Clarke Family Page
My great grandparents, Thomas Plummer Clarke and Frances Stelfox, grew up in Witton, Northwich. Thomas lived in Tabley Street with his mother Ann, his step-father John Irving (a school teacher), his sister Sarah and his grandmother Sarah Plummer. Frances Stelfox, the ninth of ten children, lived nearby in Witton Street with her father George (a blacksmith) and her mother Elizabeth Ray/Stelfox. Following their marriage in Bolton in 1865, they left England and resided in Russia for most of the next twenty years, where they raised nine children. The family left for New Zealand in 1885.
(Photograph Cla-nor-001, Russell Hudson, 1998)
Introduction
My great grandparents were Thomas Plummer Clarke (~1840-1905) and Frances Stelfox (1847-1924), both of Cheshire. They married in Bolton in 1865, and left soon after for Russia, where for the next twenty years they lived and raised a family while TPC worked as an engineer responsible for purchase, installation and maintenance of steam engines within a number of Russian enterprises, mainly textile mills, within the Vladimir district, east of Moscow, and elsewhere.
In 1884, some of the family returned to England, and in 1885 the family set sail for New Zealand in two family groups. The first group, comprising TPC and son Alfred, arrived in Auckland in July 1885; the second group, comprising Frances Stelfox/Clarke and eight other children (including my grandfather William George Clarke) arrived via Port Chalmers to Onehunga about 9 January 1886.
The family settled in Auckland, where for some ten years TPC pursued his engineering profession, firstly as a representative of English machinery manufacturers and then through his acquisition and management of a timber company, which he sold in 1888. In 1894, he commenced work as an engineer and battery manager for the Martha Mine at Waihi. He died in 1905 at Waihi, and his wife Frances died there in 1924. Both are buried in the Anglican section of the Waihi cemetery. A street in Waihi where they lived was named after them, albeit spelled without the "e" of Clarke. This has now been rectified.
Many of the Clarke descendants remain in New Zealand, and much of the above summary is based on research conducted by Vaudine Barnes, one of those descendants.
My grandfather left New Zealand following his service in the Boer War, and established himself as a metallurgist in the Western Australian Goldfields in the early 1900s (he had previously trained as an assayer at either the Waihi or Thames mining schools). In 1905, he married Elizabeth Annie Douglas, the Dunedin-born daughter of Irish immigrants to New Zealand, William Douglas (Londonderry) and Annie Marie Cuttle (Roscommon). My mother was the second of their four children and was born at Burbanks, near Coolgardie, in 1909. She married William Russell Hudson in 1936 and I was born in Kalgoorlie in 1939.
More of the Story
My New Zealand-based Clarke relatives Vaudine Barnes and Sandra Clarke have studied the Clarke family for many years. Vaudine has compiled some of this information into manuscript form, resulting in three publications. Sandra has also recently completed a summary of Thomas Plummer Clarke and his family, which appears on this website; references are also given to Vaudine's published works. I have recently revised my compilation of a Table of Descendants of Thomas Plummer Clarke, data I have collected on my own branch of the Clarke family (the line from William George Clarke, the son of Thomas Plummer Clarke and Frances Stelfox/Clarke) with information compiled by a number of other Clarke descendants. If you can see errors or add new information to the database please contact me and add your piece to the genealogical jigsaw.