From the Frontline: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke

From the Frontline: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke

by Richard Evans
From the Frontline: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke

From the Frontline: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke

by Richard Evans

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Overview

Sir Basil Clarke was a courageous and intrepid First World War newspaper correspondent. In late 1914 he defied a ban on reporters by living as an 'outlaw' in Dunkirk and by the time he was forced to leave was one of only two remaining journalists near the Front. Later in the war he reported from the Battle of the Somme and caused a global scandal by accusing the government of effectively 'feeding the Germans' by failing to properly enforce its naval blockade. Closer to home, he was the first to publish reports from the Easter Rising. Clarke became the UK's first public relations officer in 1917 and established the first PR firm in 1924. His public relations career included leading British propaganda during the Irish War of Independence, and his official response to Bloody Sunday in 1920 is still controversial today. In this, the first biography of Clarke, Richard Evans expertly portrays the life and character of this extraordinary man − a man who risked his life so that the public had independent news from the war and who became the father of the UK's public relations industry.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780752497273
Publisher: The History Press
Publication date: 06/14/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
File size: 1 MB
Age Range: 12 Years

About the Author

Richard Evans is a former journalist who has worked in public relations roles in the charity sector and local government for the past eight years. He is currently Head of Media for Diabetes UK and lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and two children. Follow him on Twitter: @richardjaevans


Richard Evans is a former journalist, having written for The Times, the Guardian, the BBC, among others. He is the author of From the Frontline: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke (THP, 2013)

Read an Excerpt

From the Frontline

The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke


By Richard Evans

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Richard Evans
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9727-3



CHAPTER 1

Into Journalism


As the son of a shepherd, it was a considerable achievement that by the time James Clarke came to having children of his own in the 1870s, he and his wife Sarah were running a chemist's shop in the affluent Cheshire town of Altrincham and were comfortable enough to employ two servants.

It was the third of their five children, a boy born on 11 August 1879, who would go on to complete the family's vertiginous social rise by becoming both a celebrated journalist and pioneer of a new profession that would change the nature of journalism itself.

When considering those who have led remarkable lives, there is always the temptation to over-interpret aspects of their childhood that might mark them out as special. Certainly, there was nothing about the circumstances Thomas Basil Clarke was born into that hinted at what lay ahead of him.

Yet from an early age, Clarke was undoubtedly different. For his parents, this difference lay in his musicality: while still a toddler he would play tunes by ear on the family piano and sing songs in local shops in exchange for sweets. The historian, on the other hand, may be more likely to see his early wanderlust – as a young child he boarded a train on his own that took him as far as Manchester and a few weeks later sneaked onto a steam boat at Blackpool – as the reason for the extraordinary course of his life.

But for Clarke himself, what gave him the strong feeling of being set apart from other children was the fact that he only had one eye. The disfigurement bestowed him with a kind of celebrity, as children would be either sympathetic because of the incorrect assumption that having an empty eye socket must be painful, or curious to discover how the eye had been lost. Clarke himself never learned the truth of what had happened because he had been too young to remember and his parents would change the subject whenever he asked about it. He was not, though, about to let his lack of knowledge on the subject detract from the attention it brought him and he would invent far-fetched stories about it; one particularly fanciful version was so heartrending that it reduced a pretty classmate to tears and led to an invitation to her house for tea.

The loss of an eye never caused Clarke any great difficulties, though it did mean that at the age of six he had to endure having a glass eye fitted. The traumatic memory of an elderly man with shaky hands trying to fit lots of different glass eyes to find one that was the right size and colour would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was the ones that were too big that were worst, causing Clarke to cry out in pain as the old man tried to push them into the socket. Eventually, his father ended the ordeal by opting for the more expensive option of having some specially made.

His new glass eye only added to Clarke's local fame, with people regularly stopping him in the street to ask to see it. He was usually happy to oblige, though it proved an expensive form of showing off as his inability to keep a firm grip meant that, as he later wrote, 'more than one dainty sample of the shaky-fingered old gentleman's fragile wares has gone tinkling to the pavement to smash into a thousand fragments'.

His disfigurement may have made him feel special as a young boy, but his experience of the education system led to him feeling singled out in a less pleasant way. His father was passionate about the importance of education – he paid for lessons with a local teacher just so that he would be able to talk to his children about their studies – and when Clarke reached the age of eleven he was sent to Manchester Grammar School as a day boarder.

It was a standard of schooling his family could barely afford, but the money they spent on it was largely wasted. His first day got off to a bad start when the teacher told the class that 'all Clarkes are knaves' and then proceeded to publicly ridicule his attempts at Latin. This humiliation set the tone for a school career in which Clarke defied authority as much as possible and was haunted by what he described as an 'indefinable but never-easing load on the mind and bleakness of prospect before me'. Not surprisingly, this resulted in an inconsistent school record. He enjoyed sport and music, both of which he showed a real talent for, and he managed to show some academic promise by coming second out of fifteen boys in Latin in his first two terms, and top of his form in physics at the age of fourteen. But at the same time as he was excelling at physics, he had fallen to twenty-first out of twenty-two boys in Latin and even in English, the subject most closely associated with journalism, he finished bottom of his form in both the summer and winter of 1894.

Even half a century later and with a successful career behind him to insulate him against the memory of it, Clarke would still feel bitter about the way he was treated on that first day at Manchester Grammar School.

'I find it difficult ... to look back with anything but contempt on the man who could so self-satisfiedly knock the heart and zest out of a small ill-taught boy,' he wrote. 'I can see now that this teacher had a disastrous effect on my school life and character.'

Given how focused Clarke's father was on his children's education, it is not surprising that he was disappointed by Clarke's attitude towards school and Clarke later admitted that 'it must have nearly broke his heart to see me frittering away opportunities'.


* * *

For reasons Clarke never discovered, his father had a visceral loathing of the banking profession that was so intense he would often refer to a job in a bank as a kind of shorthand when talking about professional and personal failure. When he was given news about Clarke's rebellious attitude at school, for example, he would warn him that 'I shall certainly see you with a pen behind your ear perched on a banker's high stool one of these days, my boy'. So it was with a sense of shame that, on leaving school at the age of sixteen in the summer of 1896, Clarke took a job as a junior clerk at a Manchester branch of Paris Bank Limited, although his acceptance of it was as much to do with the modest working hours giving him time to practice music as it was the result of his poor school record. His father did not live to see what would have been, to him at least, Clarke's disgrace. He had died the previous year.

Clarke hated the job in the bank, finding it not only boring but also physically exhausting because it involved carrying heavy bags filled with ledgers and coins. There were, though, other things to occupy his mind. As well as playing for Manchester Rugby Club, in 1897 he started a long-distance degree in music and classics at Oxford University that gave him the chance to study under Sir John Stainer, best known for his arrangements of Christmas carols such as God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, and Sir Hubert Parry, who composed the popular hymn Jerusalem. There is no record of Clarke completing any exams during his time at Oxford; he would later claim that he dropped out as a result of his father's death, though this seems unlikely as his father had actually died two years before he started his degree.

Perhaps the real reason was that he was unable to mix the demands of a degree with a draining full-time job, though the work at the bank did become easier when he was transferred to a small branch where his manager was the only other employee. As well as the work not being as physically tough, he discovered that he and his manager shared a mutual love of Gilbert and Sullivan and they eased the boredom by inventing a game where one man would sing a line and then the other would have to sing the line that came next. It may have passed the time, though Clarke later admitted that 'these little interludes, though cheery enough, were hardly conducive to accuracy of work'. Eventually, he was transferred again to another branch and his relationship with his new manager was much less amiable; he was fired after responding to the manager's rebuke that he was an 'impudent young man' by telling him that it was preferable to being 'a foolish old one'.

A job at the City of Glasgow Assurance Company in Manchester followed, but this proved no more successful in instilling in him a love of banking and he left after a year, complaining that he found it 'uncongenial'. With no job apart from a part-time position as an organist in a local church, he started sending music he had written to publishers in the hope of becoming a professional composer. He even tried his hand as a travelling salesman by trying to sell sheet music of a song he had previously had published at his own expense. Called 'Morning Song', it was a poem by the nineteenth-century poet Allan Cunningham that Clarke had set to music. Though he never made his money back on it, the expense was justified some years later when he was walking past a house and felt a great thrill when he heard it being played on the piano inside.

It was around this time, on 14 April 1902 and with Clarke now twenty-two, that his sweetheart Alice Camden gave birth to a baby boy they called Arthur. The arrival of their first child meant Clarke's need for a job was all the more pressing, and so when Arthur was just under a year old Clarke travelled to London for the first time to try to secure a job playing piano at a West End theatre. He was unsuccessful, but during his stay in the capital he met a German man who was looking for people to teach English in Germany.

Clarke was initially sceptical, not least because his inability to speak German made him question how useful he was likely to be, but his prospective employer assured him this would actually be an advantage and so Clarke took a boat to the Netherlands and then travelled on by train to Hirschberg in Germany. There, he made his way to the Bokert Academy, an establishment whose rather grand-sounding name belied the fact that it was based in a small house, and met its French proprietors, two men called Bokert and Prunier who Clarke took an instant dislike to.

Perhaps surprisingly, there was actually a job for him there, though shortly after he started work he began to wonder how Bokert and Prunier were able to afford his wages given the small number of students he taught. He was right to be worried; before long his employment came to a bizarre end, and one he came to believe was engineered as a pretext for getting him off the payroll, when Prunier accused him of knocking on doors in the town and running away. In the confrontation that followed, Clarke gave Prunier a 'flat-handed clout' and Prunier retaliated with a kick to the head that Clarke described as a 'dangerous little sample of the "savat" fighting for which you have always to keep a bright lookout when exchanging fisticuffs with a Frenchman'. Though the kick was sufficiently powerful for Clarke to think 'it would probably have broken my jaw had it landed', he managed to catch his opponent's heel and the momentum of the kick, aided by a shove from Clarke, sent Prunier onto his back, smashing a glass door in the process. Bokert, who had been watching the fight, left the room and returned a moment later with a gun and shouted at Clarke to 'allez'.

'I have done many silly things in my life,' Clarke later wrote, 'but I have never yet argued against a revolver.'

He left, though he did return later to demand his unpaid wages. He threatened to go to the police if they refused and they eventually gave him the money they owed him, though only after deducting the cost of a new pane for the glass door.

Clarke's fight with Prunier is the first known example of the violent temper that would be a feature of his adult life, but it was not his only confrontation during his time in Germany. No one could accuse him of picking on easy targets. He was later told he was lucky not to have been put through with a sword after he insulted a drunken German officer, while on another occasion he was attacked and thrown in a river by some German soldiers he had got into an argument with.

After the job at the Bokert Academy ended, he continued teaching English but made such little money that he could barely afford food and cigarettes, and paying for a ticket back to England was out of the question. But things improved when he got a job playing piano in a small theatre orchestra and he also started giving swimming lessons. Then when the summer ended and it got colder, he ended the swimming lessons and started teaching boxing instead.

He described living abroad as a 'good life', though it was more the existence of a young man without responsibilities than that of the father of a young son. Perhaps it was the inevitable fulfilment of the need to travel that he had felt since he had boarded the train to Manchester as a toddler. Certainly, looking after children on her own was something that Alice would have to get used to. She and Clarke would go on to have a large family and his thirst for adventure, probably more so than the demands of his career, meant he spent long periods of their upbringing away from home.


* * *

Clarke returned from Germany near the end of 1903. The time spent apart from Alice does not seem to have diminished his feelings for her and as soon as was practically possible, on 4 February 1904, the couple married in Altrincham.

A plain-talking woman, Alice responded to his proposal of marriage with a characteristically matter-of-fact 'all right'. There is little doubt that her acceptance of his proposal was one of the best things that ever happened to Clarke. Alice would be a loving – and sometimes long-suffering, given the amount of time he spent overseas – companion until the end of his life and was known for her kindness and warmth.

One of the witnesses at the wedding was Clarke's friend Herbert Sidebotham, who he had met at Manchester Grammar School when Sidebotham had been a prefect and Clarke had thrown a screwed up piece of paper at his head. Sidebotham's decision that calling Clarke a 'silly ass' was sufficient punishment proved to be the start of a lifelong friendship.

Sidebotham, a scholarly figure who studied at Balliol College before becoming a journalist for the Manchester Guardian, would go on to play an important role in setting the direction of Clarke's career. But Clarke's initial brush with journalism happened entirely by accident.

He had re-joined Manchester Rugby Club shortly after arriving back in England and was at an evening team selection meeting in a local hotel when three men who had just finished dining began to sing a quartet from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Clarke realised that the lack of a fourth singer meant most of the chords were missing a note and, knowing the words to Gilbert and Sullivan's oeuvre almost by heart, he decided to join in. When the song was finished, one of the men thanked Clarke and in the conversation that followed Clarke mentioned he was a church organist. The man replied that he was editor of Manchester's Evening Chronicle and asked Clarke if he would be interested in writing an article for it.

Clarke had never before even considered the possibility of a career in journalism and, somewhat shocked by the offer, asked what the article should be about.

'Write it, my boy, on good music and how to appreciate it,' the editor replied. 'Just write me a column saying simply and clearly what you feel you'd like to say about it to someone you liked. And ... let me have it in my office by ... noon tomorrow without fail.'

It was already gone 10.00 p.m., so Clarke went straight home and, fuelled by large quantities of coffee, began to write. He finished the first draft of the article at around 3.00 a.m. but he was not happy with it and so started again from scratch. The sun was already beginning to rise when he completed the second draft but he was still not satisfied and so began a third and, it transpired, final draft, which he delivered to the Evening Chronicle's office with just 10 minutes to spare before the midday deadline.

Clarke bought the newspaper the following evening and saw his work, barely changed, on the page with the initials 'B.C.' at the bottom. It gave him a huge amount of pride. 'That "first-article-in-print" feeling,' he later wrote, 'surely it is the masculine counterpart of the feminine "first baby" complex.'

But as great as the sense of achievement he felt at becoming a published writer may have been, it might not have led anywhere had it not been for Sidebotham. The two men were taking an afternoon walk about two weeks later when Sidebotham suddenly turned to him.

'Basil,' he said, 'I've been thinking that we ought to make a journalist of you.'

Clarke was surprised and more than a little flattered that someone he respected as much as Sidebotham thought he had the potential to be a successful journalist. As well as boosting his confidence, Sidebotham also gave him the practical advice that he should get six months' experience on any newspaper that would have him and to then come and see him.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from From the Frontline by Richard Evans. Copyright © 2013 Richard Evans. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Prologue: 'The Austrians are here',
1 Into Journalism,
2 The Manchester Guardian,
3 The Daily Mail,
4 Canada,
5 To War,
6 'A Sort of Nightmare',
7 Ypres,
8 Eastern Front,
9 Home Front,
10 'We are Feeding the Germans',
11 Leaving the Mail,
12 The Somme,
13 Into Government,
14 Ireland,
15 Bloody Sunday,
16 'Propaganda by News',
17 Truce to Treaty,
18 Back at the Ministry of Health,
19 Editorial Services Ltd,
20 Business,
21 The 'Publicity Journalist',
22 What Really Matters',
23 The 'Doyen' of Public Relations,
Plates,
Copyright,

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