.
Ordination and the Crowther Family
Macaulay’s clerical career developed in stages.
The Church Missionary Society’s missionary register records that he was ordained a deacon on 26 November 1854. He did not become a priest at that time. His ordination to the priesthood took place on 5 February 1865, more than ten years later.
In 1854, Macaulay also married Abigail Crowther, the second daughter of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who would later become the first African Anglican bishop in modern times.
The marriage joined two families deeply connected with the history of liberated Africans, Christianity and education in West Africa.
Among Thomas and Abigail Macaulay’s children was Herbert Macaulay, born in Lagos in 1864. Herbert later became a surveyor, journalist, political organiser and one of the most prominent critics of British colonial government in early twentieth-century Nigeria.
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s historical importance, however, stands independently of his son’s later political achievements.
Thomas Babington Macaulay and the Founding of CMS Grammar School
Macaulay’s most enduring contribution came in Lagos in 1859.
Christian families in Lagos increasingly required education beyond the elementary level, while the growing Sierra Leonean community strongly supported further educational development. Macaulay brought to the project experience acquired through his education and teaching work in Sierra Leone.
On 6 June 1859, CMS Grammar School opened in Lagos.
The institution is widely recognised as the first secondary school in the territory that later became Nigeria, within the Western-style grammar school tradition. It opened before the British annexation of Lagos in August 1861.
The school’s beginnings were modest. Historical accounts describe a very small initial intake of pupils, but from those beginnings emerged an institution that became highly influential in Nigerian education.
Macaulay served as the school’s founding principal and remained closely associated with it for the rest of his life.
The significance of CMS Grammar School should not be confused with the beginning of education itself in the region. Yoruba communities and other peoples of what later became Nigeria possessed established indigenous systems for religious instruction, apprenticeship, vocational training, social education and the transmission of political and cultural knowledge long before missionary schools appeared.
CMS Grammar School’s historical distinction lies specifically in the development of Western-style secondary grammar school education.
African Money and African Agency Behind the School
The establishment of CMS Grammar School was not simply a story of a European missionary organisation introducing education to passive African recipients.
African participation was fundamental.
One of the most important supporters was James Pinson Labulo Davies, a prominent Lagos merchant and businessman of Sierra Leonean Yoruba background.
Historical scholarship records that Davies advanced £50 to Macaulay for the purchase of books and equipment needed for the new school. In 1867, he was also closely involved in efforts to raise money for a permanent school building and contributed substantially to the building fund.
Davies’s involvement reveals the broader role played by African merchants, clergy, teachers and families in establishing and sustaining missionary education.
The Church Missionary Society supplied an institutional and religious framework, but Africans were active participants in determining what such institutions became.
Macaulay himself embodied this complicated history. He was born in Sierra Leone, descended from Yoruba recaptive experience, educated in Sierra Leone and Britain, employed by an Anglican missionary organisation, and ultimately responsible for one of the most important educational institutions in nineteenth-century Lagos.
A School Founded Before Colonial Lagos
The timing of CMS Grammar School’s establishment is particularly significant.
When it opened in June 1859, Lagos had not yet been annexed by Britain. British political and commercial influence had already expanded considerably, but formal annexation came in August 1861.
The school therefore preceded the establishment of direct British colonial rule in Lagos.
As colonial administration subsequently expanded, Western-educated Africans became increasingly important as clergy, teachers, clerks, interpreters, professionals and administrators. Institutions such as CMS Grammar School helped produce members of the educated African elite who became increasingly prominent in Lagosian public life.
That educated population would not always remain politically aligned with colonial authority. In later decades, educated Africans used newspapers, professional associations, churches and political organisations to challenge racial discrimination and colonial policies.
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The connection is especially striking in Macaulay’s own family. The father built an institution within the missionary educational world of nineteenth-century Lagos; the son, Herbert, became one of the most forceful political critics of the colonial system that followed.
More Than an Educator
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s work was not confined to schools.
The CMS missionary register also credits him with translating the Minor Prophets of the Bible into Yoruba. The translation was subsequently revised by Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
This work placed Macaulay within the wider nineteenth-century effort to develop Christian literature in Yoruba. Translation demanded more than religious commitment. It required close engagement with vocabulary, grammar, meaning and the challenge of expressing biblical concepts in an African language.
His career therefore brought together education, Christian ministry and translation.
Death During the Lagos Smallpox Epidemic
Macaulay’s life ended in Lagos on 17 January 1878.
The Church Missionary Society’s records state that he died of smallpox. His death occurred during a period when smallpox remained a serious and recurrent threat in nineteenth-century West African towns.
By the time he died, the school he had founded had already existed for nearly nineteen years.
His work continued through the institution itself, through the students and teachers who passed through it, through his contributions to Yoruba Christian literature and through a family whose members would remain important in Nigerian public history.
CMS Grammar School at 167
The longevity of CMS Grammar School offers a striking measure of Macaulay’s legacy.
On 6 June 2026, the school marked its 167th anniversary. The commemoration brought together alumni and other stakeholders and included an anniversary lecture and thanksgiving service organised by the Old Grammarians Society.
The anniversary followed renewed investment in the institution. During its 166th anniversary programme in 2025, activities included the foundation-laying ceremony for a proposed $2.5 million information and communication technology building at the school’s Bariga campus.
The contrast between 1859 and the present is remarkable. An educational institution created in nineteenth-century Lagos with modest resources has survived the annexation of Lagos, British colonial rule, the amalgamation that created Nigeria, independence and decades of social and political change.
Its survival has transformed the school’s foundation from a single episode of missionary history into part of Nigeria’s continuing educational heritage.
Conclusion
Thomas Babington Macaulay deserves to be remembered as far more than the father of Herbert Macaulay.
He emerged from the remarkable society created in Sierra Leone by liberated Africans and their descendants. He was educated within the CMS network, trained in Britain, returned to West Africa as a teacher and missionary, worked in Abeokuta and eventually established his most enduring institution in Lagos.
The opening of CMS Grammar School on 6 June 1859 represented an important development in the history of formal secondary education in what became Nigeria.
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It also demonstrated the importance of African initiative. Macaulay provided educational leadership, James Pinson Labulo Davies supplied crucial financial support, Sierra Leonean returnees supported the project, and African families, teachers and clergy sustained the institution.
More than 167 years later, CMS Grammar School remains the most visible monument to Macaulay’s work.
His journey from Kissy to Freetown, London, Abeokuta and Lagos captures the movement of people and ideas that reshaped nineteenth-century West Africa. It is a story of abolition and displacement, return and reconstruction, Christianity, language, African enterprise and the creation of institutions whose influence endured long after their founders were gone.
Author’s Note
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s life reminds us that the history of modern Nigerian education was shaped not only by colonial governments and European missionary organisations, but also by Africans who travelled, taught, translated, financed institutions and created opportunities for subsequent generations. His story connects Sierra Leone’s recaptive communities with nineteenth-century Lagos and demonstrates how African initiative operated within, alongside and sometimes beyond missionary structures. Remembering Macaulay in his own right restores an important educator and clergyman to the history he helped make and shows that the foundations of Nigeria’s modern intellectual life were laid through complex networks that crossed communities and borders.
References
Church Missionary Society. Register of Missionaries (Clerical, Lay and Female) and Native Clergy from 1804 to 1904. Entry for Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Dictionary of African Christian Biography. “Macaulay, Thomas Babington (B).” Biographical account of Macaulay’s Sierra Leone background, education, Yoruba Mission service and work at CMS Grammar School.
J. F. Ade Ajayi. “The Development of Secondary Grammar School Education in Nigeria.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 2, No. 4, December 1963, pp. 517–535.
Jean Herskovits Kopytoff. A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The “Sierra Leonians” in Yoruba, 1830–1890. University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Adeyemo Elebute. The Life of James Pinson Labulo Davies: A Colossus of Victorian Lagos. Prestige, 2013.
Ayodeji Olukoju. “Lagos in the 19th Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press, 2019.
A. G. Hopkins. Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931. Princeton University Press, 2024.
THISDAY. “CMS Grammar School Marks 167 Years of Educational Excellence,” 8 June 2026.
Vanguard. “C.M.S Grammar School, Lagos Celebrates 166 Years of Educational Excellence,” 27 May 2025.
