The Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828-1907

The Life and Times of HENRY CLARKE of Jamaica, 1828–1907 The Life and Times of HENRY CLARKE of Jamaica, 1828–1907 JAM...

Author: James Walvin

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The Life and Times of HENRY CLARKE of Jamaica, 1828–1907

The Life and Times of HENRY CLARKE of Jamaica, 1828–1907 JAMES WALVIN

FRANK CASS

First published in 1994 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS & CO. LTD. Newbury House, 900 Eastern Avenue, Newbury Park, Ilford, Essex IG2 7HH, England This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc. 5804 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, Oregon 97213–3644 Copyright © 1994 James Walvin British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Clarke, Henry Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828–1907 I.Title II. Walvin James 972.9204092 ISBN 0-203-98860-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7146-4551-6 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Walvin, James. The life and times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828– 1907/James Walvin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7146-4551-6 1. Clarke, Henry, 1828–1907. 2. Jamaica—History—To 1962. 3. Clergy—Jamaica—Biography. 4. Teachers—Jamaica— Biography. 5. Politicians—Jamaica—Biography. 6. Social reformers— Jamaica— Biography. I. Title F1886.C53W35 1994 972.92′04′092—dc20 [B] 94–342 CIP All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.

iv

Blessed be the man who spares these books, And cursed be he who in them looks, If disembodied spirits can Play tricks upon a living man I’ll meet him some night in the dark And tweak his nose, just for a lark As sure as my name’s Henry Clarke. 5 December 1850

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

xi

1

Early Days

1

2

Tormented in Jamaica, 1847–51

11

3

Making a New Start, 1851–55

23

4

Preaching and Inventing, 1856–65

31

5

Rebellion, 1865

41

6

Conflict and Trial from First to Last, 1866–74

47

7

Not a Friend in the World, 1874–80

55

8

No Way Forward, No Turning Back, 1880–84

65

9

Family Woes, 1885–93

77

10

A Preacher in Politics, 1894–97

87

11

An International Audience, 1897–98

97

12

Unfufilled Old Age, 1898–1903

103

13

Alone Again, 1903–7

113

Conclusion

123

Notes

137

Sources

143

vii

List of Illustrations

Between pages 30 and 31 Henry Clarke Jamaica, c. 1855 Jane Clarke

Acknowledgements

THE PAPERS of Henry Clarke are in the possession of his descendants in Jamaica. Without their help this book could not have been written. I was given free and open access to all those papers, the bulk of them in the possession of Oliver Clarke. Despite the sensitive nature of many issues in the life of Henry Clarke, Oliver Clarke objected only to errors of fact in the book which emerged from my work on those papers. He proved an excellent host, editor and critic. Monica Ladd subjected my first efforts to unsparing criticism and I thank her for that. I also greatly benefited from the critical words of Anthony Thwaite. Without the co-operation and hospitality of various of Henry Clarke’s descendants this book would never have seen the light of day. I am especially indebted to George and Beryl Clarke, Robert and Billie Clarke and Tony Clarke. David and Andrea Hopwood have tolerated my presence and my obsession with Henry Clarke for longer than they deserve. Among the libraries whose facilities I used in the course of writing this book I am happy to thank the National Library of Jamaica, the Jamaica Archives, Gordon House, Kingston, and the British Library. Sections of this book were delivered as seminar papers at the University of York, the University of

x

London, the University of the West Indies, Mona, and the College of William and Mary, Virginia. Ideas from those seminars have found their way into the text. Help from the Leverhulme and Nuffield Foundations made it possible to undertake work in Jamaica and I am immensely grateful for that. James Walvin York

Introduction

THE REVEREND Henry Clarke was an English schoolteacher, cleric, politician and businessman. Born in Mansfield in 1828, he moved to Jamaica at the age of nineteen in 1847. For the next sixty years he taught and preached in the remote western part of the island, living in the main in Savanna-la-Mar. Clarke was an energetic man who found time in the midst of a busy and varied career (and fathering eleven children) to keep a detailed personal diary of his life, and to generate volumes of other papers.1 He left behind an extraordinary amount of personal writing; a six-volume diary which covers the whole of his life between 1828 and 1907, volumes of letters, correspondence to the press, printed pieces, miscellaneous jottings, notebooks and hundreds of sermons. Despite this literary inheritance, much besides has been lost since his death. Of course Henry Clarke was not alone in writing so much throughout his life. It was almost an occupational disease among Victorian clerics to leave behind diaries, sermons and letters. Henry Clarke’s papers belong then to a well-defined and reasonably commonplace genre. What makes Clarke’s writing different, however, and what attracted me to it in the first place, is that it emerged from Jamaica (and an isolated corner of

xii

Jamaica at that) in a period which is inadequately covered in modern historiography. Henry’s life spans the years between the ending of slavery in 1838 (a topic which has attracted an amazing amount of research), and the reasonably well-known twentieth-century history of the island. The period in between—the years covered by Henry Clarke’s diary—is relatively less well-known. Here then seemed a perfect opportunity of filling a gap; of writing about an under-explored period in Jamaican history, albeit through the eyes of one man. My initial aim, to write about Henry Clarke’s life and times, soon began to change as the nature of the material unfolded. The great bulk of Henry Clarke’s papers are concerned not so much with Jamaica, or with the world at large, but with Henry Clarke himself. Even within the format of a diary, which is by definition a highly personal record, Henry Clarke’s account is more the journal of a soul than it is a view of his time and place. This means quite simply that it was relatively easy to write about Henry Clarke but more difficult to discuss Jamaica. Month after month, Henry was concerned with the details of his personal life and struggles, but much less involved with the world around him. *** When Henry Clarke died in 1907 his obituarist spoke of him as an Englishman.2 Yet he had lived in England for only his first nineteen years; for the next sixty years he lived in Jamaica. As a teacher between 1847 and 1851 he hated his life there; he hated his teaching, his pupils, his employer—hated Jamaica in general. When he returned from visiting England, with his bride, Jane Lister, in 1851, his attitude began to change. Slowly he came to realise that Jamaica afforded the opportunity of doing good works; slowly he came to love the island, though

xiii

ever despairing of solving its complex social and ‘moral’ problems. Henry Clarke then settled into the routines of a cleric, committing the rest of his life to improving the lot of the Jamaican people. The Jamaican people were overwhelmingly black: the free descendants of the African slaves imported, until 1807, to work the sugar plantations. The black majority, and the small white elite, had over the years spawned a middle group, of ‘coloured’ people. And to this exotic racial mix there were added, in the course of the nineteenth century, importations of Indian ‘coolie’ labourers. Henry Clarke found it hard to fit into this unusual world. He belonged by colour, profession and national origin to that white elite which had controlled the island in its slave heyday and which continued to dominate economic and social life in the years after slavery. Former slaves, on the other hand, floundered in their recent freedom; no longer owned by their masters, but struggling, as a free peasantry, to survive in hostile economic conditions. Henry Clarke was an outsider in every sense. An Englishman in white circles which could trace their pedigree to the old slave-owning plantocracy; a white man facing a sea of black and brown faces in the countryside of western Jamaica. Never able fully to belong to the local white community, he was even more removed from Jamaica’s black majority. In this Henry Clarke was in a well-established tradition of clergymen who had, since the late eighteenth century, found difficulty accommodating themselves to the peculiar social structure of the islands. Like many of those earlier missionaries, Henry Clarke sprang from plebeian stock. He was a man of humble origins who found himself surrounded by white material prosperity; an Englishman in a world of white Jamaicans who

xiv

despised the English for freeing the slaves; a white man in a black society. By origin, profession and colour Henry Clarke was, from first to last, set apart from the people and groups he lived with for sixty years. What compounded Henry’s sense of isolation in Jamaica (a feeling that lasted throughout his life) was his own personality. To a marked degree that personality was forged by his life in western Jamaica. But Henry arrived in Jamaica in 1847 displaying most of the traits which were to flourish over the next sixty years. He was a man shaped by early circumstances. Life in western Jamaica served to accentuate the basic features of his character, but those were clearly visible long before he left England. We know this because his diary tells us. In the course of a long and varied life, Henry Clarke—like most people—passed through different phases. He was, by turns, a frustrated unmarried schoolteacher, then a happily married cleric with a young family; a grumpy middle-aged man and finally an enfeebled and disillusioned patriarch. From the age of twenty-three he was a family man, his house gradually filling with, and never completely disgorging, eleven offspring. For much of their married life together, Henry and Jane Clarke lived in the midst of large numbers of children or young adults. Theirs was a noisy, bustling household filled with the sounds and frictions, the pleasures and pains of family life. It was a domestic world from which Jane Clarke could not escape. But Henry Clarke took periodic refuge from domestic turmoil in the solitude of prayer and of his writing. Even here, the origins of Henry’s lifetime’s addiction to the privacy of writing can be traced back to his late childhood. He was only fifteen when a notebook, given as a Christmas present,

xv

encouraged him to begin a diary. The diary grew and grew. He carried it with him, completed and current volumes, locked in a wooden case, whenever he travelled. Writing and re-reading his diary was habitual and compulsive. Even on his deathbed, Henry Clarke continued to scribble in his diary. The last entry, five days before his death in 1907, was scarcely legible. His physical powers had failed, he could no longer walk, dress or feed himself, but Henry Clarke still managed to write in his diary. Diaries do not, of course, always tell the truth. But they often convey a distinct, sometimes unique, sense of the world at large. Occasionally they are themselves brilliant and arresting literary forms. At times they offer a unique entrée into the mind of the author. More often, however, they are dull and uninteresting, the fruits of writing merely to keep boredom at arm’s length. Henry Clarke’s diary is unique, though not for any of these reasons. It is unique because of where and when it was written. We know of nothing like it for Jamaica in the nineteenth century. Curiously, however, we have a massive diary, written a century before by a slave master who lived close to Henry Clarke’s home in western Jamaica.3 What follows is a biographical study based on Henry Clarke’s diaries; it is an attempt to sketch the history of this one man, Henry Clarke, and of his troubled times. It is up to the reader to decide how far that diary tells us something about Jamaica in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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1 Early Days

IN DECEMBER 1847, the sailing ship Apolline from London made landfall in Jamaica after an Atlantic voyage of six weeks. It carried only a handful of passengers, most of them returning home from business or schooling in Britain. But among them was a newcomer, a young Englishman of nineteen, Henry Clarke, setting out on a career as a humble schoolteacher in Jamaica. Little in his early life could have prepared him for what he was to encounter. Jamaica had been the most prized of Britain’s Caribbean possessions since its capture from the Spanish by Cromwell’s army in 1655. Like Barbados before it, it became a black society as ever more cargoes of enslaved Africans were brought to the island to convert the abundant fertile land to sugar production. But its natural beauty and economic importance stood in sharp contrast to the brutality and degradation of its human affairs. Jamaican slavery was brutal, inhuman and endemically violent.1 The sufferings of the slaves were indisputable; a collective, lifelong exploitation of one generation after another; from imported Africans to their local-born off-spring. The slaves had no choice but to adjust to the grotesque conditions which passed for normal life in the island, shaping for themselves an independent

2 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HENRY CLARKE

black society which was a refuge from the rigours of enslavement. Accommodation and resistance went hand in hand. Jamaican history was punctuated by acts of individual and collective slave violence, followed inevitably by more punishing and bloody reprisals from a vindictive white plantocracy and the colonial authorities.2 After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, supplies of imported Africans dried up and planters were forced to revise their management and labouring systems. Slaves now found themselves working harder, privileged slaves lost many of the privileges they had taken for granted and, in general, the system was tightened up and run more onerously than at any time in living memory. It was no coincidence that the most savage of slave revolts and the most severe of reprisals took place in the years after abolition. The decision to end slavery altogether was of course a complex political change, but the outcome, in August 1838, was freedom for 750,000 former slaves throughout British possessions.3 Freedom did not, however, herald a marked improvement in material conditions. Many quit the plantations to scratch a meagre rural living, often on marginal or legally disputed lands. Others continued to work on the plantations, but the fortunes of sugar were in decline. By the end of 1847 the Jamaican sugar industry faced its worstever crisis. It was agreed on all sides that the material lot of the island’s poor had declined quite markedly since 1838 (a fact which confirmed, to the planters’ minds, the folly of black freedom). It was also agreed that an effort was needed to improve the lot of Jamaica’s black population. They needed in particular a drive to educate and raise ‘them in the scale of social beings’.4

EARLY DAYS 3

At precisely this moment, in December 1847, the young Henry Clarke stepped ashore at Black River, Jamaica, ‘a poor charity school assistant with a bare maintenance’.5 What had persuaded so young a man to strike out on this venture, so far from home and in so hostile and uncertain a climate? Henry Clarke was born into a poor but respectable and upright family in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, on 30 April 1828. His father, John Corden Clarke, was a silk-dyer, specialising in women’s silks and ribbons, an occupation rendered precarious by the current transformation of the British textile industries. Helped by his industrious and God-fearing wife Mary Waters, John Clarke was a craftsman of repute and always seems to have had enough work to hand. But he needed all the work he could muster to provide for his family of five sons, who filled the small, two-bedroomed house to overflowing. The Clarkes were a poor working family, but both parents bore their material privations with a stoicism buttressed by a fierce religious commitment. Mary Clarke had been converted by a Wesleyan preacher when she was carrying her son Henry and she dedicated her unborn child to the Lord. In time her wishes came to fruition: of her five sons, three became clergymen.6 Both John Clarke and his wife were literate and anxious that their offspring should be better educated than themselves. Henry, for instance, attended two Dame schools (available to poorer children throughout much of England in the early nineteenth century). Some time around 1837 he progressed to Clarkson’s Charity School. This was the age before steel pens and Henry learned to write with quills, preferring to use them throughout his life. His father was keen to complete Henry’s education at a ‘good’ school, though it was an


expense the family could ill afford, and in January 1840 he was enrolled at the Grove House Academy. The burden of so many children, pressing on the meagre income of a silk-dyer, proved insupportable. One son was taken in by a friendly cousin, another son was apprenticed at an early age to yet another relative. In the year he entered Grove House Academy, Henry, aged twelve, also had to leave the parental home, moving into a neighbour’s house—a ‘well-to-do butcher and farmer’—as a companion to his son. For the first three or four hours each day Henry toiled in the man’s slaughterhouse before going to school. Despite the obvious rigours of this life, Henry was clearly a bright, industrious boy with a natural talent and zeal for book-learning. His success at school put paid to the suggestion that he should hire himself out as an agricultural labourer. By the age of fourteen, Henry had begun to excel at the local Elizabethan Royal Grammar School where he transferred when Grove House Academy had closed its doors. Under the eye of a friendly master he prospered, winning a prize, revelling in reading classical Greek texts and heading the class in French, history and arithmetic. He began to read novels, a habit which was to remain a major entertainment throughout his life. Despite his undeniable cleverness, though, Henry was uneasy about his prospects because of his family’s humble circumstances. Looking for work, Henry saw a suitable position advertised in the Stamford Mercury for a resident ‘usher’ at the National School at Conningsby near Lincoln. Thus at the age of fourteen, in 1842, Henry Clarke ‘took leave of my dear mother and father with a heavy heart and wept bitterly’. In a bedroom crowded with other boys, Henry Clarke cried himself to sleep on his first night away from home.

EARLY DAYS 5

Henry enjoyed teaching for the school’s owner Mr Chapman, but Mrs Chapman was another matter, easily angered and always volatile. Henry worked there until December 1842 and in the New Year moved on to become tutor to the five children of the Lister family who lived at Goltho House, near Wragby, Lincolnshire. He received the handsome salary of £15 a year. The Lister home was warm and friendly, a farm of 400 acres with its own family schoolroom where Henry worked in a congenial atmosphere. He loved the rural setting, he enjoyed his work and, most important of all, it was here that he met his future wife. In March 1843, on a trip to Lincoln with Mrs Lister, he was introduced to his employers’ niece, Jane Lister, ‘a short, compactly-built, black-eyed, round-faced brunette girl, apparently about my own age of 15’. Shortly afterwards Henry Clarke and Jane Lister were confirmed into the Church and took their first communion together. Jane was a shy girl and Henry felt immediately drawn to her. At Christmas 1843 Henry’s employer gave him a small pocket book, a diary, in which he made his first entry on 21 January 1844. What began as the inconsequential jottings of an intellectually curious young man developed into a lifelong undertaking which was at once a private confession of a difficult and often lonely life, and a self-conscious effort to create an important historical document. Throughout 1844 Henry Clarke was happy tutoring the Lister children and studying diligently in his leisure hours and rare holidays. By the age of sixteen he was seriously considering the Church as his natural and ultimate destination. The Lister family, however, now fell on hard times and a dispute with their landlord resulted in notice to quit the farm. A harsher future beckoned. Henry followed the Listers to Lincoln in April 1845 and


continued to teach, but the family could no longer afford his services and in December 1845 he left. Henry spent Christmas 1845 with his family in Mansfield and advertised in The Times for a teaching post. On 1 January 1846 a Mr Henry Pritchard of London wrote that he might have a suitable opening. Henry travelled to London on 12 January, where Mr Pritchard, a wealthy hat manufacturer, showed him round the city and later took him to the Orphans’ Asylum. But the school’s directors rejected Henry’s application because of his youth. For two days he wandered through the city in a daze of disappointment, before recovering his senses and registering with a teaching agency. In the event he secured a post as tutor to the principal of a private school, a prosperous clergyman, the Rev. Pritchard, via personal contact. All too soon he began to feel the temper of the Rev. Pritchard, who ‘told me indirectly I was both a liar and a hypocrite’. Despite the alleged clerical nature of the school, Henry Clarke ‘met no signs of spiritual life anywhere’. The schoolmaster even took Henry and three senior pupils to Vauxhall Gardens, one of London’s favourite, indeed infamous, places of entertainment, past assembled prostitutes and into ‘the devils own den’ of lights, fireworks and singing. The pupils stayed behind for an assignation with prostitutes. Henry was mortified, retreating home in some confusion.7 It was in every way a far cry from the rural or smalltown settings which Henry had so much enjoyed in earlier positions. Like many migrants before and since, Henry was taken aback at what he saw in London; his youthful spirituality shocked by the scenes of low life and vice so readily available at every turn. In London, and later in Jamaica, there was no doubt in Henry’s mind that he had been put on this earth to do the Lord’s

EARLY DAYS 7

bidding in the midst of human frailty and wickedness. This, from first to last, was to prove an unequal struggle. Henry’s relationship with the Rev. Pritchard deteriorated further and on 3 October 1846 he was given notice to quit at Christmas. It was ‘a thunderclap’ which plunged the young man into a despondent bout of prayer and soul-searching. The next five years, until his marriage to Jane Lister in October 1851, were years of mounting personal and professional misery. He left Pritchard’s employment with the demoralising advice ringing in his ears that he was ‘fit for nothing but a junior clerk and scarcely for that’. Henry tried desperately to find a teaching post, always in the hope that he could work towards ordination. His frequent applications were met with regular rebuffs, and cries of anguish filled his diary. Henry’s only good fortune was being able to stay in the South Lambeth home of a former colleague at Pritchard’s school. But even these domestic arrangements were disturbed by the man’s financial recklessness. Whether at home or out of doors, Henry felt besieged by troubles and uncertainties. In June, Henry’s diary consists of almost thirty pages ‘of a closely written agony’. His letters home clearly troubled his parents. ‘I do not quite like your manner of writing’, his mother, by now very ill, wrote from Mansfield, suggesting that the Lord might not want Henry as a church minister. ‘I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but when people follow their will instead of prudence and judgement they are always involved in difficulties.’8 These words of maternal wisdom seem to have made little impression on the unhappy but resolute son. By the mid-summer of 1847 Henry was virtually penniless, in need of new clothes and becoming


more desperate by the day to secure a teaching post. At this, his lowest point so far, he recorded that ‘Satan assaulted me with temptation’ and he decided ‘to eat of the forbidden fruit—but the Lord prevented me, and I passed through the burning fiery furnace and suffered no harm’.9 Time and again, until his marriage in 1851, Henry’s sexuality was to be a source of frequent and acute torment. As far as we can tell, Henry succeeded against all the odds in preserving his virginity until his marriage. In July 1847 Henry’s fortunes changed. On yet another trip to a teaching agency, he was told of a vacancy at Manning’s Free School in Savanna-laMar in Jamaica—with the distant prospect of ordination into the Church of England in Jamaica. The salary is £60 per annum, board and lodging, and the passage money would be paid…When 23 years of age, if my conduct had been uniformly good, I should be eligible for ordination by the Bishop of Jamaica.10 It was an opportunity he could scarcely turn down. After months of anguish and frustration it seemed that his fortunes were on the rise. He secured a summer teaching job in London and began to prepare himself for the move to Jamaica. Returning to see his parents in Mansfield, Henry was invited to visit the Lister family in Lincoln and renewed his acquaintance with Jane. He recorded in his diary: ‘the truth is, I love her. To tell her so however would I think be of no use’. Jane gave Henry a lock of her hair, but apart from that and the occasional hint of friendship, Henry had no practical evidence that she harboured any special affection for him. Nevertheless, he was convinced in his own mind that a special bond had been forged between them.

EARLY DAYS 9

In his first lonely sojourn in Jamaica, this affection for Jane Lister seems to have remained one of Henry’s few strengths and comforts during a time of unqualified gloom. At the beginning of October 1847, Henry Clarke returned to his family in Mansfield, visiting as many relatives and friends in the neighbourhood as possible. He doubted whether he would ever again see his ailing parents. As he left them he ‘burst into a fit of involuntary sobbing’. He returned to London on 7 October, and a week later boarded the sailing ship Apolline, along with the rest of the passengers, a cow, four sheep and a mound of vegetables. On board he found himself the centre of attention of six young women returning home from school in England. Later that same day the vessel anchored at Gravesend before finally heading down the Channel and out into the Atlantic bound for Jamaica. It was Henry’s great fortune that he was a natural sailor, quite unaffected by the Atlantic storms. The thought of the even more uncertain tempests of life ahead plagued Henry much more than the Atlantic itself and prayers dotted his journal. When the weather was good, life aboard passed pleasurably enough; reading to each other on deck, playing cards and chess in the evenings. Henry quickly developed ‘a special penchant for the eldest of the maiden ladies’. They touched hands playing chess and Henry recorded that ‘our attachment was pleasant while it lasted and did no harm.’ But the young woman warned him about his future employer, Mr Fidler, ‘a coarse vulgar man’, assuring Henry that ‘teaching a lot of brown boys’ would be Very irksome’.11 Other passengers plied him with miserable accounts of Fidler’s character. On 1 December, Henry and his fellow passengers caught their first glimpse of Jamaica, at Morant


Point on the easterly tip of the island: ‘It seemed a perfect paradise’ The vessel nosed its way along the island’s southern coast, dropping anchor at Port Royal, the former headquarters of Jamaica’s early piratical years. Henry was rowed across Kingston harbour and took lodgings in the town. He was impressed by a group of young ladies, ‘of all hues between black and white’, but he was even more struck by the vast amount of alcohol consumed by the locals and noted: ‘I must take a resolute stand against it’ Indeed, Henry Clarke was to spend the rest of his life taking a resolute stand against an extraordinary array of the island’s deeply rooted social habits. Rejoining his ship, the closer he came to his place of employment, the lower his spirits dropped. By the time the Apolline dropped anchor off Savanna-la-Mar in the west of the island, a mood of gloomy foreboding had engulfed him. Events were to justify his feeling that his path was ‘crooked and difficult’.12 On 11 December, a servant took Henry from the harbour in a horse and gig and deposited him at ‘The Castle’ (the headmaster ‘s house at Manning’s Free School). He was immediately introduced to his employer and some of his future pupils. On this same day his mother died in England, convincing Henry that ‘God had appointed her my ministering spirit in this land of darkness and oppression’.13 But even in his gloomier moments, of which there were to be many, he could never have imagined how instantly difficult and troubled his new life and career would prove to be.

2 Tormented in Jamaica 1847– 51

SAVANNA-LA-MAR was a poor, dusty town which served as the regional capital for the south-west of the island but which showed in its crumbling and peeling façades the material decay which characterised the whole area. The charms of its natural setting, perched on the rim of a magnificent bay and hemmed on to the coastal strip by wild and beautiful mountains, soon faded. Socially, it proved a miserable place for the young Englishman who found himself mixing with disgruntled ex-slaveowners, farmers and property-owners who cared little for the local black population but bemoaned their own fall from material grace. Henry Clarke was soon convinced that slavery was responsible for the manifold social problems he saw around him. Wherever slavery existed, he asserted, ‘it was impossible that there could be, not only spiritual life, but any family life—or any sense of morality or justice’. This was to prove a recurring theme in Henry’s writing and outlook throughout his life in Jamaica. He was not alone in blaming slavery for the ills of free Jamaica, but he asserted his views with a pugnacity which, as he grew older and more prominent, served to alienate him from his contemporaries. After two years in Jamaica, Henry Clarke began to take a keener interest in secular politics, though


he had expressed a certain curiosity (especially in Free Trade) during his teens in England. Not surprisingly, religion was the mainspring of his political views. He came to accept, as an article of unquestioned faith, that ‘all men are born into the world, and stand before God equal’. Such a view was unlikely to recommend itself to the survivors and defenders of the old slave system. Before long he became as assertive and opinionated in his political judgements as he was self-confident and self-assured in his religion. It was to make for a heady mix of public assurance and rectitude which other people found unattractive. For the moment, though, Henry had more pressing concerns. He claimed to have enjoyed work and been successful as a teacher in England, but he was utterly ill at ease and thoroughly miserable in Jamaica. His routines were simple and unchanging. Work began at 7 a.m. and lasted, with a lunch break, until three in the afternoon. Then he read and wrote until four o’clock; dined and exercised until six; read from six until seven; talked with Mr Fidler ‘while he smokes and drinks’ after that until retiring to his room at 8.20 to complete his diary. He went to bed at nine. Manning’s Free School had been endowed in the previous century through a legacy in the form of a gang of slaves; until emancipation the school had catered solely for white pupils ‘and a few brown boys who had been freed by their fathers’. When Henry arrived, there were 150 boys and fourteen resident scholars, all taught in one classroom and the adjoining open piazza. Each day Henry set the boys their first task before crossing over to ‘Manning’s House’ to supervise a geography class for girls. By then ‘the school becomes a perfect bedlam’. Henry felt obliged to beat three or four

TORMENTED IN JAMAICA, 1847–51 13

boys (‘half a dozen strokes on the hand’) and demand silence. No sooner did tranquillity settle than the ‘racket and confusion’ broke out again. More floggings of noisy pupils, further attempts to teach, efforts to stop pupils copying each other’s work, such was his daily pattern. By early afternoon ‘my voice is hoarse, my strength gone and my patience utterly exhausted’.1 Henry Clarke disliked the headmaster, Mr Fidler, almost as much as his work and his only real friend was the local vicar, Mr Mayhew, a Cambridge graduate in his late thirties, whose home ‘was a spot of English morals and refinement, transplanted like an oasis into this distant desert of slavish degradation’. Henry’s woes were not simply professional, and his feeling of general despondency did not lift when he left the classroom. What plagued him more than anything was his own acute but deeply frustrated sexuality. Unhappy at the thought of giving in to sexual temptation, he was utterly miserable in resisting it, though consoling himself with the thought that ‘the natural inclinations of every man are especially strong in this climate’. As in so many other areas of his life, Henry portrayed the problem as a battle: Henry Clarke beset by, but valiantly resisting, the world, the flesh and the devil.2 The solution was clear, but evidently remote: ‘I earnestly hope God will ere long give me a suitable wife for I cannot help but burn.’ For the first two years in Jamaica, Henry Clarke’s diary makes depressing reading. For him, the process of compiling the journal had changed; it was no longer a casual account of daily, often inconsequential affairs, but had now become something close to a form of personal therapy. As he approached his twenty-first birthday, in 1848, his confessions sound like the work of a much


older, world-weary person: ‘I know life chiefly by its sorrows and disappointments—its labours and its hardships.’ By the New Year of 1850, he was writing: ‘I laid my head on my lonely pillow and wept and sobbed till I fell asleep’ From the first, Henry Clarke felt isolated from those people among whom he ought to have found friends or acquaintances, an isolation which was to last a lifetime. They were either poor ‘and very worldly’, people with whom he had ‘few feelings in common’, or rich and too addicted to fleshly enjoyments. Alone in the company of women he could never escape sexual tension. On a rare holiday, riding, swimming and shooting, he continued to feel out of his element. At times Henry Clarke seemed comfortable only when he felt miserable. Even his close associate and employer, Mr Fidler, rarely afforded Henry more than the barest of material facilities. Fidler’s self-indulgence, especially in food and drink, contrasted sharply with Henry’s meagre life. While Fidler feasted himself at one end of the dining table, his young schoolmaster watched across his own humble meal from the other end. When guests arrived unannounced, Henry was unceremoniously ejected from his own room. Henry’s only solace seems to have been his books. He read voraciously, as he did throughout his life, immersing himself in improving literature (‘I have lately finished Virgil’s Eneid, Horace, and the seven books of Homer, and am now beginning the Greek plays’), though the Bible remained his favourite book. Even the pleasures of reading were hard to sustain in the face of physical and psychological ailments. He regularly complained of illness, especially in his throat, and openly admitted to himself that the cause of his ill-health might have


been ‘nervous’. His throat was treated by painful blistering which left him in even greater agony. After three years in the island he had weakened, was thin, wretchedly depressed, socially isolated and miserable in his work. At this, his lowest ebb, the cholera epidemic struck Jamaica, part of its devastating surge westward from Russia, through Europe and on to the New World, leaving behind a fearful death toll, and plunging medical and political opinion into a turmoil about diagnosis and treatment.3 Through the winter of 1850, the cholera exacted its dreadful toll in the island, especially in Kingston; Henry dutifully recorded its ghastly statistics and even wrote a poem about it which was published in the Morning Journal. In the last weeks of 1850, the cholera made a steady advance towards the west of Jamaica. It devastated Black River, only a few miles to the east of Savanna-la-Mar, and began to attack Montego Bay to the north. The residents of Savanna-la-Mar felt trapped, waiting for the inevitable. Henry made arrangements for his diary to be shipped to England in case of his death, a sure indication of the importance he now attached to the document. Some locals even painted the plea ‘Lord have mercy on us!’ on their doors in the hope they would be spared in true biblical fashion. As the year ended, the sombre mood throughout the island seemed to suit Henry’s own introspective bleakness: ‘though bruised and shattered and broken, I am not yet utterly overwhelmed’.4 In this period of acute anxiety Henry found support in dreams and fantasies about Jane Lister, the young girl he had last seen more than three years earlier in Lincolnshire. In April 1849 he confessed: ‘It still affords me a great delight to think of her, and I have no doubt if I were again in her company I should be as fond of her as ever.’ Two


days later he summoned up enough courage to write to her. Even Henry could not explain why his emotions surfaced when they did—‘I cannot tell how it is that feelings long almost dormant should again and without any apparent cause be so strongly excited’—but the more troubled and unhappy he became, the more he thought about her. Henry greeted the beginning of the school holidays in the summer of 1850 with more complaints: ‘There is nobody I can visit with pleasure and the prospect of a month without a soul to speak to is frightful’ But local white people obviously knew of Henry’s predicament and invited him to a host of local functions. His diary records that every few days he enjoyed someone’s hospitality. One day he dined at Mr Galbraith’s, a few days later he was entertained at Cornwall Estate; a week later he travelled to Old Hope guest house before moving on to acquaintances at Negril. Yet, acutely aware of his humble origins, Henry refused to think of Jamaica as any more than a temporary home. His thoughts and aspirations always drifted back to England and Jane, though she had not replied to his letter. He continued to pine for her as if she were openly committed to him, even writing verse dedicated to, and about, her: a poem, of eight stanzas, which mingled selfpity with the maudlin. In 1851 Henry was offered a better teaching post, at the Free School to the north at Lucea (where the schoolmaster had died of cholera). He hesitated, for what he really wanted was to go home to Jane, The offer of the post made his life more, not less, unhappy; now he had to wrestle with chronic indecision. Should he remain with Fidler at Manning’s (fantasising that Fidler might die and leave him his money), or should he branch out north to Lucea? He believed that the threat of his


departure had secured better conditions from Fidler. When Fidler reneged on his promises, Henry suffered the added indignity of having to dispatch a messenger to retrieve his withdrawal from the Lucea position. Thus in early March 1851 Henry Clarke rode to Lucea for an interview at the local school. There he was fought over by conflicting groups in local parish politics, an unedifying squabble between the mean-spirited and vindictive trustees of the school. In the event he was chosen by eight votes to three. But even success felt bitter as it ended all hope of returning to England and Jane. In a rare moment of public revelation, Henry mentioned Jane Lister to Mr Fidler, who advised him to propose to her immediately. Henry mulled this over. Since he thought about Jane Lister endlessly, what harm could be done by contacting her? Thus, after school on 10 March 1851 he wrote the letter which was to change his life and hers. My dear Miss Lister (for I know not yet if I may address you by a more endearing term), I hereby send a letter to your father, requesting his permission to make you an offer of marriage. I have never yet told you in words of my love, but I am sure it was no secret to you. And (more especially when I recall the little incidents of my last visit) I cannot but hope my love is reciprocated. Three tedious years have passed since then, during which period I have heard nothing from you. Fears will naturally arise as to what has taken place during my absence, but if your love be aught like mine, such fears I feel are groundless. I cannot look upon that highly-cherished memento of yours, which now lies before me, and believe that you have forgotten me. My


love for you began from the moment I first met you, and time and absence have only strengthened it. I have a long story to tell but must wait to know how it will be received. Should my suit be entertained, no ordinary obstacle will keep me much longer away from you. If on the other hand, my hopes are to be disappointed I request you to make the communication in your own writing. I know not how I should bear it, though I am pretty well schooled to endurance. In such case I can rely on your kindness that you will destroy this letter, and mention the receipt of it to no one. I have two months to wait before I can possibly receive your reply. In pity to me do not delay it. I am, my dear Miss Lister, Your very faithful friend and admirer, Henry Clarke.5 Agitated and anxious—but ever hopeful of finding happiness with Jane Lister—Henry rode north on 13 March to take up his new teaching position at Lucea. The relatively short journey took two and a half days; he stopped and dined with a string of friends en route. In Lucea he was greeted and housed by the local vicar, Mr Stainsley. Lucea was a small town, a charmingly situated harbour on the north-western tip of the island in the parish of Hanover. But it was also very poor (and still in mourning for the dead from the recent epidemic). His hosts were kind and considerate—a sharp contrast to his time with Fidler—but Henry felt unwell from the start. Chest pains, a chronic sore throat, heavy sweating—all defied various cures suggested by Mr Stainsley. Henry immediately began the busy life of a local teacher, but it afforded him few material rewards.


The town was poor, with few local people able to educate their children (though Henry thought ‘the coloured appear superior to the same class in Westmoreland’). His pupils could afford no more than one shilling per week for their schooling, and his total private tutoring would yield a mere £20 a year. Moreover, Henry still found no real pleasure in teaching, and no improvement in his physical or mental state. As he completed a volume of his diary, he reflected on its unhappy contents. Three years and three months, ‘more than 1,000 days’, in which ‘there is not one single day—I might almost say hour—that I can look back upon with pleasure’. Henry was quickly adopted by local society, brown and creole. He spent hours horse riding, exploring the mountains behind the town, shooting, and enjoying the usual round of dinners and entertainments in local homes. Even he could not be unimpressed by the beauties of the region; of the mountain-top view of Dolphin’s Head, south over the plain of Westmoreland and north across Lucea to the open sea. Despite all this, Henry felt more unhappy in Lucea than in Savanna-la-Mar and claimed to have had few local friends. His private tuition was undercut by a rival teacher (who charged a mere sixpence a week), and he even considered moving back to the muchdespised Mr Fidler. Finally, on 27 May 1851 the much anticipated reply from Jane arrived. It is worth repeating her letter in full, for it catches the surprise and bewilderment she felt at Henry’s unexpected declaration. April 26th, 1851. My dear Mr Clarke, Father and I each received a note last Monday and although they both bear your signature, yet the contents were such that I


can scarcely reconcile myself to the idea that you yourself have written them. You say in your note, that although you never told me of your love, you felt sure I was aware of it. Oh! Mr Clarke, if such has been your idea, how mistaken you have been. I never, I can truly say, was more surprised in my life than when I read the avowal of your love. There never was anything in your words or conduct to lead me to suppose you entertained any warmer feeling towards me than everyday friendship. The last night you were at Wragby I was present when my father expressed a wish that you would write and tell me a few particulars of Jamaica —you promised you would—months passed by, we left Wragby and in the midst of much trouble and anxiety I dare say Father had quite forgotten the request he had made. I also after a time gave up all thought of hearing from you. I was however most agreeably surprised after a lapse of a year and a half to receive the long promised epistle. It was duly appreciated and I felt pleased to think that in the midst of so many new acquaintances we were not quite forgotten. You said you saw no probability of ever seeing your Lincolnshire friends again. I was told before you left England of attachments formed during your stay in France, and also an insinuation of something of the kind during your voyage to and on your arrival in Jamaica—most assuredly my dear Mr Clarke there is nothing in all this to indicate a preference for myself. I never heard that my name was mentioned or the least enquiry made after me in any of your letters to England and I am sure I had not the slightest suspicion that beneath such apparent indifference you felt the least interest in aught


concerning me. What my feelings have been since I read your letters, none can ever know. I feel in a sort of dream, and try in vain to convince myself of the truth of your love. If I really am to believe it as a blessed reality you must write and tell me all again; at present I cannot divest myself of the idea that the letters are not from you, but from someone who in making use of your name has attempted to trifle with my feelings, and then I cannot but ask myself who is there in the whole world that would act so cruelly? I am sending you a strange unconnected sort of scrawl but do excuse it—perhaps it will never reach you, and if it does I wonder how long before I receive an answer.6 This letter pleased Henry, but he now began to worry about the prospect of bringing a young bride back to his meagre existence in Jamaica. To make matters worse, cholera flared up again in settlements between Lucea and Savanna-la-Mar. He resolved that the only way to settle matters was to return to England. Taking leave of absence, at midnight on 20 June 1851 Henry Clarke took a canoe along the coast to Montego Bay. Arriving at 6 a.m., he boarded the Sophia, where he had a berth for £25. Three and a half years after arriving in Jamaica, Henry Clarke took leave of the island. If I thought I were never to see it again I should be much better satisfied. I never have liked it and I never shall.’7

22

3 Making a New Start 1851–55

THE LONG sea voyage to England gave Henry Clarke plenty of time to indulge in his favourite hobby of thinking and writing about himself. The further his vessel sailed from Jamaica, the more he dreaded the prospects of returning to the island with a new wife. He felt so unwell that even his fellow passengers remarked on his unhealthy condition, especially his nervous tic. A doctor on board gave frequent medical advice, and made pessimistic noises about the future. For his part Henry was convinced that his problems were a result of the stresses of the past three and a half years; remove his sexual frustration and his life would change. On 16 August the Sophia moored at London’s East India docks. As was customary with travellers from Jamaica, Henry first called at the Jamaica Coffee House (a cross between a social club, place of gossip and news and poste restante for the West Indian mail). The message from Jane was curt and cool. As Henry wandered round the city in a daze, around the ‘astounding wonders’ of the Great Exhibition, he was now alarmed that he might have made the wrong decision. When money failed to arrive from Jamaica he once again found himself penniless in the great city.1


At the end of August 1851 he took the train from Euston. The reunion with his own relatives was formal and a little stilted. A letter from Jane was waiting for him; a rebuke and a pointed reminder of how odd his own behaviour had been. Henry travelled to Mansfield to visit his father and his new wife, Ann Thornton (they had been married on 12 June 1849), visiting friends and scenes from his childhood. He retraced his steps through Lincoln and as he got closer to Jane’s home in the little village of Baumber, he became tense and excited. When the couple finally came face to face, I clasped her in my arms and pressed her to my breast. She received my embrace passively— uttered not a word and walked out of the room again as soon as I had liberated her. She presently returned and we sat down to tea.2 Over the next few days, the couple got to know each other, enjoying the rounds of visits to friends, to relatives and to church, but best of all simply talking to each other. Henry was keen to marry as soon as possible, but sometimes burst into tears on her shoulder when he thought about taking her back to Jamaica. Needless to say, she was perturbed by this turn of events.3 By October 1851, much of their time was taken up by wedding preparations. As Henry ticked off the days, ‘that dreadful land is never out of my thoughts and it destroys every enjoyment’, and he seemed gloomier than ever. Tuesday 14 October 1851 dawned cool, fresh and cloudless. Henry Clarke and Jane Lister were married at 8 a.m. at Baumber Church. They then took a tearful leave, travelling by horse, then train, to Lincoln and on to Manchester where they were to stay with relatives.

MAKING A NEW START, 1851–55 25

Henry Clarke was extremely happy in the early days of married life. He and his bride spent their spare time visiting the various sights of Manchester, attending lectures, listening to local preachers, Henry visiting factories. By late November it had become clear that the couple had no alternative but to return to Jamaica. Jane could not bear to say farewell to her father and friends; she slipped away from home in tearful secrecy. They celebrated Christmas 1851 at sea, but Jane was horribly seasick as the ship rode out one Atlantic storm after another. Finally, they made landfall in Jamaica on 19 January 1852. Ten days later their vessel narrowly squeezed past the rocks and dropped anchor at the northern port of Falmouth. The Clarkes changed ships and sailed on to Lucea. On their first Sunday in the island, Henry wrote: …after returning from church we both returned to our room for the afternoon’s nap, and then for the first time since my marriage I experienced a calm restful feeling… I felt the struggle was over, and that now I had that sweet girl all to myself, with nothing and nobody coming between us. I have always dated my real honeymoon from that afternoon. During the previous 8 years the sexual desire had been the plague, the burden and danger of my life. From that day it became to me the inexhaustible source of the most exquisite happiness and delight.4 There is no doubt that Henry’s life was changed beyond measure, and for the better. His health improved dramatically, and he embarked on a regime which included daily sea-bathing. Gradually his full strength and spirits were restored. He was, in private at least, deeply contented, no longer


plagued by sexual tensions but at ease with himself and his impulses. Before February 1852 his battles had been with himself. Henceforth he found—and made—enemies in the world around him. Jane was now pregnant—the first of eleven pregnancies over the next twenty years—and the couple moved into a new home, ‘Everton’, set in five acres of land. Although Henry had returned to his teaching post in Lucea, his goal henceforth was to be ordained; he had already embarked on a rigorous programme of self-study and preparation for the ministry. His lack of formal educational qualifications was deceptive. He was an extremely well-read young man, with a fierce critical capacity (though one sometimes unrestrained by a sense of moderation or humility) and with a voracious appetite for hard work. In time he was to become a genuinely learned (if not always wise) man. In May 1852 Henry Clarke travelled to Montego Bay to be examined for ordination by the local archdeacon: he gave me pen, ink and paper, and 25 questions to answer—which in about 2 hours I accomplished pretty well to my satisfaction. I then put the 9th Article into Latin—after which I read a chapter of Grotius (lib 3 cap 7) and part of the 5th Chapter of John in Greek, and lastly, I turned the first 6 verses of Luke 14 Chap: from Greek into Latin.5 This from a man whose formal education had been minimal. Two weeks later Henry sailed to Kingston to be ordained as a deacon by the Bishop of Jamaica. He returned home qualified and anxious to work as a preacher. His first sermon, ‘Pray without ceasing’, was really a statement on his own life. In the


following year, 1853, he came top of the class in his final examinations for ordination and was ordained into the church in Spanish Town Cathedral on 25 September 1853. Henry was a busy man. His school in Lucea prospered and his duties at the local Trinity Church took up much of his spare time. Understandably in this early period of married life Henry Clarke’s diary became less important. Entries were sparse and largely factual accounts of local deaths and gossip— to the extent that even Henry noticed the change. He also recorded the minutiae of family life, most graphically the birth of the Clarkes’ first child in October 1852. It was a painful, protracted and badly handled birth and the child was eventually delivered by forceps. Within a day the baby, named Henry, began to have convulsions; the first indications of epilepsy which was to plague him later in his life.6 Increasingly visible as a professional and social force in the western part of Jamaica, Henry rode vast distances—often setting out in the middle of the night—to visit and dine with friends, to preach and to attend to school matters. Jane Clarke was less mobile, though hospitality aboard visiting ships provided a welcome social break from the dull routines of life in Lucea. Henry’s life was increasingly dominated by church affairs and in April 1853 he was appointed Minister of Trinity Church in Grange Hill, Westmoreland. Work drew Henry Clarke more and more into the life of the local black community. Apart from earlier squeals of outrage, he had rarely mentioned black life. Even the black servants who made life comfortable for him and most other whites in the island rarely had more than a walk-on role in his commentary. As a preacher, he began to face local blacks and their generally wretched conditions. He


set out to explore his local region more thoroughly than ever, riding long and arduous distances, through bush, over mountains and wading rivers, to scrutinise remote black homes and settlements. More Nonconformist than Anglican, Henry became a preacher on horseback. Local blacks became the most regular of all the worshippers at Henry’s services. Without realising it Henry Clarke had launched himself on what was to be a lifetime’s career on behalf of the black Jamaican population. ‘My head is full of schemes for doing good’, he wrote in September 1854. He had already launched a series of enterprises; a ‘Sick Club’ for local blacks (similar to the Friendly Societies of contemporary Britain) attracted 130 members within a month. Its success prompted Henry to establish another at Morgan’s Bridge. This mood of altruism, fired by a Christian zeal, was to characterise Henry Clarke’s career henceforth. His own material circumstances had improved dramatically. In 1853 he calculated that he earned £500 a year. Slowly he began to feel financially secure and thanked the Lord for all his material blessings. Yet he was never completely at ease with material success. The more he prospered, the more he mixed with local ‘society’, the more uneasy he felt. Henry was now firmly established as a minor local patriarch. The head of an expanding family, prominent through the west of the island, recently joined by his younger brother Edward (for whom he found local employment), Henry was a regular fixture at social gatherings and held permanently ‘open house’ for passing friends and locals. Much of what little spare time he had was spent writing, revising or practising his sermons (he also recorded how well or badly they were received). As he gained in self-confidence, he occasionally spoke without


notes, preaching in remoter rural areas, in friends’ homes or to crowds of 100 and more. When parishioners could not come to his services, he preached at their homes. Wherever he travelled he held Bible classes, Sunday School classes and he established benefit societies, agricultural societies and even a savings bank. There was no doubt that Henry Clarke was emerging as an unusual clergyman. He was assiduous, highly disciplined and conscientious on a broad front. These qualities were all the more striking when set against the general tone and quality of Jamaica’s Anglican clergy. Absenteeism, pluralism and a general disregard for clerical duties were among the complaints which periodically surfaced in the local press.7 By comparison Henry Clarke was a model of application and industry. For a time he continued to hold his daily classes as a schoolteacher. But when in June 1855 he dismissed the children for the summer holidays, he felt his career as a schoolmaster was at an end. And so it proved to be. Only a few days later the Bishop offered him the curate’s post at Trinity Church at Morgan’s Bridge, roughly halfway between Savanna-la-Mar and Lucea in Westmoreland, at a salary of £340 a year. He was to hold the post until 1890. As he prepared to change careers, on 31 October 1855, Henry Clarke wrote his first letter to a Jamaican newspaper (about taxation). It was, as he later noted, ‘the precursor of countless letters since’. Within a short space of time he became infamous throughout the island as an inveterate correspondent to the press, hectoring readers on matters great and small, often to the mortification of his family. In the first week of the New Year Henry, Jane and their three children moved to Bulstrode where

The Rev. Henry Clarke

Jamaica, c. 1855

Jane Clarke, Henry’s wife and mother of his eleven children


Henry set about his new ministry with the vigour he applied to most things.

4 Preaching and Inventing 1856–65

HENRY CLARKE’S new life had a distinct pattern. Daybreak saw him working in his garden and tending his bees; he then supervised the day’s tasks for the workmen and servants around the property before embarking on his own duties. Parish work created its own obvious routines of baptisms, weddings, funerals, all with their attendant social gatherings. He was also expected to carry out certain local government functions such as conducting the local census. Despite his good works, Henry Clarke never lost his sense of sin and worthlessness. When he began to enjoy life too much, he felt the twinges of mortification. As he settled into his new routines, Henry Clarke gradually came to terms with his life and future in the island: ‘the more I see of Jamaica the more I like it—with the blessings of the Lord it will be one of the wealthiest and happiest places of the earth.’1 At the year’s end 1856, Henry Clarke was a man at ease with himself; comfortably at home in the island which, only a few years earlier, had been a very torment. But there were ominous signs of domestic troubles in the making. Jane Clarke’s physical condition had deteriorated in the course of her three recent pregnancies. Her eyesight, never very good, had worsened, not helped by some painful medical treatment. At the age of thirty, she


had begun to suffer ailments which would get worse as time passed. But the stability and happiness of family life was to be disturbed, for ever, in a most bizarre and quite unexpected fashion. On 14 January 1857 Henry Clarke had the first of many ‘inspirations’: the sudden idea of a design for a ship which could skim over the water. This idea, his ‘Ariel Screw’, was to return again and again to plague him throughout his life. Henry viewed it as a divine inspiration which promised to revolutionise transport, but over the years his attempts to implement it were to prove costly and often humiliating failures, a torment to Henry himself and a burden to his long-suffering wife. Forty years later he recorded that this revelation had ‘caused me suffering and effort and cost, greater than I can calculate and to this day it continues to try me as much as ever’. It is of course easy to mock Henry Clarke for his behaviour, but we need to remember that he lived in an age of remarkable invention and discovery. Victorian clergymen were an especially notable group of would-be scientists, inventors and experimenters and a great deal of clerical energy and imagination was directed towards the theory and practice of a wide range of scientific projects. In a society where science had begun to challenge biblical explanations of the natural world, it was understandable that clerics—especially after the publication of Darwin’s Origins in 1869—should be drawn to the intellectual arena of science and its application. As Henry wrote, read, or even rode his horse, ideas for new inventions began to tumble from his brain. Within two months he had ‘invented’ the ‘Ariel Screw’, a rotary engine and a flying machine. Each week brought an improvement on his basic

PREACHING AND INVENTING, 1856–65 33

ideas. With this ferment of inventions buzzing in his mind, Henry decided to uproot his pregnant wife and young children, cross the Atlantic and try out his ideas in a society more suited to mechanical experiment. Early in May 1857 the Clarke family boarded a steamer in Kingston for the first leg of the voyage to England. The journey took the Clarkes via Haiti and the island of St Thomas where they changed vessels. Their new ship had yellow fever aboard and within a week nine people had died. The voyage was a nightmare: the Clarkes endured uncomfortable quarters, had to scramble for poor food on an overcrowded ship and watched the daily committal of the dead to the ocean. Within two days of arriving in London on 2 June 1857, Henry Clarke had lodged his scheme with the Patent Office. Convinced of impending success, Henry then took his family to Lincolnshire for a family reunion. He next informed the Admiralty of his invention before returning to London to discuss the project with the famous engineer Robert Stephenson. He scarcely waited for my explanation of the plan when he said it was worth nothing—there is nothing new in it —and condemned it in the strongest language but without any valid argument against it. Moving on to the Admiralty, Henry Clarke was confronted by a Very kind old gentleman’, who said They had rotary engines by the dozens—every man who meddled with mechanics first made a rotary engine. It was like a small pox which attacks a man once in his lifetime’ That same day Henry had his third rebuff, from a professional engineer. Opinion was united; Henry’s


revelation had already been tried, it did not work and would not work. The coup de grâce came from Isambard Brunel who scrawled across Henry’s description of the engine ‘as old as the oldest and found very bad’.2 The judgement could not have been clearer. This was not what Henry Clarke had dragged his pregnant wife and three children thousands of miles to hear. The alternatives seemed clear enough: either he was inspired by God or misled by the Devil. He submitted revised schemes to the Admiralty. Rejected again, he began to fret about Jane’s impending confinement and the prospects of sailing back to Jamaica. Yet he could not drop his idea. He persisted, against further technical advice, in patenting his ‘Ariel Screw Steamer’ and published a letter in The Engineer about his invention. Glaring and repeated rebuffs seemed merely to reinforce Henry Clarke’s conviction: ‘I feel as confident as ever….’ In fact, throughout October and November 1857 Henry’s diary was that of an unhappy man; wandering between friends and relatives, preoccupied with an idea that was universally condemned, and increasingly worried about his wife’s pregnancy and his family fortunes. The day after the birth of their fourth child, Sara (delivered with the aid of chloroform), Henry returned to his invention, retreating to Matlock in Derbyshire to supervise the construction of a sailing vessel by a local carpenter and blacksmith. In the last days of 1857 Henry watched the failure of his design on a pond in Matlock. My home is broken up—my dear wife and children are scattered—my labour is interrupted—my money spent—my mind disturbed—my plans failed—my prospects gloomy as I can well imagine them.


Further failure with his prototype boat in January 1858 resolved the matter; he must return to Jamaica. Yet the Clarkes lingered on, until the end of April. On 9 June, after an absence of eleven months, they anchored at Montego Bay. Back home, Henry immediately launched into his familiar routines of preaching and teaching, fired by the belief that he ‘could convert the district by educating the children’. No sooner had Henry Clarke settled into his familiar routines than, in October 1858, he recorded ‘another great revelation’. Pondering the problem of money, Henry realised that ‘Silver and gold are useless as money—the circulating medium ought all to be paper issued by the government to landowners on the security of their lands, at the lowest rate of interest, the security being absolute.’ One charm of Henry’s scheme was that it ‘would destroy that monopoly of money supply now held by the London bankers, which causes such extremes of wealth and poverty so ruinous to rich and poor alike’.3 This too was a theory to which Henry clung for the next half-century and for which he was widely ridiculed. He could not have known that he was not alone in advancing such views. Theories of paper currencies were well-established on the fringes of radical thought; but there seems always to have been a close link between political or personal eccentricity and a belief in paper currency. Henry Clarke was merely one of many. However, he was convinced he was unique and, again, divinely inspired. No amount of heavy parochial duties seemed to free Henry Clarke from his inventing mania. Old ideas were revived again and again. In 1860 he wrote: ‘I believe confidently that to fly through the air is the easiest, cheapest and safest method of


travelling’.4 However commonplace that idea might seem today, in 1860 it was eccentric. Much the same was true of his idea for a ‘Velocipede’, ‘on four large and light wheels (3 would be better but I cannot yet see how to contrive one in front)’.5 His outline was, in essence, the modern tricycle, and to the end of his life he believed that it would be greatly superior to the (then) developing bicycle. Since first arriving in the island Henry Clarke had prayed for Jamaica’s salvation. Late in 1860 the answer seemed to hand with the onset of an extraordinary island-wide religious revival. It began among Moravian churches in Manchester but quickly swept through the island and came to be known as the Baptist Revival. Revivalists of all sects took to the road in emotional processions, their ranks swelled by vociferous converts as they passed by. ‘Respectable’ society feared its apparent indiscipline and ‘promiscuity’ (Revivalists slept rough along the route), but the movement ended as inexplicably as it began (most likely because those involved had to return to their lands and tasks). When the first rumours of scenes of ecstatic revivalism seeped through to Lucea, Henry asked himself, ‘Is this the first drop of the shower I have been so long expecting?’ Some people in Henry’s church swooned and fainted to cries of ecstasy, but most of the congregation ‘were as dull as usual’.6 Revivalism gradually lapped its way into the west of the island and Henry witnessed some remarkable scenes of individual and collective enthusiasms. Local towns were effectively evacuated as thousands gathered in local halls and churches to watch the amazing scenes. The dancing, wailing and fainting left Henry ill at ease. All his services and meetings were, quite suddenly, full to overflowing; the ceremonies punctuated by the cries


of ‘the stricken ones’. In late November and December 1860, feeling was running at such a pitch that Henry was able to hold daily meetings; each was packed and each characterised by scenes of wild revivalism. By mid-March 1861 the energy of the movement seems to have burned itself out; numbers began to dwindle, and there were fewer meetings and fewer faintings. At root, Henry remained mystified by the event. On the one hand he was delighted to have such crowds of willing worshippers—many of whom he had baptised and married—and he was convinced that ‘a great work has begun’. But on the other hand he detected ‘sham’ among many involved and he was ill at ease with the spontaneous outbursts, the shrieks, cries, weeping and fainting which punctuated his services. Moreover, his own family remained untouched by it. The whole affair, he wrote, was like the cholera, which ‘has never visited Jamaica either before or since and I cannot account for either one or the other from any natural or visible causes and neither of them left any permanent spiritual change in the population at large’.7 Henry Clarke was a fiercely independent man, convinced of the justice of his own behaviour and willing to clash with authority whenever appropriate. Contrary to usage, he conducted a burial service for a suicide, brushing aside the complaints of his superiors. This resolution and single-mindedness were, at once, a source of Henry’s strength and also a cause of so much friction with others. At times his ambition became hubris and vaulting fantasy: ‘it will not at all surprise me if eventually I rule the whole island’.8 Henry Clarke’s life had developed a perceptible pattern. He threw off his gloom by immersing himself in yet another scheme for reform or revitalisation. He carefully worked out his


thoughts, painstakingly drafted a letter to newspapers or political sympathisers—and then waited for reaction. More often than not his idea was spurned. This had been the pattern throughout the Baptist Revival when Henry had actively promoted legislation to curb, or to regulate, levels of bastardy in Jamaica. He had always viewed illegitimacy as a sign of an all-pervasive vice and sinfulness among Jamaicans. To the end of his life he sought to persuade the island authorities to enact measures to control it and especially to make fathers responsible for their offspring. Although his ideas were warmly received by other clergymen, he could never secure the necessary political support. Failure to persuade the Assembly to legislate a ‘Bastardy Act’ in 1861 was followed by his usual slump into low spirits. A few months later he bounced back off the ropes, like an old prizefighter, with a new scheme for social reform. Not until the last years of his life, in the early twentieth century, was Henry Clarke to see opinion swing behind his arguments about illegitimacy in the island. Henry’s next reform proposal was a Land Tax. Long troubled about Jamaica’s inequitable taxes, and the disproportionate burden shouldered by the poor, Henry Clarke, ‘directed by the Holy Ghost’, drafted a letter denouncing the island’s fiscal structure. This was to be only one aspect of a vast scheme of amelioration for which he was to act as the earthly agent. No longer simply a preacher, Henry Clarke had developed a notable political voice. Though solitary and mocked, it was a voice which could not be ignored for it uttered critical ideas which rarely brought comfort to the propertied readership of Jamaica’s newspapers. No amount of public hostility or indifference could stem his flow of ideas


—all prompted by the Lord. He thought up a scheme for introducing cotton into the west of the island (an idea doubtless prompted by the disruption caused by the American Civil War). Like so many of his ideas, it was, in theory, plausible and superficially seductive, but measured against the realities of the Jamaican economy in the 1860s, it smacked of fantasy. On his thirty-fourth birthday in 1862, Henry Clarke listed his ambitions: ‘My expectations are the Currency Plan—the skimming ship—aerial propellers—rotary engine—flying machine—land tax —the gift of the Holy Ghost and a crown of life, and an eternal inheritance.’ Forty years later, he sadly remarked: ‘these are still my expectations’.9

40

5 Rebellion 1865

JAMAICA’S WIDESPREAD social and economic decline and the collapse of the local sugar industry had required outside intervention. In response to planters’ complaints that the ex-slaves had simply quit the plantations, the British Parliament—so recently the instigator of slave emancipation—was persuaded to authorise the recruitment of Asian (mainly Indian) indentured labour for work in the Caribbean. The migrations began in 1845. When they ended in 1917 some 34, 412 Indians had been shipped to Jamaica (especially to the sugar estates in the parishes of St Thomas, St Mary, Clarendon and Westmoreland). Many more had gone to Trinidad and Guyana.1 The early years of Indian indentured labour were chillingly reminiscent of slavery. It was inevitable that their wretchedness—and the very scheme which had brought them halfway round the world— would catch the eye of Henry Clarke. He began to complain long and loud about indentured labour. A letter to the Jamaica Guardian on 6 October 1862 claimed that they were being starved, cheated, flogged and even murdered. Such accusations instantly drew the wrath of his Bishop and the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. The Bishop of Kingston felt that it was pointless arguing ‘with one who can advance a position so outrageous,


exaggerated and extravagant it is useless to attempt to reason’. Henry replied with a ‘rather bold and aggressive letter’.2 Jamaica’s Governor severely rebuked him for putting ‘forward to the world publicly a most calumnious statement affecting both the Government of the Island and the Planters of Jamaica as a body’. The Governor demanded a public retraction and a statement of regret for the language used in his letter. Henry refused and in December 1862 learned that the Attorney General planned to prosecute him for libelling the government.3 For once, Henry seemed genuinely alarmed, but consoled himself with the knowledge that ‘it must be the Lord’s doing’. Meanwhile, he employed a solicitor and set about finding examples of the cruelty to indentured labourers he had alleged. In January 1863 he was formally indicted of ‘wickedly and maliciously contriving to injure the employers of Chinese and Indian immigrants and to bring such employers and the executive authorities of the Island into contempt’.4 Publicly bold and unswerving, privately Henry was in some fear about the outcome. It was very difficult to prove incidents of cruelty, especially when the estate overseers and investigating police closed ranks in their denials. And it was very unlikely that their word would be overruled by the evidence of poor indentured labourers. By February he was able to present a number of authenticated cases of cruelty and the libel case against him was dropped, but not before the Governor issued a peevish rejoinder, claiming that Henry’s action was ‘reprehensible’.5 Henry thus established a reputation as a defender of the Indian indentured workers. Later, when the House of Assembly held an inquiry into the administration of the immigration laws, Henry

REBELLION, 1865 43

gave evidence, taking the opportunity (in November 1863) of haranguing his opponents to their face at the Spanish Town meetings. The resulting report— claiming that Indian immigrants were afforded every care and attention—infuriated Henry. Once more he put outraged pen to paper. And yet again his words were intemperate if not foolish. He claimed that the investigating committee was no more than ‘the criminals themselves formed into judge and jury to try their own case’.6 The House of Assembly, not surprisingly, viewed this as an attempt to bring their proceedings into disrepute, and Henry was ordered to appear before them to explain his words. He again made the long and difficult journey back to the island’s capital in Spanish Town, secure in the belief that he was ‘entirely in the hands of God’. The whole business turned into high farce. When he arrived, Henry discovered that the Assembly had been prorogued and his own case had lapsed. It was, he felt, a ‘signed deliverance’. Yet Henry was not a man to learn his lesson well. He immediately sat down and wrote another letter pouring scorn on the Assembly’s behaviour.7 Jamaica’s Governor ruled in harness with a Council and the Assembly, which consisted of fortyseven elected members, though the franchise was restricted to a small group of property-based voters (so too, of course, was the British House of Commons).8 The then Governor, Edward Eyre, sought to improve the quality of elected members by insisting that they should be able to produce certificates of good character from a minister of religion. Forty years later Henry Clarke remarked that this proposal ‘was a dead letter from the beginning and public officers as a body are as immoral now as they were then’.9 Eyre was fully aware of the dire conditions which prevailed


throughout much of the island and made perceptive complaints to the Colonial Office in London which echo the observations made by Henry Clarke in his diaries. Although both men offered similar analyses of Jamaica’s prevailing troubles, Eyre was unhappy about advertising such views at a time of mounting social tensions and political instability. Yet Jamaica—only a generation after slavery—had a vibrant and established tradition of social and political dissent. Matters began to deteriorate rapidly early in 1865. Eyre responded to complaints by blaming the local population for their own plight and sympathising with property owners. Massive gatherings were convened throughout the island with the aim of forcing Jamaica’s government to act.10 A petition calling for help was sent to Queen Victoria. Her answer (in effect from the Colonial Office) was an insulting rebuff, urging Jamaicans to be industrious, telling them, in diplomatic language, that they were the authors of their own fate. Governor Eyre distributed 50,000 copies of the Queen’s letter throughout the island. Henry Clarke was one of many expected to pass on the letter in his neighbourhood. He was outraged by what he read and drafted his own reply to the Queen, but eventually resolved not to enter the debate.11 It was a providential decision, as he later recognised, for it almost certainly saved him from suspicion as a ‘conspirator’ when, in October 1865, a rebellion erupted in the east of the island. The ‘Morant Bay’ rebellion, sparked by the Queen’s letter, but rooted in the island’s miseries, was crushed by Eyre with awesome savagery. News arrived of the rebellion and its bloody suppression via travellers, rumours, delayed mail and newspapers. After initial suspicion that there had indeed been a major conspiracy against the

REBELLION, 1865 45

whites on the estates, Henry Clarke quickly reverted to his initial feeling that the rebellion ‘was an inevitable outburst of wronged people’. In the tense and uncertain aftermath of the suppression of the rebellion, Henry Clarke noted, ‘there still exists among the governing class an intense hatred of the black race, for the reason I suppose that it is natural to hate those whom we have injured’.12 In the panic of the rebellion’s early days, confined as it was to the east, and in the bloody revenge which Eyre visited upon suspects of all sorts and conditions (killing almost 500, flogging 600 and destroying more than 1,000 buildings), suspicions were quickly and often unjustifiably aroused. Mere sympathy for the poor was enough to brand a man as party to the rebellion. Men of less radical persuasion than Henry Clarke committed the grievous sin of speaking up, writing out of turn or at an inopportune moment. Henry was saved by his hesitation in replying to the Queen’s letter. Had he taken his customary step of broadcasting his views, he would have found himself caught up in the broad government and military sweep of suspected conspirators. Moreover, Governor Eyre and his coterie of advisors had every reason to distrust and dislike Henry Clarke; he had already provoked them with his irritating complaints, and had proved to be troublesome and unbending. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, Henry Clarke was bitterly critical of Governor Eyre. Once more he was in a small minority in his neighbourhood, where most of his parishioners signed an address approving of Eyre’s actions. And as details of the government’s repression emerged, notably the conduct of the trial of Gordon, an alleged ringleader, Henry Clarke believed that Eyre and his associates ought to be tried for murder.


The Jamaican House of Assembly was finally dissolved to make way for Crown government. Henry wrote that it was an improvement for it delivered the local poor ‘out of the hands of that slavery-loving oligarchy which for 200 years has so mightily oppressed them’. At last Britain began to pay attention to Jamaica,13 The last bastion of the old slave-owners’ political power had been swept away, but it was obviously going to take much more than tinkering with the political system to bring about those improvements in Jamaican life which Henry Clarke felt so necessary.

6 Conflict and Trial from First to Last 1866–74

JAMAICA STEPPED back from the traumas of the Morant Bay rebellion and its aftermath, but the island’s basic problems remained unsolved and its people’s grievances unanswered. Eyre was dismissed and returned to England. For his part, Henry Clarke returned to the humdrum routines of a parish priest, as well as teaching at Manning’s School for a time when his brother Edward returned to England in 1866. But he was never too busy to write characteristically peppery letters, to the press, to island officials and to friends.1 Most people outside western Jamaica knew him only through these letters, but visitors who met him face to face were left with a more favourable impression. According to two visitors who met him in 1866, Henry was ‘an earnest Christian Minister, of singular courage, disinterestedness and compassion’.2 Chief among Henry’s wishes was a desire for public recognition of his ‘revelations’. He expected ‘every day to hear that somebody’s eyes have been opened to the Currency’3 but no such support was forthcoming. New ideas still tumbled forth. In the spring of 1867 he was pondering how best to eliminate heat loss up a chimney and how to boil water quickly, from the top. In 1867 a local man, Mr Farquharson, took an interest in Henry’s design


for the ‘Ariel Screw’. After lengthy discussions they agreed to take the idea to England for development and experimentation. They left in June. Henry made the most of his visit to London, negotiating with the Patent Office, attending parliamentary reform meetings, visiting the Anti-Slavery Society and listening (with a keen professional ear) to other preachers. But London remained, he thought, ‘a whited sepulchre’. The craftsmen and factories they had come to see had gone bankrupt but they found another promising young craftsman keen to help (Henry thought this was another act of divine providence). As the boat took shape, the bills mounted and Henry began to have doubts. As in his early twenties tension produced worrying physical ailments such as headaches and bad throats. Alone in London, fretting about the prospects of failure, Henry’s diary, by the late summer of 1867, had once again become the confession of a troubled soul. He even suggested that he was suffering ‘on a smaller scale the same ordeal that Jesus suffered in the wilderness, in Gethsemane, and on the cross’.4 When Henry’s boat was placed in the water, it managed a mere five miles per hour. It was instantly clear that his latest sortie into mechanical engineering was another failure: ‘In all my long conflict I have never met with anything so dreadful as this’.5 Henry and Farquharson severed their failed partnership in bitter disagreement about the legal division of any potential profits (or costs). By the time Henry boarded his ship in Southampton on 17 September his mood had changed. The failures of the past few weeks—indeed the very reason for the journey to England—seemed to slip away and he settled into a tranquil mood, savouring the prospects of returning to his family. On 8 October Henry was back home. A few days

CONFLICT AND TRIAL, 1866–74 49

later he and Jane celebrated their sixteenth wedding anniversary. Within months Henry was at loggerheads with the Bishop, had taken offence at the island’s Colonial Secretary and was in a state of permanent irritation because of his recent failure. In March 1868 he had another revelation: ‘a turbine or horizontal water-wheel’. A month later he came up with a scheme for improving the manufacture of sugar. (That, too, proved a failure when it was tried out by one of his sons in 1886.) In April 1868 Henry Clarke celebrated his fortieth birthday. His greatest comfort and pleasure at this time came from his large family. ‘All the dear children are healthy, intelligent and good-looking, and though my sweet Jane is losing her teeth she is attractive to me as ever she was.’ But they were poor—there were nine children so far, and no end in sight—and Jane upbraided her husband for continuing to give £5 per month ‘to the Lord’ while they were hard-pressed to survive on £315 a year. Henry was aware of his failings towards Jane but could never escape the feeling that material hardship was merely a preparation for earthly and spiritual salvation. It needed only one of his ideas to gain acceptance, and material rewards would enable him to relieve his family of their poverty. In the meantime, Jane openly castigated him for failing to maintain their family in decent sufficiency. ‘I am often most painfully tried by her want of faith and submission. She does not think I have acted prudently in giving all I had away and thinks the result proves my imprudence.’6 In addition, the family home was ill-designed, badly located (hard by a stagnant pond) and overcrowded; an ideal setting for illness and tensions. Throughout November and December 1870 Henry recorded little in his diary but a miserable list of sick children. For fully ten months


in 1870 illness, including his own, had been Henry’s main preoccupation.7 By this time Jane ‘does not appear equal to bearing more children’, but within months she was pregnant again and, understandably, ‘in a sad state of mind’.8 It was at this juncture, in 1871, when the future looked as materially bleak as ever, that Henry Clarke hit upon an idea which was to transform their fortunes (and those of their descendants). In April 1871 he wrote: I have great hopes of the good that will result from the contemplated Building Society. The great need of this parish ever since I came to it has been houses, and I have long prayed to the Lord to send us help in this matter.9 Henry Clarke’s idea for a building society was to be his lasting monument. Today, in the guise of the Jamaica National Building Society, it is one of the biggest indigenous business concerns in Jamaica. But before it took root, Henry continued to hover between a variety of different discoveries—to the very great distress of his wife: ‘she said she was ready to sink into the earth, when she heard me once more entering into experiments… She went into a paroxysm of weeping.’ It was the greatest irony of Henry Clarke’s long and largely unsuccessful search for innovation and change that he had serious doubts about the one idea which was to prove successful. ‘I never began a new enterprise with less hope or confidence of success.’10 But on 15 June 1872 he and three associates formed the Westmoreland Building Society.11 In the spring of 1872 Jane was forty-five and pregnant for the eleventh time. Toothless, old before her time, already afflicted by bad eyesight,


beset by a vast brood of children in an overcrowded and unhealthy home, materially deprived, she had little, at this stage of her life, to feel thankful for. Often, she opened a newspaper to see her husband ridiculed for his latest venture or outburst. Their sixth son, Charles Lister, was born on 4 July, ‘a special gift from the Lord’, wrote Henry, ‘for neither I nor Jane wanted him to come.’12 Yet despite their troubles the Clarkes had enjoyed a remarkable run of good luck with their eleven children. Few contemporaries with so large a family could have boasted such overall good health. This changed in September 1872 with the death of their daughter Ida, of a fever, at the age of seven. Henry’s description of the child’s illness and last days is among the most moving passages in his diary. Jane and Henry Clarke and their children were overwhelmed by grief at the child’s unexpected death, though Henry took comfort privately in his faith. For a long time afterwards the Clarke family circle—now broken by a gap where Ida had once sat at family meals—would regularly weep and then discuss the dead child. The sight of her few material possessions prompted more weeping. Slowly the family’s grief began to subside, ‘but the weight is still on all our hearts’. Henry also worried that his own recent denunciation of an obeahman might be associated in the minds of local blacks with Ida’s death. The family doctor and Henry were convinced that the Clarkes’ persistent fevers and Ida’s death were related to their home’s proximity to dangerous swampy land. No sooner had they come out of their period of mourning than another bout of fever afflicted them (accompanied by an unearthly insect noise from within the walls of their house). Throughout October 1872 not a day passed without some mention of family illness. It was, then, with


tremendous relief that at the end of that month their worldly goods were loaded on to a cattle cart and two mule carts and removed to Manning’s House. At the end of 1872 Henry was prompted to give a full description of all his children. For the first time we are able to add details to the generally uninformative comments he had made about them so far. Henry is now over 20… He is not tall or particularly good-looking, and is still troubled with spots on his face. His teeth are bad and he has fallen off in flesh of late. He is a thorough Xtian… Jenny is now 18½, tall, of good carriage and very sensible—but not good looking in the face. Her complexion is dark and often sallow and she has a large dark-coloured mole near the ear on her right cheek which is an eyesore and a great trouble to her. Her mouth is not pretty, but her teeth are good—and tout ensemble is ladylike. She plays but not con amore… Mary (17) is stouter than Jenny and has a better face, though not as good a figure, but for the last two years she has been greatly disfigured by eruptive spots on the nose and cheeks which have been a sore mortification to her. She has appeared much out of spirits lately and has appeared to take no interest in anything. She is slightly deaf and so shortsighted that she cannot distinguish countenances beyond the length of the room… Sally (15) is very good looking in the face, but stout and not very gainly in figure. Industrious, cheerful and musical, she enjoys life much…


Stainton (13) is a cheerful boy—short in stature—of late sallow and unhealthy in complexion—of average ability and good common sense. Edith (11½) the best looking of the girls— having a pretty smiling face, and a cheerful temper and a good figure… She suffers from sick headaches. Clement (9½) is tall for his age with a large head and fine open countenance. He has always been more difficult to rule than the rest… Ida (7) had a very good face, every feature and limb being well-formed, but her teeth were a bad colour. Frederick (6) is fair and delicate in appearance as much like a girl as a boy. He is healthy, lively and intelligent but does not read yet. Hughey is a very dear sharp little fellow, but for the last few months has looked sallow and puny. Charles [Lister] (½) is the dearest, fattest, sweetest, little cherub we have ever had.13 For his part, Henry had begun to feel his years. Travelling the island in bad weather gave him aches and pains, his eyes had deteriorated and he began the New Year 1873 in low spirits. Family feuds (with his brother Edward), recurring illness among the children, disputes in church, and the running sore of indentured immigration, all these and more plagued him greatly. He entered into a bitter correspondence with Governor Grant about financial reforms and indentured labour. Then, in mid-June he was struck down by illness and his journal lay blank until early August. He was feverish, in a great deal of pain from sciatica, and


suffering from loss of weight. He revived, thanks to careful nursing and doses of brandy, champagne and lashings of broth. By mid-August he felt ‘as if I had been raised from the dead’.14 Looking back, Henry thought this episode ‘the great Crisis of my life’, and the years 1857 to 1873 a period ‘of extraordinary conflict and trial from first to last’.

7 Not a Friend in the World 1874–80

THE SUMMER of 1873 proved a miserable time for Henry Clarke. The fever returned time and again; boils erupted all over his body. But slowly he regained his strength, began to walk unaided, and very slowly picked up the routines of his normal life. Boosted by news of the good fortunes of two of his brothers (Joseph in Australia and John in the USA), Henry was himself about to enjoy a change of material fortunes. On 10 December 1873, Henry ‘sent out 50 notices for a meeting to form a Building Society’. Eleven days later the meeting ‘was well attended and 150 shares have been subscribed for’. In January 1874 the directors held their first gathering, presiding over a fund of £49.18/-. By April 1875 the society was in a position to make its first loan. Thereafter lending (and investing) gathered pace. In January 1877 the building society voted Henry 50 guineas for his past services and ‘fixed the future salary of the Secretary at 2½% on receipts’. This income, from a flourishing and expanding business, was to lay the basis for the family’s comforts over the next 30 years.1 The building society helped others to acquire new homes. Henry meanwhile had moved his own family. The first six months of 1873 had been spent at Manning’s House; in August they moved again,


to Ailsa House in Savanna-la-Mar. Although they liked their new home, they were still troubled by fever for which the doctor offered no cure except doses of quinine. Henry resolved to ‘look to Jesus to heal them’.2 Now in his late forties, Henry Clarke used his diary as a vehicle for airing personal grievances and concerns, finding solace from earthly cares by writing about them. His was a voice in the wilderness; an individualist whose views were rarely pronounced in a modest or reasonable tone. Few people seemed to agree with him; fewer still agreed with the manner in which he discussed an issue. The advice of others—even of his few friends—made little impact on him. Occasionally, however, the long-suffering Jane made an impression. In December 1875, after days spent polishing a letter for the press, he read it to Jane: she burst into tears and reproaches, because I was always abusing the planters and making it so unpleasant for her and her daughters to meet the Burgesses or Mrs W. Vickers who had shown them so many kindnesses—and when I remembered that after writing to the newspapers for 15 years I had not succeeded in gaining a single adherent to my views, or supporter of my efforts, but that so far as men are concerned I stand entirely alone while all the educated people of the country regard me with suspicion or dislike—my courage failed me and I resolved not to send it.3 Such reported victories of commonsense and prudence by Jane Clarke were few and far between and it was but a matter of time before Henry once again entered the fray.

NOT A FRIEND IN THE WORLD, 1874–80 57

Relatives sometimes told him some home truths. Edward Clarke, his brother, struggling as a moderately unsuccessful schoolteacher at Manning’s School, flared up against Henry in 1875, complaining of an old grievance and of constantly being snubbed and put down. Far from taking the point—a flaw familiar to those who knew him well— Henry wrote that Edward was ‘exceedingly weak in judgement, excessively exalted with the least success, and is depressed by any failure and he does not improve as he grows older’.4 Secure in his self-image, Henry would never have recognised this as a description of himself. Looking back over the course of 1875, Henry Clarke was becoming ever more aware of his family’s isolation. Those of his children who were now young adults had clearly begun to rebel against their father’s dominance, and the price they had had to pay for each passing whim. His daughter Mary, a woman of twenty, disfigured by eruptions on her face, poor of hearing, had slumped into depression. All resented being drafted as reluctant foot-soldiers into Henry’s recurring and unsuccessful campaigns. And as if to prove the point, Henry’s diary describes his family’s pains in one paragraph and in the next he blithely returns to the complaints about his treatment in the press— the very behaviour that was the root of so much of their pain. Why did Henry persist with his campaigns? He saw his task as putting the world to rights and tried to do this, at a humble level, through his various parochial activities. But he also set out to galvanise national opinion through the press and got nowhere. Instead, he convinced readers that he was an isolated and foolish visionary who claimed that his ideas were the Lord’s, thus absolving himself of any responsibility. Henry Clarke knew that his


ideas, presented to the public in his customary pugnacious style, would bring ridicule on his head. He knew it would make him unhappy. Yet year after year, the life of the Clarke family was disrupted by the father’s compulsive urge to air publicly his latest scheme. In spring 1877, Jane Clarke, accompanied by two of her daughters, Mary and Edith, left for a visit to England, no doubt glad to have a respite from Henry’s verbal fisticuffs and moralistic interventions in public and the press. She left behind a forty-nine-year-old husband suffering from what he described as ‘another attack of invention’, this time perfecting (in his head) ‘the walking machine’. Without her restraining influence he was soon in the thick of local antagonisms, firing off aggressive missives to a host of protagonists in Savanna-la-Mar.5 In July Henry recorded that The Holy Ghost guides me and therefore when I move He moves me’.6 On this occasion, Henry was moved to cross the Atlantic. On 15 August, three hours after landing, Henry was delivered by train to his wife staying near Manchester. The happiness of the reunion lasted a whole day. Henry then broke the bad news. I told Jane this morning that I intended to try the experiment of my engine while here. This brought on another of those terribly painful scenes with which she meets every fresh effort to carry out my ideas. Jane sensibly insisted that Henry conduct his experiments away from family and friends. He took his ‘engine’ to engineers in Salford and Manchester, and was told everywhere that it would not work.


The Clarkes greatly enjoyed the social side of their time together; the theatre (where even the sombre Mary cheered up) and visits to old friends and relatives in Manchester, Lincoln, Durham and Derbyshire. Their travels round the north provided a buzz of excitement and interest unknown in the remote isolated fastness of Savanna-la-Mar. Henry, however, had not come to England to let his family relax and enjoy themselves. He pressed on with his engine. Other matters proved more constructive: visits to Mr Sturge at the Anti-Slavery Society, appointments at the Colonial Office, and meetings with old acquaintances in London. By October he was heading back for Jamaica, his mind drifting towards inventions. Two days after his arrival he was back to his old habits, drawing up plans for a rotary engine to send to British engineers. Just as quickly, Henry slid back into his old habit of causing offence, dashing off rude letters to the Governor, and refusing to shake hands with old adversaries.7 For all these frictions, by the late 1870s Henry had established a reputation as a distinctive and contrary voice on Jamaican affairs. There were people in Britain, friends of the West Indies, who respected his comments and some of his ideas. Henry’s opinion was also sought to counter hostile comments on the region in an article in Fraser’s Magazine. Henry took this support as a sign of greater things to come: There is but a step between me and the highest wealth and honour.’ Despite such glimmers of support, 1877 had proved to be a painful year. Always at odds with the church hierarchy, in the late 1870s Henry embarked on a bitter struggle which was to cause great distress to his family and cast a shadow over his own reputation. The matter


was simple, but there was a point of principle at issue, and the passions aroused were to blight the Clarke family for years to come. Following the disestablishment of the Church of England, ministers were expected to forward all money raised via collections to the central church authorities. In turn, the church paid salaries and running costs. Henry Clarke had given the matter some thought and now refused to hand over to the Diocesan Church Fund moneys raised locally for his salary and other church costs. Convinced that he, not the Synod, was the proper (and legally sanctioned) agent for such collections and payments, Henry refused to accept the Synod’s rights in the matter. It was thus a matter both of ecclesiastical law and obedience to church discipline. There ensued a conflict which Henry Clarke could not hope to win but which—thanks to his unbending conviction that he was right—he could not avoid. The Bishop was exasperated with Henry, and his brother Edward felt just as strongly that Henry was being unreasonable. The running disputes with local and national church authorities had begun to make life extremely unpleasant for the Clarkes’ eldest son, Henry junior. Recently qualified as a minister, the young man was struggling to establish himself in a neighbouring parish, but invariably struggling under the shadow of his domineering father. Loyalty to his father placed a great deal of strain on him; it put him in disfavour with the church and was eventually to create a major chasm between father and son. It was a blessing for all—save possibly for Jane herself—when Jane Clarke and her daughters returned from England in October 1878. On 12 November Henry junior suffered a fit, the first of an epileptic condition which was to afflict him thereafter. Perhaps related to the protracted


trauma of his birth (delivered with forceps and consequent damage to his head), he was, from 1878, at the age of twenty-six, physically disabled. Henry senior had his own explanation: ‘Satan was permitted to assault me through my first begotten son’. From that day onwards a gulf opened up between father and son. At precisely this time the young man’s fiancée, Alison Tullis, was due to arrive to marry him. Henry junior was stricken and lifeless, every attempted move producing body convulsions. Sedated by opiates, even his resting body was racked by twitches as his anguished parents stood watch. Improvements were followed by further setbacks. A whole month passed, as Henry junior was carried from bed to chair, up and downstairs, fretting and weeping when awake, twitching helplessly when asleep. Slightly better when his fiancée arrived, he none the less offered his future wife a miserable prospect. His father recorded the painful minutiae of the affliction and the world at large did not begin to intrude into the diary until midDecember 1878.8 While his eldest son lay so wretchedly ill, Henry planned to publish correspondence about that son’s recent removal from a preaching position in nearby Bluefields. Planning to pursue a public vendetta with the Bishop could bring only controversy on the young man’s head. That the father could even contemplate so crass a move provides an extraordinary insight into his sense of priorities and reveals his determination to pursue his own battles whatever the cost to those he loved. As Henry junior slowly regained his strength he had to overcome not only his physical ailments but also his father’s insistent public recitation of contentious church matters in which the son was involved. Parochial meetings—held when the young


man was scarcely fit to travel—broke up in confusion. (Henry was not, however, the only eccentric cleric on the island; the new vicar of nearby Lucea thought Henry should be made the new Bishop.) After months of illness and uncertainty, on 3 April 1879 the convalescent Henry Clarke junior was married, by his father, to Alison Tullis. Before a packed congregation the father was, for once, unreservedly happy. The speeches over—including a ponderous paean of praise for his new daughterin-law by Henry—everyone relaxed and the last guests left at 3 a.m. It had been a thoroughly happy occasion; one of the few moments in Henry’s diary where his own pleasure was unqualified and unalloyed. Some time later, Henry junior, still convalescing, and his now pregnant wife sailed for England. Henry Clarke locked himself away in his room and wept from 7 a.m. to noon; ‘nothing I think has wounded me more deeply than my own son Henry’s defection’.9 Another son, Stainton, happily employed at Paradise estate, was dismissed from his position when, at his father’s insistence, he sought to become a lay preacher in Henry junior’s absence. In the lifetime conflict between the two Henrys, the father assumed throughout that the basic problem was the son’s illness. It had more to do with resentment. The first letter home from the travelling couple was full of recriminations and suspicions. What the father took to be paternal care and interest, the son viewed merely as intrusive high-handedness. Henry junior took the opportunity of being so far away from home to upbraid his father,10 and his father’s frequent rebukes in the mail drove a wedge permanently between them. To crown this deteriorating


relationship, the father harboured a suspicion that his eldest son was having a relationship with his black servant Helen. Challenged about it, the young man became indignant. But the father continued to nurse his suspicions. After thirty-five years of resisting the ‘devil’s assaults’, Henry Clarke feared that the devil might, even now, ‘humble me in my own son Henry’. Convinced that his son wished to return to Jamaica ahead of his wife to be alone with the woman, he ‘resolved to dismiss the girl before Henry’s return, and to keep him with us till Allie comes back’. The frequency of letters from Henry junior to Helen alarmed the father. Having secretly read one, however, he realised the contents were harmless (though more pleasant than his own letters). Bitter letters criss-crossed the Atlantic and the dispute continued after the son’s return to Jamaica on 26 November 1879.11 Henry Clarke dealt with his son much as he handled his political opponents. He was never to learn that he might have made more progress through a less abrasive style. Whatever his flaws, Henry Clarke was obviously a good preacher and a conscientious minister. He was always thrilled to hear praise for a sermon (he now had a stock of 500; each one had taken him twelve hours to draft). A government census in April 1881 showed that Henry’s services were exceptionally well attended: 854 at Morning Service, 585 at Evening Service and 90 boys and 162 girls attending Sunday School (helped by twenty-five teachers). Not surprisingly, he found his clerical work increasingly difficult.12 By 1879—and with thirty years’ service to his credit—Henry Clarke could have retired on a modest pension. But this was scarcely sensible since he continued to provide, in some form or other, for all ten of his children.


Henry was particularly vigilant about proceedings in local magistrates’ courts and he often defended cases of what he considered to be injustice. When unhappy with a magistrate’s decision, Henry was prepared to publish a critical letter even at the risk of a libel action. At other times he interrupted court proceedings, earning the longlasting enmity of court officials.13 The arrival of a new Bishop, Toser, in 1879 offered the chance of a fresh start in Henry’s relations with the church. The new man was soon confronted by the tortuous arguments between Henry and the authorities about their financial dispute. It was, said the Bishop, a matter of ‘some not unnatural perplexity’. The Bishop confessed that Henry’s letters ‘both astonished and distressed me’. Henry received a reasonable though firm rebuke but brushed aside the hand of professional friendship. It was, he thought, a ‘pretty beginning with the new Bishop’. Not one to take a hint, still less an order, Henry’s riposte pained the Bishop further. At the end of 1879 Henry Clarke was at odds with his eldest son and alienated from his church: ‘I have not a man in the world whom I can call a friend’.14

8 No Way Forward, No Turning Back 1880–84

THE ESTRANGEMENT between father and eldest son was complete by the New Year 1880. The young man, still unwell and doubtless missing his pregnant wife who was still with her family in England, had returned to Jamaica to face his stern and unbending father. Both men were at times reduced to tears by their mutual conflict. They lived close to each other, yet communicated by bitter letters. The disputed serving girl became a ritualistic bargaining counter; one man refusing to countenance her employment, the son insisting on it. (The unhappy woman in the middle died two years later.) Ordered not to cross his parents’ threshold if he refused to heed his father, the young man replied: ‘I shall be prepared to endure your threat carried out, terrible though it will be, and shall have strength under it. I shall be conscious of having done nothing to be treated so’ Supported by his wife, the young Henry Clarke told his parents that he would ‘patiently wait till your confidence is restored’. It was a bold, reasonable and honest approach. His father took a predictably severe line, claiming the son was out of his mind. Trying to make amends, Henry appointed his son as curate in his own church in the New Year 1880.

66 NO WAY FORWARD, NO TURNING BACK, 1880–84

But all the son would concede was stern looks and a grudging tolerance of his father’s presence. Even the arrival of the first grandchild, Gertrude Alison (born in England) did not improve matters. Henry junior simply refused to speak unless spoken to. And to make matters even more painful, the new baby lived only four days after arriving in Jamaica. A day later she was buried. The funeral revealed a deeply divided family. The child’s parents were too stricken to attend the burial, and the coffin was borne to the graveyard by Henry Clarke and five of his sons. Oddly enough no one attended from the family of Edward Clarke, Henry’s brother; they were busy preparing for a ball that evening and a visit to the circus the day after. In so small a community as Savannala-Mar it was surely remarkable that the family could not close ranks around the grave of this grandchild.1 Despite Henry’s dispute with his eldest son, he worried about him. Sometimes he got up at night to write him a loving and sympathetic letter. But to his great distress Henry junior, who suffered further epileptic attacks that spring, rarely responded. The father felt as isolated at home as he did in society at large. His eldest son was aloof and cool and his older daughters had few prospects of work or marriage. Family problems could not deflect Henry Clarke from his self-appointed task as keeper of the nation’s conscience. His words seemed more outrageous and insensitive than ever. In May 1880 he was charged with libelling a Mr Petgrave, a magistrate and clerk of the Petty Sessions. After long preliminary legal wrangles (and with some of the press—unusually—on his side), Henry’s case was postponed until November. On the 10th of that month he stood in the dock of the court at Black River. It took the jury a mere fifteen minutes to

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HENRY CLARKE 67

decide against him, but with the recommendation of leniency. It is a measure of Henry Clarke’s amazingly thick skin that at this very moment he penned a note to the judge. Fined £50, Henry threatened to go to prison rather than pay. Friends and associates paid the fine and costs, thus preventing Henry from making a martyr of himself. Others, however, denounced him, in the press and in abusive letters.2 In the months leading up to his case, Henry had had to deal with other worries. Yet another new bishop, Nuttall, took up his position in April 1880. From the first, Henry did not like him, describing him as ‘unjust and untruthful’, a view he maintained for thirty years. The Bishop for his part went out of his way to seek Henry’s help, clearly aware that there were theological ambushes awaiting him in Savanna-la-Mar. Nuttall hoped that differences would be forgotten. Henry’s formal response provided the flavour of things to come: a graceless and stilted reply which could scarcely have reassured the new Bishop.3 Life would have been much easier for the Clarke family had they not lived in so isolated and inaccessible a place as Savanna-la-Mar. The town was separated from what Jamaica had to offer by way of social and intellectual life by distance, poor roads, dangerous river crossings, mountainous rides or risky sea voyages. This physical isolation determined the severely restricted local social life. It also meant that Henry Clarke had few people with whom to discuss his reforms or inventions. Jane Clarke’s common sense—and self-interest—alone stood between Henry Clarke and his public conflicts. The outside world had come a little closer to Savannala-Mar as the years advanced. Steamships regularly plied to the town by 1880, and in that


year the telegraph service was opened at the local post office. Henry’s first move was to telegraph thanks to the Governor. Henry Clarke did not mind being alone, and he did not worry too much about the paucity of good company. At a wedding in September 1880 he noted: ‘All the élite of the parish were there, but there was really nothing worth calling a man among them.’4 Local ‘society’ clearly made little impact on his life. But it was the only life to which his wife and daughters had access. Dinners and church celebrations, the company of visitors and the arrival of Jamaican or international figures, hospitality shared and enjoyed, rides and visits into the cooler hills, Sunday School feasts and prizegivings, visiting lecturers, travelling circuses: these provided the tastier morsels to a more restricted social diet. Visitors from Kingston, friends from England and a regular flow of books, newspapers and magazines from England, all these helped keep local society informed, though gossip was perhaps the most potent source of information. As a prominent local figure, Henry Clarke’s home was a staging post for passing luminaries. On rare occasions Henry Clarke realised that he had gone too far. In October 1880 James Gall, a Kingston newspaper publisher, attended a service in Henry’s church. Henry’s sermon, denouncing infidelity and blasphemy, had Gall in mind. Returning home, Henry saw that his wife ‘was full of terror, so much so that neither she nor I cd. even allude to the sermon, and my own heart sank within me till I could not speak until after I had cried to the Lord for help’. To confuse Henry even further, he was visited by the same Mr Gall who expressed his delight with the sermon and even asked for a copy.


It is difficult to tell whether Henry Clarke was as uniformly severe in all his dealings as the record suggests. Certainly he dismissed people from taking communion if he thought they had misbehaved. Was he, though, at times, more congenial, less hostile, in his dealings with people at home or in public? The evidence is sparse, but it is there. At dinner with the visiting Governor in April 1881, Henry recorded that Musgrave reported he ‘had never been more agreeably disappointed in a man than in me—he had supposed me morose and unpleasant but had found me most congenial and agreeable’.5 This side of Henry Clarke seems rarely to have broken through the aura which he created for himself; of an other-worldly figure caring little for what people thought of him. Henry Clarke was prepared to go considerable lengths to make a point. In the summer of 1881 he refused to pay the legal costs of the man he had recently libelled. Nor would he pay his lawyers’ bills. Refusing to make any concession, Henry obliged the court bailiff to seize the Clarke family furniture, then their horse and carriage, to auction them locally. No one would buy the goods. Yet what a humiliation, what grief this must have caused his family; to see their worldly goods distrained and hauled away in public, so that Henry Clarke could maintain an (unspecified) point of principle.6 If his diary is to be believed, for much of the time Henry Clarke suffered. Yet did he suffer more than other people? Henry seems to have swung from one extreme to the other: one day’s joyful diary entry (rejoicing in his long and happy marriage) was followed by the gloom generated by a press item. Pleasure at the birth of a new grandchild gave way to despair at discovering that Stainton had fathered a child by a local woman. Henry was ‘heartbroken’. When this child died two years later


Henry’s comment was instructive: ‘I am thankful to the Lord for this and earnestly pray Him to protect all my children that such a calamity may never happen again.’ In May 1882 his daughter Sally was diagnosed as having leprosy in her right hand. It was a horrible affliction which began to blight her life; previously she had been an outgoing, friendly and musical young woman. It makes my heart bleed to look at my dear Sally—not that I have any doubt that the visitation comes from God’s love… I feel it may be discipline necessary to wean my daughters from the world and bring them to Christ. In the summer of 1882 the Clarkes’ daughters prepared to visit England again. Sara had been advised not to live in the tropics and the journey was to place her with her mother’s family, the Listers, in England. They took with them their seventeen-year-old brother Clement. When they gathered for church on 2 July that year it was to be the last time that the whole family was joined together. As Henry prepared to dispatch half his family off the island he had ‘to fight hard against depression of spirits’. The logistics of packing off Jenny, Mary, Edith, Sara and Clement to England were formidable. They headed for Montego Bay drawn by a variety of vehicles, four mules and two horses in a veritable pack train, cutting across the west of the island to Jamaica’s second city on the north coast. Luggage left at night, the passengers left home at 3.45 a.m., arriving at 10.15. After saying a painful farewell to his children Henry Clarke returned to his wife and to a strangely silent house. The children’s news from England was mixed. They greatly enjoyed meeting new friends, but


medical opinion confirmed that Sally’s condition was indeed leprosy. Clement Clarke must have inherited his father’s mania for inventions, for no sooner had he arrived in England than he patented a design for a tricycle. Though it was more successful than his father’s various schemes, this unexpected turn of events prompted Henry to return to his own inventions. Edith Clarke, in England, experienced a profound conversion in 1883 at a mission church. The experience had transformed her, she told her parents, giving them a graphic account of being ‘born again’. Henry was ecstatic, but Edith’s sudden love for Christ and the manner in which she described that event may have been an alternative for a human affection which had so far eluded her. Henceforth, her letters to her parents exuded a ‘sweet, spiritual quality’.7 Such good news was a rare interlude for Henry Clarke. By the autumn of 1883 family affairs seemed little changed. Henry’s eldest son admitted to being in debt; his brother Edward, moving to a distant parish, had lost all his possessions (and had no money in the first place). Their daughter Jenny narrowly escaped drowning when her ship ran aground near Savanna-la-Mar. As each of his children reached adult independence, they faced a future which was less attractive than Henry had planned for them. In December 1883, for example, Fred took up his first post, on a sugar estate. Twenty years before, Henry Clarke had written, ‘I would as soon put a son of mine into the fire as place him in such an immoral slough as a Sugar Estate’. Fred was later to be a successful sugar planter, creating a thriving business from the ruins of the very institution his father so disliked and feared.8


Welcoming the New Year 1884 with the usual rounds of festivities (gifts of food to the poor, agricultural shows, church and Sunday School festivals), Henry’s mind began to stray once more towards England. When he discovered that he possessed £160 more than he realised, Henry took it as a sign that he should go. He also wanted the opportunity to denounce a recent report into Jamaica’s finances which had, to his fury, proposed an increase in land taxes and a continuation of indentured immigration into the island. Preparing for his fifth return to England, Henry found himself still hard at work on his inventions,9 though the failures and humiliations of earlier visits tempered his enthusiasm. On 5 May 1884 he boarded the steamer Maroon in Montego Bay; on the 28th, he was back in ‘the noise and confusion of the Great Babylon’, ordering new clothes, visiting friends, the Anti-Slavery Society and—predictably— paying an early visit to the Patent Office. At the end of the month he was reunited with his daughters in Matlock. They were obviously homesick for Jamaica but Henry felt that they could not return because of Sally’s health. Doctors had warned against her returning to the tropics, assuring Henry that the leprosy was very grave.10 Henry spent most of his time in London promoting his tricycle (in vain) and in discussions with the Anti-Slavery Society, where he had, over the years, established good relations with Sturge. Henry took the opportunity of meeting him and explaining his views on indentured labour. Sturge took Henry to meet W.E.Forster (famous for the 1870 Education Act), who agreed with Henry and urged him to discuss the matter with other prominent politicians. After a series of interviews with sympathetic MPs, in June 1884 Henry Clarke found himself in Downing Street, interviewed by


Evelyn Ashley, the UnderSecretary for the Colonies. A few days later Henry was ushered in to meet Lord Derby at the Colonial Office. Like many before him, Derby did not impress Henry Clarke: ‘Lord Derby is a large, heavy, sluggish looking man, who evidently knows as much about Jamaica as I know about China, and yet he has us in his absolute control.’ Through his contacts in the Anti-Slavery Society, Henry was able to listen to a range of public figures, notably the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning.11 In all this, Henry felt his emotions pulled to and fro. Downcast by slow progress with his cycle experiment, despondent about his political interviews, he was periodically cheered up by visits and hospitality enjoyed at old friends’. The cycle was taking shape in the hands of an engineer in Southwark, for an outlay of £30, but when it was finished it was found to be clumsy, noisy and went at only 6 mph. The cost had risen to £43 and was bound to rise further with necessary modifications. Henry now told his family about the experiment— and its failure. Edith replied in a vein worthy of her father: ‘If failure comes we know that it is because failure is best for us.’12 Once more a familiar style descended on Henry’s diary. Day after day he wrote of being depressed, of having no strength, no courage. He was, yet again, in considerable mental, even religious, confusion: ‘I am wholly puzzled to understand why these 5 successive times at these long intervals my Father has permitted me to be misled so grievously.’13 A day later he added: ‘I do not intend to let the devil beat me.’ The pattern—the phraseology—was always the same. Whether talking about human passion, parochial intrigue, theological disputes, family troubles or experimental failures, all setbacks and failures in Henry Clarke’s life were imputed to the


devil’s work. Since his own path was guided by the Lord, each and every obstacle placed in his way must necessarily be the work of the devil. Late in August 1884 Henry and his brother William paid nostalgic visits to the scenes of their childhood in and around Mansfield. Retracing their steps street by street through the much-altered town, Henry described in affectionate detail the habitat of his childhood and youth, noting the new buildings and roads, the changes inside the church and school. When he left the town, he realised that ‘my name would never be known in it and that I should never see it again’.14 By late August, Henry had been away from Jamaica for four months and he had begun to tire of England. His brother William left for Guernsey where he too was a minister. Though he was despondent at leaving his daughters behind, Henry’s spirits rose when, on 8 September 1884, The Times published his letter about Jamaica. Less encouraging was news from home. His son Stainton had been dismissed and Fred was talking of emigrating to the USA. Henry noted mournfully ‘out of the whole 21 Clarkes I am the only one with a sufficient and reliable income’.15 Buoyed up by another letter in The Times (on ‘coolie labour’, running to a full column and a half), Henry prepared to leave for home. His final task was to travel to the Isle of Wight to confirm an apartment in Sandown for his daughters (but he was aggrieved to find it cost six shillings more than expected). On 17 October 1884 Henry Clarke joined 300 other passengers on the Para bound from Southampton for Jamaica. At Barbados local newspapers were full of denunciations of him because of his recent letters in The Times. On 5 November he was home. At once he was busy again —letter-writing, affairs of the church and the


Building Society. One of his first tasks for the latter was to rescue the collapsed estate of Llandilo, owned by a Mr Burgess (and indebted to the Westmoreland Building Society). When the society took possession Henry had finally come into control of a sugar estate. Although this affair caused him a great deal of anxiety, in truth he was presiding over a very healthy commercial concern with Company deposits of £20,000, and with ‘the Lord directing me I think I shall soon be able to use it for the welfare of this poor oppressed people’.16 It was a recurring but idle speculation on Henry’s part that he could somehow fuse together personal success with broadly based social improvements. As far as we can judge, it was a sincere ambition; but, like most of his ambitions, it was to prove mere illusion. When he had established himself and his family in some considerable prosperity—through the Building Society—he continued to look out across an impoverished and under-developed Jamaica. In 1905 he ruefully commented, ‘not one of my efforts has prospered either in destroying the works of the devil, or in bettering the position of the poor people of Jamaica’.17

76

9 Family Woes 1885–93

THE ONE success among Henry Clarke’s many failures, the Building Society, went from strength to strength, capturing the savings from investors throughout the area and finding a buoyant demand for investments in housing. Even local critics had begun to admire its success. Domestic life went much less smoothly, however.1 News from his daughters, happily ensconced in the Isle of Wight, was reassuring, but the health of his eldest son and continuing difficulties with Jane plagued him. On his fifty-seventh birthday Jane Clarke had a terrifying outburst: Shortly after breakfast Jane suddenly began screaming out in a most alarming manner and said she was going to die, she presently began to vomit and continued to do so for several hours and seems better this evening. More worrying than this physical condition—at least for Henry—was her mental outlook: ‘Her dark desponding frame of mind, and her want of spiritual life is the heaviest burden I have to bear.’ Henry was convinced that Jane had become more difficult. By February 1886 she ‘is constantly complaining of some sort of swimming sensation in

78 FAMILY WOES, 1885–93

the head and is more brooding and despondent than ever she was’. In April 1885 the Clarkes’ seventh child, Clement, now aged twenty-three, had joined his sisters on the Isle of Wight. Soon afterwards, he contracted scarlet fever. Letters from their daughters told Jane and Henry of their son’s rapid deterioration. On 14 September they were told that the man was dying; the distressing symptoms were described in detail. Henry consoled himself that his son’s last letters home had been full of Christian zeal. On 28 September they received news that their son had died exactly a month before. In Clement’s last conscious moments he had dictated a letter to his parents: Tell my father I die perfectly happy—I am quite ready and have nothing to keep me back. Jesus is with me. Tell mother she must forgive all my rough speeches. I have always loved her, though I have often been so rude. The dying man then sent a similar message to all his brothers and sisters, and took leave of his friends and the servants. In his last moments of lucidity, Clement repeated verses from favourite hymns. Even allowing for literary and religious licence, of daughters painfully describing the death of a sibling for their parents, this was a quintessentially Victorian deathbed scene, familiar from contemporary literature. Yet there is no reason to doubt its authenticity. Understandably, Jane and Henry Clarke were distraught. Clement’s doctor wrote to Henry describing the daughters as ‘the bravest and brightest Christians I have met for a very long time’.2


Materially, Henry Clarke had much to be thankful for. His income from the Building Society enabled him to make ample provision for his daughters, though he had always been very careful with his money. Always parsimonious (except for his experiments), and with a firm sense of what was a fair price for a task, an item or a service, he was in permanent conflict with people to whom he owed money; challenging solicitors, builders, engineers— whomever—to explain or reduce their bills. As he got older he prospered, yet he never lost this habit of demanding an explanation for every penny owed to others. Moreover, this financial stringency went hand in hand with a distinctive approach to money. Quite apart from his theory about paper money and his crusade against precious metals, he always felt free to challenge other people’s (or institutions’) financial codes and practices. He was possessed of a spirit of fiscal independence which was to lead him (and his son Henry) into endless trouble. For some time past Henry Clarke junior had failed to pass on the collections from his churches at Savanna-la-Mar, Petersfield and Trinity to the ‘General Sustenation Fund’ run by the Synod. Like his father (see Chapter 7) he disputed the Synod’s interpretation of ecclesiastical law on this point. After a prolonged church investigation, Henry junior was suspended. Later, in October 1889, the family were ejected from their home.3 Their possessions were carried into Savanna-la-Mar on six carts and they took up residence in a house rented by Henry Clarke senior. It was an all too obvious reminder of the son’s dependence on the father. The pathetic house-move ended in a tearful rage, Henry junior held down by his father and two brothers. It was, wrote Henry, ‘the most painful scene I have ever had to pass through’.4 The case rumbled on for years.


For a man whose working day was generally filled with a range of church and local activities, Henry Clarke spent a great deal of time writing. Apart from the diary, his letters, his inventions, his sermons, he tried his hand at a range of essays and literary projects. For thirty-four years Jane and Henry Clarke had lived in homes filled with children. But in July 1886 Lister, the youngest son (‘more selfwilled and difficult to manage than any of our children’), left for school in the Isle of Wight. For all his inner turmoil, Henry Clarke’s family life had in recent years enjoyed an unusual stability and calm. By October 1886 they had lived in the same house for ten years and Henry, at sixty, was in good health. But it could not last. In 1888 he wrote: I am in the most awful terror and distress. My eldest son saved, but only so as by fire with his strength for labour impaired. My second son [Stainton] rolled into the dust and possessed by the demons of drink. My third son (I praise God for it) taken out of this evil world and safe with Jesus. And the Town in which I have witnessed for God’s truth through 40 years still in full possession of the devil— 70% of the births illegitimate. And who am I that I can fight against these powers of darkness?5 Now that Henry had been made aware of Stainton’s drink problem—Stainton had confessed to being a heavy drinker since 1880—he saw frequent signs of it (though the wonder is, with the son living at home, the father had not spotted it earlier). Endless promises of reformation were made, each followed by another drunken scene. When Jane Clarke left to join her daughters in England in June 1889 she felt reassured by Stainton’s promise not to drink. It


was to prove merely the latest in a string of empty offers. After seeing Jane off to England, Henry remained in Kingston to watch the ecclesiastical case against his son Henry. But living alone was difficult and his loneliness was compounded by the extensive press coverage given to the case, confirming the initial judgement against Henry junior. Although he had been suspended from clerical duties, Henry junior set to work as his father’s assistant. In December 1889 the Bishop reminded father and son that Henry junior could not work as a curate during his suspension. The son bitterly blamed the father for his current misery; Jane who had returned from England in November had occasional outbursts about it, and Stainton responded by getting drunker than usual.6 The difficulties of the Clarkes’ eldest son were clearly enormous; he was epileptic, professionally outcast and now without a home. Just as efforts were being made to ease him back into ecclesiastical respectability, his father once more wrote to the Bishop in a manner which ‘will bring matters between us to a crisis’. Speaking his mind—whatever the consequences— had become a way of life for Henry Clarke. Early in 1890 he decided to tell the mother of Stainton’s fiancée about his son’s drinking. Needless to say, this immediately resulted in painful scenes. Bravely, the fiancée agreed to continue the engagement if Stainton would refrain from drinking for twelve months. That too was a forlorn promise. In the midst of such domestic miseries, there were occasional shafts of light. The Clarkes’ daughter Edith became engaged in the Isle of Wight to an English doctor, Dr Barker; their son Lister became articled as a solicitor; their son Hugh continued to be ‘a great help and comfort’. But in


May 1890 Henry’s brother William died in England. Sadness at his brother’s death gave way to a deep suspicion about his will. It was characteristic that Henry should find skulduggery at every turn. William had left virtually all his possessions to his wife (‘the most violent-tempered unprincipled woman…she is worse now than ever’). She died three weeks later, bequeathing everything to her relatives. Henry was convinced that William had not made these arrangements of his own free will and to his dying day he remained convinced that the will was a forgery.7 Despite the warnings, Henry had continued to employ his suspended son as his curate; he even asked permission for his son to take his place so that he could take leave. Inevitably he was called to account. In the autumn of 1890 an ecclesiastical court sentenced him to two years’ unpaid suspension from duties. Jamaica’s Governor Blake made strenuous informal efforts to allow Henry to escape the trap he had sprung for himself. All Henry would do was issue self-righteous, huffy replies; by turns truculent and unyielding.8 Friends urged him to accommodate, to retire on his pension. By the end of 1890 there seemed a very real possibility that Henry Clarke would impoverish his whole adult family by refusing to accept that he might be in the wrong. The press—and correspondents in the press —attacked him as never before, much to the mortification of his family. Jane even refused to attend church because of her public embarrassment. When Edith married, on 10 June 1891, Henry and Jane Clarke were in Jamaica. Her father blamed his conflict with the Jamaican church authorities for keeping him from his daughter’s side.


The clumsy dispute rumbled on, but began to lose its force when Henry Clarke’s mind began to veer towards another of his favourite diversions. He began to experiment again; this time with the evaporation of sugar, working with his son Fred on Mount Eagle property. Like all before it, this venture, which had been germinating in his mind for some time past, was a failure. Stainton’s daily drunkenness was a constant worry. He was, by turns, aggressive and abusive, before begging forgiveness. His wild swings of mood terrified his parents. When he left for the USA in October 1891 (to seek a cure and to find a new career) Henry was greatly relieved. In May 1892 Jane and Henry learned that their daughter Edith had died in childbirth three weeks earlier; the child had died a few days after the mother. Newspaper cuttings, letters and messages of condolence arrived from England and Jamaica. Their daughter Mary described in distressing detail the circumstances of the birth and the two deaths: ‘if grief could kill we would not be alive now’. The funeral was held before a crowded congregation which included the local Fire Brigade, the Odd Fellows and the Free Masons. Henry wrestled with his grief for days, riding out into the country to clear his mind. Scarcely had the shock of Edith’s death subsided before Henry received news that his brother John had died in Buffalo, New York. Sadness was, again, tempered by the knowledge that John had died a good Christian; converted to Methodism, he had proved devout at the end. It was, understandably, Edith’s death which hung most oppressively. Nor could the family put their bereavement aside. Condolences and press cuttings continued to dribble in from England for a long time after. But it was only a matter of time


before Henry began to link Edith’s death with all his other earthly battles. This was but the latest—if the most distressing—of Satan’s assaults. Henry’s thoughts soon returned to his continuing battle with the church and island authorities. Henry Clarke was still under suspension and in the midst of his family troubles but continued to write about his case. He showered people with letters arguing his case, though most simply refused to be drawn in. He littered the island’s press with letters and was rewarded—predictably— with further abuse from editors and correspondents. When in February 1892 a new minister tried to take possession of Henry’s church, he insulted the officers involved, refused to accept or open the necessary documents, throwing papers back at the issuing officers. All this was viewed as a ‘strange assault’ by the Bishop and the Governor, but at no point in this unseemly wrangle did Henry imagine that his own behaviour might have played some role in the unfolding of events. In late January 1893 Henry Clarke’s case went to trial before the Chief Justice in Kingston, to decide whether he had been justly suspended from his position. With the help of his sons Lister and Hugh, Henry conducted his own case: a vigorous and uninhibited two-day scrutiny of his superiors, including Bishop Nuttall. Assessing his summing up, Henry thought ‘it was not I who spoke but the Holy Ghost who spoke in me’. Pleased with his own performance, Henry retired to Savanna-la-Mar. Two weeks later a telegram announced that the Lord Justice had ruled in Henry’s favour—with costs (though the issue hinged on a technical interpretation of the legal relationship between Henry’s church and its incumbent). Henry immediately wrote to the Governor asking for a restitution of his suspended salary. The Governor


refused, and the church authorities decided to appeal the case. Thus, the dispute continued, and throughout 1893 Henry persisted in badgering all and sundry with letters about his side of the case. Despite his temporary victory, the matter lay in suspended animation. When Jane left in May 1893, accompanied by her daughter Jenny, to join her other daughters in England, Henry was looked after by his daughter-inlaw Allie. Left to his own devices, he was lonely, which accentuated his natural tendency to brood and speculate. When Jane wrote from England, he observed that she was ‘taking her usual sensible view of our affairs’. This ‘sensible view’ was missing on a daily basis. The one male to whom he was physically close, his son Henry, simply ignored him. Both men lived under the same roof, but for much of 1893 contrived not to speak to each other, though occasionally they had embarrassing ‘scenes’ in public. Eventually, still living under the same roof and working in the same church, they resorted to communication by letter; long recriminating letters dripping with poisonous hostility. On her extended stay in England, Jane Clarke had seen a great deal of Dr Barker, their late daughter’s husband. Henry had never met the man, but obviously did not like what he was hearing from Jane. This was evidence enough for him that ‘our Father acted lovingly in taking our darling Edith and her infant to Himself .9 Modern readers need to make a leap of the imagination to understand the sensibilities of devout Victorians who could find such solace in the death of a loved one. Henry’s reaction—though personal—was not unique. At the end of 1893 Henry began to consider a move which was to give him a completely new


change of direction. Prompted by an anonymous letter to The Gleaner, he started to think about a political career. Should he stand for election to the island’s Legislative Council as the delegate from Westmoreland and Hanover? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He waited, again, for the Lord’s command.

10 A Preacher in Politics 1894– 97

THE PROSPECT of entering Jamaican politics fascinated Henry Clarke—and others. The early days of 1894 were filled with gossip in the press about his possible candidature, and his friends urged him to stand. His sons initially disapproved. Henry, however, placed his trust in the Lord. In order to stand for election he had to resign as a state-paid cleric and claim his pension. This would clear away the long-running feud between himself and the island’s authorities. With his letter of resignation on the Governor’s desk, Henry Clarke took to the familiar roads of western Jamaica, addressing crowds throughout the region. His sons managed the campaign, Lister devising his father’s ‘colours’ of red, white and blue and distributing badges and placards. Two newspapers, Galls News Letter and the Colonial Standard offered their support.1 After a fashion, Henry Clarke had long been active politically. He had for years campaigned for a host of his favourite issues and reforms (though always unsuccessfully). Now, he grew in confidence as the campaign progressed, sensing a popular tide running for him (and against his two opponents, Farquharson and Ewen). Wherever he spoke, in the Court House in Lucea or from under a tree in Green Island, Henry drew big crowds. A good orator, after


a lifetime’s practice from the pulpit, Henry’s voice caught a local mood. His energy, good health and well-tried oratory were ideally suited to political campaigning and on voting day,6 February 1894, the crowd seized him in ‘the roughest embraces of a friendly kind I have ever known’. He escaped only by locking himself in his vestry. A cheering mob failed to stop Henry enjoying his normal good night’s sleep and at mid-day on 7 February he was declared the resounding victor: ‘Clarke 1,029, Farquharson 389, Ewen 293.’ This is the first honour I have received from men and it comes entirely from the Poor for all the upper classes have cast their vote against me. Of course I know that it comes from the Lord.2 This explanation could not have been correct; the ‘poor’ were not enfranchised and it seems very likely that Henry’s support lay among the humbler ranks of the local middle classes and propertyowning people of colour. The white landed élite, against whom Henry had railed for the last forty years, were unlikely to find his views (about taxation, social and land reform) attractive, quite apart from any residual personal dislike they may have harboured because of his long-standing denunciation of their class. Henry telegraphed the happy news to Jane in England. The old problems rumbled on, none more painfully than the conflict with his eldest son, but henceforth Henry Clarke’s preoccupation was his new role as elected member of the Legislature. When he met his fellow delegates in Kingston for the first time he was—as in all things— unimpressed by the company he had to keep.

A PREACHER IN POLITICS, 1894–97 89

In Kingston in the spring of 1894 Henry found himself in the thick of Jamaican social life. Long accustomed to more provincial and limited pleasures, Henry was now wined and dined and mingling with the island’s political, landed, commercial and governing élite. It was a far cry from the remoteness of western Jamaica, though rarely to his demanding approval. For the first time, Henry’s diary shifted its focus away from the minutiae of its author’s private life and woes, to a much broader stage. Dining with colonial officials, chatting with the local élite, caught Henry’s fancy. It also gave him the opportunity of pressing his views on those in high places. His first political move was to oppose the moneys raised to pay for Indian immigration. Nobody else was prepared to vote alongside him. Renewing his drive to register the fathers of illegitimate children, he could not understand why the Chamber failed to follow his lead. Henry Clarke simply could not grasp that others might have a genuinely different point of view, nor did he help his own case by writing privately to island officials accusing them of trickery when, inevitably, he found himself at odds with them. Throughout Henry’s first few weeks as an elected member, the dispute about his church pension periodically surfaced. Offered a number of solutions, he rejected each one as unworthy or unprincipled. Now able to tell officials to their faces what he thought of them, Henry confronted the Governor, the Attorney-General and a host of clerics with what he felt about their proposals. It was inevitable that this highly personal dispute would be raised in the Chamber.3 Escaping from Kingston at the end of his first legislative session in May 1894, Henry returned to the usual round of domestic frictions in Savanna-la-


Mar. The tense domestic atmosphere was greatly relieved when his son Henry left the town to take up a new post elsewhere in the island. Whatever their personal differences, all his sons united in feeling their father was wrong not to accept the offered compromise on his clerical pension; Jane later joined their ranks. When he returned to Kingston in late May 1894 Henry felt especially tested. Unusually for him, he was sleeping badly, and spent hours locked away in his lodgings. Realising that he simply could not bear to be without Jane any longer, he resolved to join her in England. All five previous visits had been marked by ‘humiliations’ and he pondered what this would bring. Leaving Kingston with his son Fred on 26 June 1894, Henry Clarke arrived in Southampton on 11 July. He was greeted by his daughters Jenny and Sara, and his son-in-law Dr Barker. Later that same day Henry was reunited on the Isle of Wight with ‘my dear old wife’. They all thought Henry looked ten years younger, but he was shocked by the change in Mary, now ‘a deaf old woman and her front teeth project so much that she is quite disfigured’.4 Within two days Henry had written to the Governor of Jamaica about his pension. He again took up his favourite reforms—currency, land tax and the regulation of illegitimacy—with officials in the Colonial Office. He also had long talks with prospective business partners about proposals for buying or managing Jamaican properties. But he also played the tourist, whisking off his family to enjoy the gaudier delights of the changing capital.5 Throughout September and October Henry was happy to remain with his family on the Isle of Wight, enjoying the pleasures of the island, attending to his devotions and generally relishing the role of Victorian pater familias. At the end of


October, Henry and Jane Clarke and their daughter Jenny left for Jamaica. By a freak of circumstance, both the Governor, Sir Henry Blake, and Bishop Nuttall were fellow passengers. For the first eight days the ship was battered by heavy seas, and few passengers emerged from their cabins to join the robust Henry Clarke for his storm-bound breakfast. As soon as normal life was resumed, Henry argued his pension case with his captive audience. Relations broke down between Henry and Bishop Nuttall; they simply communicated with each other, from one part of the ship to another, by letter and note. Not even the intimacy of life on an oceangoing ship could dislodge Henry Clarke from the unshakable security of his convictions.6 The Clarkes returned to Savanna-la-Mar on 14 November 1894, but Henry’s pension dispute with the church was no nearer to resolution. It was finally resolved in February 1895, when a unanimous vote of the Legislative Council awarded him his pension. Freed from this embarrassing dispute, Henry now flung himself into his work as a reforming politician. His first proposal, for currency reforms, was ‘received with a perplexed look’ on the faces of other delegates, By the time Henry’s second session as a legislator ended in April 1895 he had stamped on the Council those qualities which had been his hallmark for years past in the west of the island: industry, persistence (in the face of overwhelming opposition) and a moral certainty that he was right when all others were wrong. When Henry Clarke returned to his new home in Savanna-la-Mar (the family had moved in January to ‘Hendon’, the house he had first slept in on arrival in Jamaica in 1847), he embarked on yet another cantankerous correspondence about his pension with the Bishop. Having already received a


back payment of £1,013, he now demanded a further £624, ‘the difference between my stipend with interest and what I had received by vote of the Legislative Council’.7 On New Year’s Eve 1895, for the fiftieth time, Henry Clarke compiled his reflections on the past year. His first summary had been read to his mother in Mansfield in 1845. Now he concluded: I see as clearly as I always have that no man can understand a new truth, even when it is visibly set before him, without divine inspiration and therefore I know it is God and not man who has withheld me so long from finishing the work He has given me to do, but I expect every day to hear Him say of my fight of faith ‘It is finished’.8 Henry was to spend the rest of his days unrequited; seeking divine approval and public acceptance for his reforming ideas, but finding instead little but ridicule and resistance from his fellow men. For reasons he could never quite fathom, his own ‘revelations’, implanted in his mind for the betterment of mankind, were, from first to last, dismissed as visionary nonsense by the very people they were intended to benefit. The following year, campaigning for re-election to the Council, Henry took the canvassing, speeches and lengthy travel in his stride. On the last two nights of the campaign the peace of Savanna-laMar was interrupted by crowds chanting ‘Vote for Henry Clarke’; his meetings were usually packed, his colours were festooned throughout the region and the result (Clarke 704, Braham 273, Farquharson 28) confirmed all the pre-election signs.


As he prepared to return to Kingston, Henry found himself isolated from the one institution which had been his very life for almost half a century. His successor at Trinity Church had slowly introduced High Church ceremonial, to Henry’s great revulsion. Distrusting Bishop Nuttall and all his associates, Henry Clarke now found himself ‘driven out of the old church after worshipping in it for 48 years and ministering in it for 24 years’.9 Ever keen to keep his fellow men on their religious toes, his first step on his return to Kingston was to ask the Governor why the Council no longer began its proceedings with prayers. Always a loner, Henry again found himself isolated in the Council. Within a week he was thoroughly disillusioned. Opposing most of the government’s proposals—especially their regressive taxation system—he found it hard to keep his temper. He hurled his verbal barbs around the Chamber and at the heads of officials present, on one occasion ‘charging the Govt. with being a prayerless heathen Govt’.10 It is perfectly clear from his diary that he knew he stood alone; where he had support, it was unreliable. When his proposals were debated, Henry proved his own worst enemy, routing any support he might have expected by the ferocity and intemperance of his words. There were few people in Jamaica in the 1890s who openly supported Henry’s ideas, but only a decade later, shortly after his death, he was praised for tenaciously promoting the very issues which incurred such scorn. This is particularly striking on the question of the island’s official finances. Henry took an almost personal interest in public funds; he hated to see taxpayers’ money spent on what he regarded as extravagant schemes. He fought all costly proposals and beadily scrutinised national accounts to find traces of bad housekeeping.


Chicanery seemed always just below the surface. When the figures proved otherwise, he simply assumed that the matter had been ‘cooked and falsified’. From the first he was firmly convinced that the island’s finances were much less healthy than officials and the published accounts suggested, but his barrage of criticism merely angered his audience. A decade later it was widely agreed that he had been correct; the island’s public accounts had indeed been wrongly designed and the state of the nation’s reserves was much worse than the government claimed. Henry’s simple argument was that any individual who ran his accounts like the Jamaican government would rapidly end up in the bankruptcy courts. Yet it was to take the intervention of the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, before the island’s accounting system was changed.11 The repeated failures and disappointments in the Chamber drove Henry back from Kingston to Savanna-la-Mar in April 1896. There he submerged himself in parochial and domestic disputes. He was in a speculative mood; dreaming of inventions, worrying about his sons and spending hours each day locked in his room at prayer. When Jane was away staying with friends, Henry’s loneliness (compounded now by having no regular work) slipped into morbid introspection. Sustaining himself by reading, he was pleased to discover that both Milton and Martin Luther shared his own religious position. As he prepared, in the summer of 1896, to pay his seventh visit to England, Henry was periodically plagued by revelations about old—and new— inventions. His latest idea was a new braking system for trains. In England, his first move was to request an interview with Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. Chamberlain, however, was


abroad for a month. Henry had to be content to meet Colonial Office mandarins and he was left with an unsatisfactory promise that his submission for currency reform would be considered. Henry set aside this latest disappointment, claiming to be happier than at any time of his life. Early in November 1896, Henry took leave of his family and returned to Jamaica, sharing the leg of the journey to Barbados with the Governor Sir Henry Blake. Inevitably, the Governor was badgered by the energetic clergyman and they spoke ‘warmly’. By the 21st Henry was back in Savannala-Mar, enthusiastically greeted by family and parishioners. When the Legislative Council reconvened in February 1897 Henry Clarke quickly made his mark querying finances and denouncing ‘coolie’ labour. Among his successes he counted a change in postal orders, the payment of pensions and the removal of a sugar duty of one penny. For one who sought to put the world to rights, these seemed mere trifles. But they were all Henry could point to after forty years’ agitation for change in Jamaica.12 In the Chamber, Henry had gone to great lengths to prove that the average daily income of Jamaicans was one (old) penny. His audience remained unimpressed. Further research revealed that the average income was in fact only a halfpenny per day; his bold announcement ‘was again received with derisive laughter’.13 What Henry Clarke proposed was a shift in the nature of Jamaican taxation, from property and duties (many of them regressive and socially unfair in a society with so large a proportion of poor rural people) towards ‘an Income Tax applied on the same lines as in England’.14 In many respects the Chamber was an ideal forum for his lively and wide-ranging views, though


his failures deeply frustrated and angered him. Henry Clarke was soon to find his views given an even greater prominence, on all the issues he had been peddling for the past fifty years, when he was asked for his opinions by a visiting Royal Commission. This was an opportunity he was not going to miss. If his fellow legislators refused to be swayed, perhaps he could persuade the visiting British statesmen and officials.

11 An International Audience 1897–98

BY THE 1890s, the sugar industry was in crisis throughout the West Indies and the Colonial Secretary resolved to tackle the problem by dispatching a Royal Commission to take evidence throughout the islands. Chaired by Sir Henry Norman, a former Governor of Jamaica, the Commission sought the view of all interested parties. And no one was more interested than Henry Clarke. For years, Henry had denounced the sugar industry and its harmful social consequences. More recently he had advocated the development of ‘central factories’ to encourage small farmers to cultivate cane away from the old estates. Before being called to give verbal evidence to the Commission (sitting in Kingston), Henry submitted a detailed and thoughtful paper of some 3,000 words, accompanied by relevant publications (his own) and supporting statistics. It clearly made uncomfortable reading for anyone closely involved in the island’s affairs, and was a foretaste of things to come. Henry Clarke’s written submission, now enshrined in British Parliamentary Papers, incorporated many of the ideas espoused over the last half-century.1 But they must surely have surprised Commission members, fed a diet of a

98 AN INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE, 1897–98

different kind by the vested interests throughout the islands. Here, for once, was a truly radical and alternative vision and analysis of Jamaica’s past, present and future (though scarred, as we might expect, by Henry’s unreasonable flights of fancy). Those who knew Henry Clarke had long been accustomed to his ideas, but it was quite another matter to see them paraded before so distinguished and influential a panel of visiting Britons. As long as Henry Clarke’s views were contained within the island—and generally at its westerly tip—they could be tolerated as the ramblings of yet another conscience-stricken cleric, intent on putting the world to rights. But in 1897 his ideas found an audience which was obliged, by its very brief, to be receptive where locals might turn a deaf ear. To supplement his written submission Henry Clarke was called, at short notice, to give verbal evidence on 1 April 1897.2 With no time to prepare his evidence, Henry spoke for most of the morning session, on the issues outlined in his paper, resuming after lunch. His words clearly angered many present. The former Governor, Sir Henry Norman, intervened and said ‘he must give his most emphatic denial to my statement that the Government had never made any effort for the elevation of the people in wealth or morals’. His remarks were applauded by others in the room. Henry wrote: ‘I had to return to my seat “bearing the reproach”, and it disturbed my peace till I went to bed’.3 Henry’s brief entry in his diary can be supplemented by the fuller, verbatim report in the Parliamentary Papers. And it is here that we see Henry at his best—or worst; assertive, selfrighteous and unwilling to concede to the feelings of other people. His evidence takes up six full pages of double-columned text. In answer to questions


from members of the Commission, he returned to many of the points he had made in writing, but adding twists and barbs, clearly on the spur of the moment, which could do nothing but cause personal offence. Henry was thanked, but was sent away with a firm rebuke. Not for the first time, he left a meeting impressed by the sense of his own isolation, with the derision of his fellow men ringing in his ears.4 Henry’s words, however, did not prove ineffectual. He made a deep and abiding impact on at least one man on the Commission, the Secretary, Sidney (later Lord) Olivier, the prominent Fabian. Reflecting years later on Jamaica, Olivier argued that Henry Clarke’s ‘declaration was substantially true and just’. In a book published in 1933, Olivier described Henry Clarke as ‘one of the most sincere, courageous and hard-working men I have ever known’.5 Such praise, almost thirty years after Henry’s death, was rare in his lifetime. After the heady days of the Commission, with its swirl of publicity and rather extravagant social activities, Henry’s life returned to the more humdrum routines of the lonely reformer. Yet he was making no progress and, conscious of his age, was increasingly aware of the limited time left to him. Once more he began to ponder the technicalities of the ‘Aerial Screw’, which, he blithely claimed, could be applied to all ships or trains, flying machines or motor carriages. Persistent failure and political isolation, though perfectly in keeping with Henry’s earlier life, alienated him from the world of Kingston politics. Before the session ended, he had packed his bags and returned to Savanna-la-Mar in 1897. As he prepared, wearily, for his next trip to England, Henry agreed to help Stainton buy his own property at Coolshade. Although relieved at


this solution to Stainton’s apparently endless employment problems, Henry doubted his son’s long-term prospects. On the eve of departure for England in June 1897, Henry Clarke suffered a major loss. While he was in Kingston waiting for his passage, his room was ransacked by a burglar. Henry found all his old journals, packed for the trip to England scattered across the room. A trunk of clothes and £45 had been stolen. Having called the police, and gathered his possessions together, he suddenly realised that his current diary which began in 1882 was missing. This loss gave him a serious shock. He pored over the reasons for this theft, concluding it was the work of Satan. Henry sailed for England unable to shake the loss of the diary from his mind.6 Painful as the loss of the diary was, it was put into perspective by an extraordinary incident on the voyage to England. In mid-ocean Henry’s ship was struck by another steamship. Damage to both vessels was light but Henry marvelled at their collective escape. Henry’s cabin was only twenty feet from the point of impact: ‘It seems as if the devil was aiming at me… The probabilities of such a collision happening by accident in mid-ocean are as a million to one—it must therefore have been by design.’ The accident brought home to Henry ‘the folly of making any trouble of my lost Journal and money’.7 A few days later Henry landed in England; his eighth return to his birthplace. The delights of reunion with his wife and family were reinforced by a telegram from Jamaica: ‘DIARY FOUND’. Henry’s routines on the Isle of Wight were as wellestablished as if he were at home. He dispatched a flow of letters to the influential and famous, preached locally, presided at local prayer meetings and generally slipped smoothly into the life of a


retired, provincial cleric. But he was itching to promote his inventions, and at the first opportunity he lodged his bicycle patent with a sceptical Patent Office, authorised its experimental manufacture, then headed for the sights. He also paid his customary calls on the Colonial Office, where once again he was treated as an irritating intrusion. Recollections of pleasure jostle for space in Henry’s diary with rebuffs from manufacturers. Time and again the advice given him was simple: do not proceed, the idea is faulty and its implementation would be costly and ineffective. Personal disappointments were matched by more general frustrations, particularly the newly published Sugar Commission report which ‘suggests nothing but the settlement of the negroes on lands of their own’. In early November 1897 Henry took ship for Jamaica, once more leaving Jane behind in England. He was happy to be back in his old haunts, though Jamaica was plagued by the yellow fever and the island’s finances seemed worse than ever. Only two weeks after landing Henry Clarke wrote yet another highly injudicious letter to Governor Blake (reviving the dispute which began in 1890), demanding the repayment of £747.12.0. You and Bishop Nuttall between you will have to pay it, before you will be absolved from the debt. If not now, then at that Judgement Seat to which we are daily hastening, when all human wrongs will be righted by the infallible Judge. It was to the Governor’s credit that he took a humorous route out of this renewed dispute, deciding to play Henry at his own sanctimonious game.


I propose to defer the reconsideration of this matter to the alternative period mentioned at the end of your letter. I accordingly commit the matter to the Lord for judgement as he will.8 Throughout his public life, Henry Clarke had been joined by few supporters, but in the New Year of 1898 his battle against Jamaican illegitimacy was adopted by The Gleaner. Henry received editorial support for his campaign and was favourably interviewed. Although most of the island’s clergy supported Henry’s stand on the issue, he detected the hand of Bishop Nuttall operating against him. Even worse, he suspected that some of the unfavourable correspondence in the press on the topic came from his own son Henry. Henry had traditionally placed some faith in the coming of a new Governor, this time Sir Augustus Hemming. But the Governor’s response to Henry’s publications was cool; he thought Henry’s views ‘socialistic and revolutionary’.9 Active again in the Council in Kingston, Henry Clarke seems now to have drifted through the proceedings, disagreeing with most measures and officials, but indifferent where once he had been fiery and energetic. Jamaican politics now seemed insignificant compared with the war which erupted in April 1898 between the USA and Spain. Fearful that it would ‘wrap the whole earth in a flame’, Henry hoped that it would end in ‘the establishment of Christ’s reign upon earth’.10

12 Unfulfilled Old Age 1898– 1903

APRIL 1898 brought Henry Clarke’s seventieth birthday. ‘Meditated on the way the Lord has led me in my 70 years’ journey through the wilderness and rejoiced that the promised land is near.’1 A longing for the hereafter had been a refrain in his journal from his earliest days, but in the time left to him he continued much as before. That summer Henry was alone in Savanna-laMar, his wife and family in England or elsewhere in Jamaica, and his journal became more reflective, more nostalgic for his earlier days. Time and again he scanned his life’s work, pondering the meaning of his successes and failures. He seems to swing between the speculations of a devout man and the more mundane and often humbling realities of the material world. When he fell ill, with a fever and stomach trouble in August 1898, it was his first major illness since 1877. News from Jane in England was not encouraging: that summer she suffered a series of attacks which temporarily paralysed her limbs. Although no permanent damage seems to have been caused, Henry took this as a sign that the end was near. The following year (1899) began more happily than any for twenty years, despite persistent worries about his sons. Henry enjoyed the varied social life in the west of the island, saw and


entertained his relatives, and revelled in his financial good fortune. When he returned to Kingston for the resumption of Council business in March, it was as if he had never been away. Towards the end of April he tried for the sixth time —and again unsuccessfully—to enact a register for the fathers of illegitimate children. More than political success, however, he yearned for his longabsent wife. In fact, Henry mentioned her more often when they were apart than when they were together. I have felt the separation from my dear old wife… I always feel as though my own body was not all there when my wife’s body is absent, and this feeling is as strong now I am old as when I was young.2 He booked a passage to England for the end of May, quitting his sixth session as a legislator. He even considered not returning to Jamaica, feeling that he might be able to serve the people of the island better by campaigning in England.3 This train of thought was interrupted on board the ship to England by another ‘attack’ of his inventing mania. After a voyage of sixteen days—much of it locked in discussions with his old adversary Bishop Nuttall—Henry was reunited with Jane and their daughters on 10 June. Henry slipped easily into the lifestyle he relished on the Isle of Wight; visiting friends for entertainment and ‘useful’ pleasures, catching up with gossip about old friends, and generally enjoying the beauties of the island in summertime. He paid close attention to other preachers, and preached by invitation, but after a lifetime’s preaching, and with a stock of sermons to

UNFULFILLED OLD AGE, 1898–1903 105

hand, Henry now found that his enthusiasm had drained away. Old preoccupations occasionally resurfaced; one day he rose at 5 a.m. to write a letter to Chamberlain, urging the adoption of currency reform. His theories about the risks associated with a currency linked to precious metals seemed confirmed by the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899: ‘Since the Jameson Raid in 18961 have seen that the London gold worshippers meant to take possession of the Transvaal because it contained gold and diamonds’ But the hopes that Henry had pinned on Chamberlain were dimmed by that Minister’s role in events in South Africa. That autumn, the diaries which he had so assiduously kept for half a century began to pose a problem. Worried that others might read them if he fell ill, he sealed up the old volumes in a dispatch box and addressed the keys to his executor with instructions that no one should read them before his death. On 18 October Henry once again left his wife and two daughters at Sandown and boarded the Atrato for Jamaica: his tenth departure from England. Arriving home in Savanna-la-Mar—if home it now was—Henry was soon embroiled in the usual round of family frictions, worrying especially about his sons’ continuing financial dependence. But he took great comfort from his life’s work and from the knowledge that, before long, he would be united with his heavenly father. Henry’s first entry in his diary on the first day of the new century was a simple statement: ‘I begin the year in peace and assurance.’ This was a far cry from the howls of despair which had greeted such anniversaries throughout his younger days. His main domestic complaint in the early months of 1900 was his wife’s absence in England. At this


time, too, he was effectively excluded from the church, first by his long-standing dispute with the authorities and second by the ‘popish’ practices which his successor, Mr Davis, had adopted in Savanna-la-Mar. To add material insult to theological injury, the fabric of the church (originally built as a store-house in 1780) was thought ill-suited to High Church practices. An elaborate and costly reconstruction was set in train. The rebuilding—‘an atrocious act of vandalism’—drove Henry from the church and compelled him to worship privately at home. He felt unable, on theological grounds, to join the Dissenters, and took comfort from the knowledge that great servants of the Lord in the past, from Wesley to the Salvation Army, all ‘pass away and leave the world just as rebellious and miserable as before’. On his seventy-second birthday he felt he was ‘still in the battle field’, consoling himself with the thought that, compared with Jesus’s struggle over 1,800 years, his own ordeal seemed quite minor. But his religious isolation grew steadily more complete. It was now that Henry needed his wife more than ever, but she enjoyed living in England. Save for the servants, Henry thus spent much of his time alone. For hours on end he ruminated on the past, praying for the future, and of course, he wrote; to friends, in his diary and predictably to the press. Solitude seems to have induced both an inner peace and a deeper longing for the life to come. Despite these isolations of old age, Henry Clarke remained a prominent figure, one to be visited and consulted by any luminary passing through the region. The new Lieutenant Governor, Olivier, enjoyed a conducted tour of Savanna-la-Mar with Henry as his guide, a meeting (along with the earlier Sugar Commission hearings) which left a


deep and favourable impression on the young official. Henry did his own share of travelling round the island. Wherever he went, his journeys recalled visits and experiences of years before. He was forever reminded of his own durability when all his old acquaintances had passed on; his good health where others were in decline. As his old adversaries died off, Henry’s sense of superiority was enhanced; he had outlived them all—a sure mark of divine favour. What irritated him, however, was the sense of having unfinished business to attend to, most importantly currency reform and his flying ship. For a man who felt he had it within his grasp to bring about worldly perfection, Henry experienced remarkable difficulty persuading even his own family to live with him in harmony. Disputes snarled around him from one week to the next. Should he bring back his wife and daughters from England? Why had the attractive Sara failed to attract appropriate suitors? Why were his sons always in debt? Whenever his relatives disagreed with him, it was—as ever—the Lord’s doing. Henry had always been an in defatigable reader. Now, in the long days of his retirement, with all his material needs catered for by servants, he spent even more time reading. In November 1900, for instance, three consecutive entries in his diary showed him reading Sir Thomas More on the 20th, George Herbert’s poems on the 25th and Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian on the 29th. When not reading, he spent many hours alone at prayer; sometimes he prayed for the whole day. News of the death of Queen Victoria reached Savanna-la-Mar within thirty minutes, testimony to the modern communications which had brought the outside world closer to that formerly isolated


part of the empire. Henry was unusually effusive: ‘And so ends the long and wonderful reign of the best earthly monarch of England or any other nation. I have always felt a personal love for her.’ In common with every cranny of the British empire, the residents and officials of Savanna-laMar marked the Queen’s passing in a lavish, wellorchestrated and unified display of mourning. Officials from every local organisation, religion and private group attended the town’s memorial service; the rest of the church was packed with ordinary folk. Alone far too long, in May 1901—after an absence of twenty months—Henry returned to his wife in England. The summer passed pleasantly enough, consumed by those genteel rounds of social visits, strolls and churchgoing, less frequently by preaching. By September the Clarkes were ready to leave England permanently (Henry had become concerned about the cost of running two homes, though he had never been better placed to do so). Their departure from the Isle of Wight marked the end of a seventeen-year connection with Sandown; they left behind only the mortal remains of their children Edith and Clement. Travelling north to Bristol, Jane Clarke fretted about the fate of their motley collections of bags and packages. They stayed in Bristol for three weeks, in comfortable lodgings ‘above our style (3½ guineas a week)’. It was there, at Mrs Owen’s, Cambridge House, The Avenue, Clifton, that Henry and Jane Clarke celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He conceded—in old age if not throughout their earlier married years—that Jane had had a difficult time in her marriage: ‘Living in a trying climate among strange people…[with] the ordeal of bearing and bringing up on scanty means our eleven children.’


Henry enjoyed what were to be his last few days in England. He relished being in Bristol—the strolls in Clifton, along the suspension bridge—but best of all he loved the new moving picture shows (‘I have never seen any human work more marvellous’). At the end of October 1901 Henry and Jane, with their daughters Jenny and Mary, boarded a ship bound for Jamaica. For the first time for many years he left no relative behind in England. On 8 November they stepped ashore in Kingston and a day later they entered their new home, Llandilo. This, their tenth family home, was the first Henry had owned; he and Jane shared it with their daughters Mary, Jenny and Sara. Henry Clarke’s family was happier than ever before save perhaps for the morose Mary. They enjoyed the social life of Savanna-la-Mar, which centred on tennis parties, dinners and church activities. They had no financial worries, though Henry continued to feel alarmed—privately at least —about his children’s various shortcomings. In truth they were no more, no worse, than might have been expected from any large collection of offspring. Despite his concern, most of the Clarke children prospered. The youngest son, Lister, married on 26 November, three weeks before his brother Fred. There now existed a much more extended Clarke family and the Clarkes’ offspring, with their own circle of middle-class and propertied friends, opened up for Henry and Jane a much broader social world than they had been able to enjoy in their own younger days. Of course Henry was no longer an abrasive preacher and politician, alienating people left and right. It was now easier to entertain him socially without causing or incurring bad feeling. The Building Society continued to thrive, due in no small measure to the managerial skills of the


Clarkes’ tenth child, Hugh. So pleased was Henry with the Society’s progress that he insisted, in January 1902—and against the objections of other directors—in appending to the annual report a ‘paragraph of thanksgiving to God for the success of the Society through 28 years’. Two months later this incident was raised in the Legislative Council, to the merriment of the representatives; their guffaws prompted a flurry of letters in the island’s newspapers defending Henry Clarke’s actions and his long record of Christian service in the island.4 At last Henry was beginning to attract a small chorus of approval for his work. Henry was by now a bored old man. He had spent a vigorous life working at full capacity on a range of interests. In old age he found idle hours and tranquillity unsettling. Still pestered by thoughts about his inventions, Henry latched on to the flimsiest of hints that his ideas might have been adopted. When Joseph Chamberlain claimed that journeys to the colonies would soon be swifter, Henry was convinced that the minister had his flying ship in mind. Whenever he heard of improved sailing times and performances he felt sure that his ideas—already lying on Admiralty desks—were being used. On 4 July 1902, Henry and Jane Clarke moved home yet again, back into Hendon at Savanna-laMar. A month later Jane celebrated her seventyfifth birthday. She is stout in body—feeble in her walk—has lost all her teeth—she is growing deafer—her dark luxuriant hair is now white and thin— but she still attracts me with the same kind of attraction as when she was a black-eyed maiden of 15.


On 3 September Henry came to the end of the thirteenth handwritten volume of his diary. Five years before, when he had lost, then recovered, his current volume, he had resolved to keep his journal on loose sheets. Now, realising that old age had not impaired his diary-keeping abilities or interests, he resolved to press on.

112

13 Alone Again 1903–7

AT THE age of seventy-five Henry Clarke had become a brittle, testy and domineeringly pious old man. Greeted on his birthday by the customary good wishes, ‘Many happy returns of the day’, he tossed back the enigmatic response, ‘How many?’ He found it impossible to accept light-hearted greetings or casual comments. Always eager to raise the spiritual tone of any gathering, he was especially irked by casual visitors and conversations in the morning: The usual light talk pains me and if I introduce spiritual talk it pains others and I meet with no response.’ Henry received manifold blessings in his old age. He had never been more prosperous, he was healthier than most men of his age and his family were comfortable, if not always individually happy. Most unusual of all, grudging praise began to trickle his way. In May 1903, for instance, The Gleaner praised Henry’s dogged attachment to social reform. But the praise of other men had never counted for much, and he felt that such recognition scarcely compensated for life’s continuing disappointments. Henry felt himself to be in direct contact with the Lord; they spoke to each other during his frequent prayers. When in August 1903 Savanna-la-Mar was battered by an approaching hurricane, ‘I at once


got into communication with Him whom the winds obey, and about one o’clock I perceived the worst had passed.’ When he learned that the hurricane had indeed savaged the rest of the island, leaving Westmoreland relatively unscathed, Henry Clarke knew why: ‘I regard this as my heavenly Father’s fulfilment to me of the promises of the ninety-first Psalm—as I did my exemption from cholera in 1850–1.’1 Where others saw only the workings of nature— or in the case of Henry’s family, the natural pleasures and pains of life in so large a group of people—Henry Clarke could detect the hand of the Lord. As his sons sired children of their own, the usual woes and ailments of family life inevitably multiplied; sick mothers and babies, the dangers and agonies of confinements, serious or not so serious illnesses, all were fitted into the same pattern of divine intervention. If God indeed guided Henry’s family, He sometimes moved in mysterious ways—as Henry himself admitted. In 1903 all eight of his surviving children still required their father’s financial help. Most men would have pondered hard and long about this, and might have concluded that they too had played some part in bringing about this peculiar state of affairs. Henry bowed his head stoically before the burden: ‘But as this is the Lord’s doing there must be wisdom in it and profit to me’ With no really important matter to occupy his attention, he worried about the minutest and most commonplace of irritants. Above all else, he chafed at the knowledge that his inventions could take the world by storm, and he remained resolutely convinced that his ideas would soon bear fruit. In late November 1903 he found a new occupation —writing a summary of his voluminous diary. This

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was to prove a major undertaking which lasted the rest of his life. Two months later, on the sixtieth anniversary of his diary-keeping, Henry glowed with self-satisfaction: There is not one entry in it of which I need be ashamed before any man, woman or child’.2 As he grew older, an element of urgency entered. Instead of keeping a daily diary, he now spent hours each day rewriting and abridging earlier volumes; he sometimes described this exercise as writing his ‘autobiography’. As he waited for the Lord to reveal himself, and when there was little else to record, he took to writing ‘Waiting’ or ‘Expecting’ in his journal. The entries for the early months of 1904 were reduced to a series of simple assertions about waiting. This period of expectation was abruptly terminated not by the anticipated fulfilment but by family tragedy. On 20 March Jane Clarke woke to find her left arm paralysed. She quickly recovered and the matter soon seemed forgotten. But in July her health began to deteriorate. She suffered bouts of breathlessness and her husband detected that ‘her powers both of mind and body are failing’. Jane was afflicted by waves of illness; by breathlessness, fever, pains in her legs. Eventually she was rendered helpless. Her last hours were racked by agony. Periodically, she grasped her husband’s hand with ‘an iron grip’, reminding Henry of her hold when she gave birth to her first-born fifty-two years before. Their doctor finally sedated Jane with morphia. Six hours later, she died. A day later Jane Clarke’s coffin was borne to Trinity Church in the family carriage. The church was ringed by carriages and the packed congregation spilled outside. Her husband was understandably grief-stricken but, typically, chose to confide not in those around him but only in the pages of his journal: ‘I feel that my only centre of attraction to this world is now


removed and I have not a tie to it for my children have now to care for me, not I for them.’ Over the next few days he pondered endlessly about his life with Jane and its broader meaning. Apart from childbirth, Jane had never been seriously ill; he could not recall ever having to pay a medical bill (a man so concerned with money would surely have remembered). The diary became the confession of a grieving soul; one which sought comfort in the record of his married life. Reassured by letters from all quarters, Henry found strength in looking back on the happiness of his marriage. This mood of sweet recollection was entirely understandable. But how are we to assess it in retrospect? Would Henry’s tender memories have been shared by Jane herself ? Perhaps no marriage can be quite as blissful, quite as unblemished as Henry, in his early days as a widower, thought his to have been. We have seen just how difficult at times life had been for Jane and her children: so exposed to public and personal ridicule and embarrassment, as Henry pursued his singleminded obsessions. For sixty years Jane Clarke had been integral to Henry’s life. Yet curiously she remains a shadowy figure, apparently incidental to the way he saw and recorded the world around him. It was Jane Clarke who had made Henry’s various homes comfortable and secure. Along with gaggles of servants (even more invisible than Jane herself), Jane’s role was to be the silent home-maker and helpmate. Henry needed her in ways he did not fully recognise or appreciate. For months, Henry grieved over his dead wife. He read and re-read any letters from her he could lay his hands on. They revealed a devout, tender woman, sensitively concerned with all her adult


children’s needs and woes; a good woman and caring mother to the end of her days. As time passed, however, Henry began to record details of his marriage which had gone unremarked for half a century. The more he reflected, the more honest he became with himself. Jane, he now admitted, ‘marred’ their wedding day and honeymoon by having a friend travel with them and by arranging to spend their honeymoon with her sister in Manchester, ‘where all eyes and ears were upon us, and I had no opportunity of being alone with her’. Henry’s own physical demands and energies had always been obvious (at least he often talked about them). After Jane’s death, he began to discuss her own responses to his sexual demands. She had an instinctive modesty which she retained all through her life. She never voluntarily kissed or touched me—nor would she bathe or expose her body in dressing or undressing in my presence. But this coyness attracted rather than repelled me and my delight in her body never waned to the end… I used to say to her even within this year that the touch of my wife’s breasts, and the sight of the rising sun were two delights as fresh to me every morning as if I had never enjoyed them before. As he slowly came to terms with his loss, Henry was suddenly laid low by another severe blow. Within weeks of Jane’s death, his daughter Jenny was diagnosed as having an ovarian tumour. As the family waited for the operation, a shadow hung over all of them. Jenny herself was depressed and increasingly alarmed as the operation in Kingston approached. Her father’s diary was preoccupied


with little but the family’s fears about the surgery. The initial news after the operation on 29 October 1904 seemed promising, but four days later Jenny Clarke died after much suffering. She was fifty. The pain of Jenny’s death was heightened by the poignant letters she wrote to her father in the days she awaited the surgery in Kingston. Her last words were pleas that her sisters and relatives should take her place in caring for her father. Although in great pain (from what was described as ‘tubercular peritonitis’), Jenny Clarke spent her last hours talking of meeting Jesus and her own recently deceased mother.3 With Jane and Jenny in their graves, Henry Clarke was bereft of the two women who had shielded him from the problems posed by some of his other relatives. As never before, he felt that his own life ‘seems now without an object’. Emotionally bereft, Henry Clarke was materially wealthy. He calculated, in January 1905, that his annual income was more than £2,000: his basic pension of £200 enhanced by his shares in the Society and his salary as Society manager. Though money was no longer a problem, the same could not be said of his sons, some of whom he continued to treat as young boys rather than grown men. Stainton’s persistent search for secure and regular work, Lister’s disputes with his other brothers (sometimes about family business) and, above all else, the continuing discord between the two Henrys —all formed a recurring refrain in the diary. Relations here were most strained of all since the son had hitherto communicated via his mother or sisters. At times Henry treated his first-born harshly. Asked by his son for a loan of £150 to allow his wife to travel for her health, the father refused, denouncing his son’s financial fecklessness and offering instead a free lecture


about responsibility. Not surprisingly, Henry junior replied with some venom. The greatest pleasure of Henry Clarke seems to have been the considerable time devoted each day to abridging his diary. Re-reading the journal jogged his memory, reminding him of the pleasures and the pains of a lifetime. It also meant he was able to log and trace his past movements down to the day and the hour. By mid-July 1905 he had rewritten up to 1903 and was slowly catching up, propelled no doubt by the knowledge that he could not expect to live for many more years. Finally, on 4 August 1905, Henry wrote, I have this day finished the work of writing my autobiography in the shape of a digest of my diary for every day during 60 years. I began it on 23 November 1903 and have worked on it diligently for three or four hours each day in the week during the intervening period of one year and eight months. I have always regarded my diary as an inspiration of God and this summary of it especially so, as shown in the renewal of my eyesight and the firmness of my handwriting. The task finished, he relaxed. A day later he noted: ‘A restful day as if I had finished a life’s work, or come to the end of a long journey’. Henry had decided to rewrite the diary as a way of killing time. What was he to do now? He began an index. On New Year’s Eve 1905 Henry Clarke fell ill with urinary trouble and welcomed the new year in the care of a nurse. For the rest of his life he was plagued by this complaint, passing water every few hours. Despite the great inconvenience of his ailment, Henry Clarke forced himself back to normal life as


soon as possible, arranging the inheritance of his assets to avoid duties and attending to the Building Society. Nor had he lost that periodic urge to write to the press on whatever favourite topic currently passed through his mind. His ideas continued to draw criticism, but it was a criticism tinged with grudging admiration for Henry’s dogged attachment to social reform. Age was taking its inevitable toll. On his seventyeighth birthday Henry described his failing health; he had lost weight, found walking difficult and could climb the stairs only on all fours. He had lost more of his teeth and found chewing more difficult, and suffered occasional swimming sensations. Despite these problems, his sight was better than ever and he slept from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. and enjoyed his midday nap. On the whole Henry felt at peace; at one with his Maker and ready and keen to depart this world for the promised land. The one relative who flitted in and out of Henry’s home was his daughter Mary. Now fifty, she was quite deaf, deeply unhappy and unable to settle in any home for more than a few days at a time. Savanna-la-Mar was always too hot and she generally fled, a few days after arriving home, to the hills, to friends or to lodgings in a cooler spot. She was, wrote her father, ‘a burden to herself and a costly anxiety to the rest of us’. In his own way, Henry was no less restless, searching for some way to fill his empty days. He turned again to the diary, condensing even further the abridged version. By October 1906 he had completed a three-volume version. The Christmas and New Year of 1906–7 brought no real festive joy. Henry’s main concern was his own painful infirmity; plagued day and night by urinary trouble, sorely missing his departed loved ones. He had, quite simply, had more than his fill


of this world. Henry Clarke realised that his time was strictly limited, and his anticipation of the kingdom to come was heightened by news of the disastrous Kingston earthquake of January 1907. In the confusion after the disaster news filtered through slowly, and in the same January days Henry mingled an account of his own physical decline with worries about what had happened in Kingston. As Henry’s illness bore down on him ever more painfully, his doctor dosed him ‘with champagne, port wine, essence of beef, besides two or three kinds of medicines’.4 For days on end Henry lay at home enfeebled, pondering and describing his own decline. By the spring of 1907 he had little time or energy to mention anything other than his own sickness. For much of the time he lay helpless on a sofa, unable to perform the simplest of tasks. He spent his eightieth birthday in this feeble—and declining—condition. But so habitual was his diarykeeping that he felt compelled to write, if only a simple, painful line: ‘Health symptoms more favourable’. New symptoms began to appear, mainly coldness and numbness in his hands. By mid-June he could hardly walk and had great trouble climbing the stairs or into his carriage. He ate little and suffered from permanent constipation. His hands were so numb he could not fasten his own buttons (though he continued to write) and all his remaining teeth had worked loose. Yet each day he turned to his diary, there to record, in a handwriting which was itself deteriorating, his own slow demise. He began to notice his mental decline in early July. When Mary left for England, he realised he would not see her again. By the middle of July the entries in the diary were bald statements about his own deteriorating condition. He lay on the sofa, numb in all his limbs, moving


only to answer the calls of nature. On 25 July 1907, he scribbled: ‘Lay on the sofa, in extreme weakness. Lord how long?’ A few days later: ‘I am now a helpless babe in the hands of nurse Foote’. On 4 August, Henry Clarke died at 1.30 p.m. A day later he was laid to rest beside Jane in the family plot which hugs the south wall of Trinity Church. It was left to his son Hugh to make the last entry in a journal which had begun sixty years before: ‘He kept the faith.’

Conclusion

THE IMAGE Henry Clarke portrayed of himself was that of a lonely, isolated figure; always godly, always correct but generally unsupported by others (including his family). In his late teens and in his seventies, he clung to this self-portrait. Towards the end of his life, however, some of Henry’s ideas had gained a degree of support. As he grew older some Jamaicans began to accord him respect; his age, his remarkable persistence (often in the face of ridicule), his sheer bloody-mindedness earned him admiration. The Gleaner1 (in 1903) admired his ‘bull-dog tenacity’ and began to add its weight to Henry’s lifelong campaign against illegitimacy in the island. Henry had been laughed at when he raised this in the Legislative Council, but, said The Gleaner, it was ‘the laughter of a few men who did not know moral courage when they saw it and who evidently could not respect grey hairs…’ Admired for his ‘heroic courage’, Henry Clarke was thought to personify ‘the remarkable force of staying power in politics’. The Gleaner thought that he had ‘taught us the value of sincerity and the worth of determination in life’. This eulogy was not without its qualifications. Henry’s weaknesses, paraded throughout this book, were obvious to all. ‘Perhaps he was too

124 CONCLUSION

unbending, too obstinate, too inclined to cling to ideas he had formed years before, too impervious to other aspects of the case than his own.’ His assertive arguments, always one-sided and unbending, were now commended where they had once been denounced; ‘in these days of half beliefs there is something admirable in…contempt of compromise and in…defiance of the best opinion in the land.’ Henry was now seen as a heroic figure: All of his life he has stood a solitary, earnest, sincere figure, caring little what was thought of him, possessed of a few ideas and a great determination, and going on with his selfimposed tasks with grim courage and unswerving perseverance. now recognised as a man who had striven to help the poor: ‘He is a man. Right or Wrong he is a man! every act of his has proved this to the hilt.’ When laughed at, it was ‘by men so immeasurably his inferior that we felt our gorge rise at the impertinence’. Even allowing for journalistic licence, such praise was remarkable; a last-minute reward for a lifetime’s single-mindedness. This praise was picked up again in the various obituaries written about Henry Clarke in 1907. It was, however, Henry’s various campaigns and his style of advocacy which were best remembered. His courage and sincerity stayed in the mind, and formed such a sharp contrast to many of his prevaricating contemporaries. The Gleaner2 thought that he was ‘not noted for brilliance of intellect but rather for sober, hard intelligence…’. Insistent on literal interpretation of the Scriptures, he was in the classic mould of earlier Puritans. He also looked the part.


The tall gaunt figure striding impassively along, the deep monotonous voice, grave smiles, eyes that gazed directly at you and flowing beard that made his appearance patriarchal, who does not remember these who have once seen and heard the man? In its most telling comment the newspaper remarked: ‘Psychology, history, experience he put aside; Sin and the Devil on the one hand, God on the other, and the people between—these were all he would take account of….’ Even when it was accepted that Henry’s views were wrong and his plans impossible, commentators spoke of Henry’s life with respect and admiration.3 All were agreed that his most outstanding achievement was the Westmoreland Building Society (which survives to this day under a different name). In thirty-two years under Henry’s stewardship, the Society had taken in almost £11½ million and had losses amounting to a mere £75 17s. Even here, his style created problems for his successors. Henry’s insistence on knowing the one and only way to conduct business affairs left a legacy of confusion and some personal acrimony within the Building Society. His determination to leave the concern in family hands—in the control of his son Hugh—led to an instant row among the directors. There were also objections to Henry’s methods of book-keeping. The consequent dispute was paraded before the Acting Chief Justice, who ordered an inquiry. The result, in July 1908, was a report which vindicated Henry of any wrong-doing but suggested ‘there is room for improvement’ in the Society’s book-keeping.4 At heart, the argument was about whether control of the Building Society could remain a family concern. Henry had set his patriarchal stamp on the business, but his style

126 CONCLUSION

and business system (tolerated by others as long as he was alive) were no longer appropriate after his death. Throughout his life Henry Clarke would not accept criticism of his work or of his ideas. He was right, and his critics must therefore be wrong. And he was right because he was guided by the Lord. His faith shaped his every move, and guided his life. His faith was his life; there was no distinction between the two. In the words of one of his obituaries, ‘everything he did, started with GOD and came back to GOD’.5 Henry had striven to conduct his life, and to persuade others to lead theirs, in accordance with his own literal interpretation of the Scriptures. From the years of his tormented adolescence to his last conscious hours, Henry Clarke remained God’s servant; obedient to the Lord’s word—in Scripture, in revelations and through prayer. He would perhaps have felt more at home in the world of seventeenth-century English Puritanism, or among the founding fathers of the New England colonies, than in the Anglican Church of nineteenth-century Jamaica. His faith was unbending and unchanging, and his faith determined his very being and his behaviour. Understandably, they too were as unbending and unchanging as his faith. Henry Clarke’s sterling personal qualities (widely praised after his death though generally denounced in his lifetime) often became his major shortcomings. Fortitude turned readily into pigheadedness, perseverance easily became unbending self-righteousness; theological selfconfidence could be seen as bigoted sectarianism. And throughout, there ran an obvious streak of perversity and eccentricity, nowhere more strikingly than in his infatuation with mechanical experiments. Henry would not let men deter or


frustrate what God had appointed. A lifetime of failed experiments was not enough to undermine his confidence in their ultimate viability. Repeated failure and recurring disappointment could never overpower the truth of divine revelation. Many of Henry Clarke’s public stances and utterances brought discomfort to his family. Jane Clarke was regularly hurt by her husband’s behaviour. Yet Henry seemed never able to reconcile his family obligations with his singleminded pursuit of the Lord’s work. The need to speak the Lord’s words always prevailed over the need to protect his wife and children from social embarrassment. Henry Clarke was a cool, distant figure, set apart from the normal give and take, the passions and weaknesses of everyday life. He openly admitted to having very few friends. Yet Henry was not above recognising his own flaws and weaknesses. He was, for example, acutely aware of the force of his own sexuality. Though the acute frustrations of his youth gave way to the satisfaction of marital relations, Henry Clarke never forgot the power (and the potential destructiveness) of human sexuality. But who among his readers or congregations could have guessed that such passions flowed through so austere and puritanical a figure? The only person who really did know was of course Jane Clarke. An indistinct figure, oddly reflected (and perhaps distorted) through Henry’s diaries, Jane was his companion for fifty-three years and the mother of his eleven children. For one so important to Henry Clarke—his lifelong love and the sole object of his physical passion-Jane Clarke rarely comes into close focus. Henry’s adult life was shaped by his partnership with Jane. But the reader of the diary which describes their life together might feel at times that she remained

128 CONCLUSION

strangely incidental to his life, or at least to the way he described it. Henry’s mind and thoughts often seem to have operated quite independently of those around him. There seems a straightforward explanation. He was propelled through life not so much by relations with his wife, children and friends as by his relationship with his Maker. For all that, Jane was unquestionably the most powerful personal influence in his life, too powerful at times for his own comfort and ease. Not a man prepared to take advice from others, Henry was occasionally forced to succumb to his wife’s entreaties. She alone acted as a moderating force and arbiter (not always successfully) in Henry’s life and especially in his public career. Months would pass without a single hint in Henry’s diary of Jane’s existence. Yet she was the source of his domestic peace and stability. We have only to recall the mental and physical agonies of the adult years before his marriage to see the difference Jane wrought in her husband. Nor was this simply a matter of frustration versus contented marital relations. Henry Clarke’s physical wellbeing, his daily and yearly routines, his ability to lead so vigorous and varied a life—all these were made possible by the strength of his marriage to Jane. Henry’s marriage was the bed-rock on which he built his life’s work, as preacher, politician and businessman. It is easy to see what Henry gained from this marriage, but it is much more difficult to see its benefits for his wife. Jane Clarke’s child-bearing years were dominated by pregnancies, childbirth (which was often traumatic) and child-rearing. Married at the age of twenty-four, Jane had her first child a year later, her last (the eleventh) born when she was forty-five. When she was sixty, three of her children were still in their teens. The cares and needs of so large a


brood—for much of the time eked out on the humble stipend of a cleric—were exacting enough, even allowing for the family’s good fortune with health and survival in a world dominated by illness and child mortality. Raising eleven children—even with the help of servants—was a full-time job, without the added aggravations posed by Henry’s public behaviour and private moods. All his life the father of this large family was a controversial public figure. The full cost of the controversies he started was borne not so much by Henry but by Jane and her children (especially her daughters), normally in the form of public discomfort and embarrassment. Jane Clarke entered her husband’s writing in fits and starts. Fond of referring to her as his ‘dear old wife’, Henry none the less ignored her for months on end. Only when she is unavoidable (when he married her, met her again after long separations, in family disputes or public controversy) does Henry feel the need to refer to Jane directly. His passion for Jane is clear enough, though it was conceived and nurtured in peculiar circumstances. Their courtship—an unexpected blitz of affection after years of silence—was characteristic of much of their subsequent lives together. If Henry loved her (and he clearly did) he had an odd way of showing it. More interesting perhaps, did Jane love Henry? Jane was, as Henry admitted after her death, cool to his physical demands. We can readily see why. She feared and dreaded pregnancy and childbirth. Her deliveries were often horrible and sometimes threatened her life. Her eleven pregnancies took a severe toll of her health and her looks. Jane Clarke had every reason to feel less than enthusiastic about her husband’s sexual demands. More troublesome perhaps than sexuality was the uneasy round of daily life with Henry Clarke. His boundless energy, his periodic

130 CONCLUSION

fixations with experiments, his regular and acrimonious conflicts in the press and with authorities of all kinds, his disputes with his sons, all of these (often played out at the same time) pushed Jane to the limits of her tolerance. Not surprisingly, she often rewarded her husband with gloomy moods, sharp words and outbursts of fierce anger. Hers was a meagre life. Twenty years of it were consumed by a succession of babies. When she was in her sixties and might perhaps have expected a more tranquil life, she had to endure the serious frictions between her husband and her sons, and still more public controversy. Perhaps she was happier when their various travels placed the Atlantic between man and wife. Whatever pleasures they enjoyed together in England were generally ruined by Henry’s pursuit of his latest invention— and its failure. Jane grieved that her husband wasted a great deal of money on his experiments, often, in their earlier years, when they had little to spare. The Clarkes crossed the Atlantic more than most in these years of awkward and dangerous travel. They also moved from house to house, living in more than a dozen family homes in their married life. But their family homes were always in the restricted, close-knit world of western Jamaica. Henry was able to get away from the restrictions of the home. He travelled, as a preacher, later as a politician, and he took off for England whenever the spirit moved him. Jane, however, was stuck at home, dependent for social life on local society, visitors and whatever meagre entertainments came her way. She relied on the sociability of others for much of her recreational life. When Henry hurled his regular abuse at the heads of landowners and planters, Jane (and her daughters) felt pained, not


least because it threatened their only source of local social life. Jane Clarke was often a casualty in her husband’s various wars. Never able to give herself fully to his campaigns (a fact of which he sometimes complained), she found herself an innocent bystander; caught between the need to support her controversial husband and her own need for self-preservation (to say nothing of protecting her children). Nor did these battles fade as time passed. Throughout her life Jane had to endure the private consequences of her husband’s public campaigns. Henry often described his latest campaign in military terms; he was permanently in battle, against enemies that threatened to overwhelm him. His language was military and warlike. He carried Christ’s banner in a lifetime’s battle against the devil and all his works. His life was one long battle. Conflict was often most severe with those men placed in authority over Henry Clarke. From his time as an eighteen-year-old teacher in London through to his sixties and seventies, he was forever at loggerheads with superiors. Headmasters, bishops and governors, colonial officials, British ministers or law officers, all were objects of distrust and antipathy. Henry rebelled against authority, whatever its form. Anyone in authority and placed in dominion over him would, sooner or later, find himself locked in dispute with Henry Clarke. He resented and resisted those in authority, invariably imputing to them weakness of character and a range of human vices. He was no less critical of mankind in the mass. For one who frequently proclaimed his love of humanity and his concern for their material and spiritual progress, Henry saw precious few virtues in his fellow man.

132 CONCLUSION

His aim, as a cleric and politician, was to raise the spiritual and material lot of the Jamaican people, still living, he thought, with the consequences of slavery. Regularly denouncing the human frailties of the black population of the island, Henry’s major ideas (taxation and currency reform, rural change, registration of illegitimates) were designed to improve their lot. Such changes were however merely tinkering with a rotten system. What Henry really sought was a major spiritual revolution which would bring the people to see God’s will and conduct themselves in a more Godfearing fashion. In this he was following the welltrodden path of the missionaries who, since the late eighteenth century, had tried to steer the black population into the paths of righteousness. Like his predecessors, Henry came from humble stock and throughout his life he remained acutely aware of his background. When dealing with officials— bishops, ministers and governors—men born to more exalted families and destinies, Henry’s prickliness about social class seems to have exacerbated his natural friction with authority. Henry was successful in all manner of ways. In his major career he was accepted as an excellent preacher who drew large crowds to his services and whose energies brought comfort and succour to black parishioners throughout a wide rural hinterland. But as Henry gazed at Jamaica in the early twentieth century, the island seemed troubled by the very problems confronting him when he had landed in the island at the age of nineteen, a mere decade after slavery had ended. The majority of the rural population was poor. The prevailing agricultural system—itself a legacy of slavery— offered them little prospect of material improvement. Colonial government remained the preserve of landed and trading elites which seemed


to pay scant regard to plebeian interests and needs. Of course Henry chose to ignore the major efforts made towards social reform in Jamaica under Crown government (especially under the reforming governorship of Sir John Peter Grant). But in many respects Henry Clarke was correct. London viewed Jamaica—and the rest of the islands—as a problem, and one with no obvious solution. When other parts of the empire had begun to yield undreamt-of wealth (and when free trade around the world yielded even greater prosperity) to the mother country, the Caribbean was but a reminder of former wealth and power. It was possible to take a pessimistic view and imagine that no one cared any more. Henry Clarke cared, of course. But he caused offence, left and right, by telling everyone that he was alone in his compassion for the Jamaican people. Where he cared, everyone else was heartless; where he pointed the way, others wilfully chose to ignore the obvious; where he saw God’s will, others chose to be godless. Government officials and politicians, many of whom doubtless worked hard to the same end, found Henry’s attitude infuriatingly wrong-headed and insulting. Henry Clarke had made his way in the world through self-discipline. Conscious that four of his parents’ sons had been forced to leave England to find careers, Henry clearly resented his homeland. He had triumphed, eventually, by dint of his faith and his self-discipline. At times it had been a closerun thing; at times even the singleminded Henry Clarke came close to falling by the wayside. Giving thanks that he had triumphed, Henry realised that weaker men (and women) succumbed more easily. Nowhere was this more obvious than in affairs of the flesh. Henry had battled with youthful sexuality and, narrowly, maintained his sexual appetite

134 CONCLUSION

within marriage. But he seemed alone, floundering in an ocean of licentiousness. This perhaps was the reason for his attachment to registering illegitimates. If men could not be brought to sexual restraint by a sense of sin, they ought at the very least to be forced to attend to their obligations. At the end of his life, others had come to share his judgement, though from a practical rather than moral viewpoint. In his last years Henry found himself utterly alienated from his church. Unable to accept the High Church practices of his successor at Trinity, he chose to worship alone. Yet here, as elsewhere, it seems likely that Henry simply could not tolerate anyone in authority, especially in a church which had been his own. He had of course theological objections to high Anglicanism. He had, after all, been promised to Christ by his pregnant mother when she had been won over by a travelling Methodist preacher. In religion as in politics he was an egalitarian; all men were equal and needed no intervening clerical hierarchy to see their way to Christ. The contradictions in Henry’s life and behaviour are there for all to see. To outsiders he gave the appearance of striking a superior, often priggish stance. For one who claimed to speak for the masses, Henry was far too isolated; for one who yearned for social and spiritual rebirth, Henry alienated the very people he needed as supporters. But this very isolation—aloofness even—confirmed Henry’s sense of his singular divine mission. Fond of comparing himself with holy men in the past, Henry saw himself as the very embodiment of Christ’s word. He spoke directly to the Almighty who, in his turn, indicated to Henry the path he must tread.


Far too often the Lord spoke to Henry Clarke about mechanical inventions. Thousands of Victorians had mechanical inspirations, some successful, but most mere visions. Some of Henry’s ideas are now commonplace. What distinguished them at the time (and what damned them in the eyes of many of his opponents) was his insistence that they were God’s ideas, communicated to earth through Henry Clarke. When they failed it was, to Henry’s mind, yet more evidence of the devil’s power. Jamaica itself was ‘the Devil’s kingdom’, an island whose human and collective shortcomings cried out for the redemption to which Henry Clarke devoted his life. What irritated many people who knew him was that Henry—the gauche twenty-yearold or the white-haired patriarch in his seventies— clearly felt that he alone knew what Jamaica required; he alone saw the path towards national salvation. At his death, the Jamaican newspapers devoted a great deal of space to assessing Henry’s life. He was admired more in retrospect than he was in his lifetime. The final words ought to be left to his obituarist. Henry was: a Puritan of the type of those who fought for the Bible and Covenant with the sword and who prayed to the God of Battles but also relied upon themselves. We admired him for this; for his strength and courage: for strength and courage are among the finest qualities of men… His life was useful, and though many of his views were wrong and his plans impossible, Jamaica will think of him now with respect, and will place a handful of dust upon his grave. For he was an Englishman of the class who do what they think to be their duty in whatever circumstances they are placed, and who thank God that they have done it… There is no need to wish him peace, for surely if there is peace

136 CONCLUSION

beyond the grave this man has found it. If there is reward for those who strive to do their best, such reward is surely his.6

Notes

Introduction, pp.xiii–xviii 1. See Sources below. This book is based on the Henry Clarke diary; references are to the typed version. 2. The Gleaner, 6 Aug. l907. 3. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery. Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London, 1989).

Chapter 1, pp.1–12 1. B.W.Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica (Cambridge, 1976). 2. M.Craton, Testing the Chains, Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, New York, 1982). 3. James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom (London, 1986). 4. Ibid., p. 225. 5. Diary of Henry Clarke, 1828–1907, 6 vols. (hereafter volume, date and page given), 4 Dec. 1848, I, p. 56. 6. I, pp.1–4 (for the first 16 years of his life, Henry Clarke does not give specific dates). 7. I, pp. 21–4. 8. I, pp. 34–6. 9. I, pp. 41–3. 10. I, p. 45. 11. I, pp. 53–4.


12. I, p. 58. 13. I, pp. 58–9.

Chapter 2, pp. 13–24 1. 19 Sept. 1849. On Manning’s School, see Manning’s School 250th Anniversary, 1738–1988, published by Manning’s School in 1988, p. 108. 2. I, pp. 90–3. 3. On the history of cholera, see M.Durey, The Return of the Plague (Dublin, 1979). 4. 31 Dec. 1850, I, p. 161. 5. 10 March 1851, I, pp. 181–2. 6. 27 May 1851, I, pp. 199–200. 7. 20–24 June 1851, I, pp. 204–5.

Chapter 3, pp.25–32 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

18 Aug. 1851, I, p. 212. 30 Aug. 1851, I, pp. 218–19. 8–9 Sept. l851, I, pp. 223–4. 1 Feb. 1852, I, pp. 260–1. 24 May 1852, I, p. 267. 27–29 Oct. 1852, I, pp. 276–7. 29 June 1855, I, p. 338.

Chapter 4, pp.33–42 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

2, 13, 15 May 1856, I, p. 359. 10 July 1857, II, p. 25. 13 Oct. 1858, II, pp. 59–60. 11 July 1859, II, p. 62; 14 April 1860, II, p. 76. 14 June 1860, II, pp. 79–80. 11 Nov. 1860, II, p. 85. Note 29 May 1904, II, pp. 112–13. 9 Aug. 1896, II, p. 122. 30 April 1862, Note 30 May 1904, II, p. 119.

Chapter 5, pp. 43–48

NOTES 139

1. On indentured labour see Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974). For numbers of indentured workers see David Watts, The West Indies, Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 476–80. 2. 25 Oct., 5, 7 Nov. 1862, II, pp. 124–6. 3. 22 Nov.,7 Dec. 1864, II, pp. 129–30. 4. 24, 27 Dec., 1862; 3, 6 Jan. 1863, II, pp. 133–5. 5. 28 Feb. 1863, II, pp. 138–9. 6. 3 Feb. 1864, II, p. 162. 7. 9 Feb. 1864, II, p. 164. 8. H.P.Jacobs, Sixty Years of Change, 1806–1866 (Kingston, 1973), pp. 98–9. 9. Note of l0 May l904, II, p. 162. 10. B.Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962); Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971). 11. 31 July 1865, II, pp. 206–7. 12. 14 Dec. 1865, II, p. 218. 13. 31 Dec. 1865, II, p. 221.

Chapter 6, pp. 49–56 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

See Henry Clarke’s Letters, 1867–1876. 25 Feb. 1867, II, p. 242. 28 Feb. 1867, II, p. 243. 22 Aug. 1867, II, p. 273. 30 Aug. 1867, II, p. 281. 17 June 1870, II, p. 357. 9 Aug., 24Oct., 8–31Dec. 1870, II, pp. 360, 362–4. 27 Nov. 1871, II, p. 384. 30 April 1871, II, pp. 373–5. 26 May 1871, II, p. 377. 15 June 1871, II, p. 377. 6 July 1872, II, p. 395. 31 Dec. 1872, II, pp. 415–16. 11 Aug. 1873, II, p. 429.

Chapter 7, pp. 57–67


1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

31 Dec. 1876, 11 Jan. 1877, III, pp. 76–8. 31 Dec. 1873, 4Jan. 1874, 1 Feb. 1873, III, pp. 7–9. 9 Dec. l875, III, p. 51. 28 Dec. 1875, III, p. 53. 18–20 July 1877, III, pp. 86–7. 22 July 1877, III, p. 88. 30 Oct., 14, 26, 30 Nov. 1877, III, pp. 93–4. 14 Nov.–19Dec. 1878, III, pp. 127–34. 21–24 June 1879, III, p. 158. 5 Aug. 1879, III, p. 158. 26 Aug.–26 Nov. 1879, III, pp. 165–75. 3 April 1881, III, p. 220. 11 May 1879, III, p. 153. 15 Nov., 3 Dec. 1879, III, pp. 173–5.

Chapter 8, pp. 68–79 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

8–14 May 1880, III, pp. 190–1. 8–12 Nov., 8Dec. 1880, III, pp. 208–10, 212. 21, 26 July 1880, III, pp. 199–201. 30 Sept. 1880, III, p. 205. 20 April 1881, III, p. 222. 7 April–31 May 1881, III, pp. 221–3. 21 May 1883, III, p. 267. 3 Dec. 1883, III, p. 275. 16 April 1884, III, p. 283. 1 July 1884, III, p. 297. 3 July, 1, 2 Aug. 1884, III, pp. 299, 311–12. 22–23 July 1884, III, pp. 304, 306. 30 July 1884, III, p. 310. 25 Aug. 1884, III, pp. 322–5. 26 Sept. 1884, III, p. 330. 17 Dec. 1884, III, p. 338. Note 31 Jan. 1905, III, p. 341.

Chapter 9, pp. 80–90 1. 22 Jan., 2 March 1885, IV, pp. 1, 5. 2. 28 Sept. 1885, IV, p. 15.

NOTES 141

3. Details of this case in Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town; Ecclesiastical, 5/1/44. ‘Papers relating to the trial of Rev. Henry Clarke, July 1888 (younger)’. 4. 16 Oct. 1889, IV, pp. 93–4. 5. 18 May 1888, IV, p. 63. 6. 5, 6, 9, 11 Dec. 1889, IV, pp. 98–9. 7. 19 May, 13 July 1890, IV, pp. 113, 118. Note of 11 March 1905, IV, pp. 120–1. 8. 5 Sept.–Oct. 1890, IV, pp. 126–9. 9. 2 Dec. 1893, IV, p. 218.

Chapter 10, pp. 91–101 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

23–27 Jan. 1894, IV, pp. 224–5. 6, 9 Feb. 1894, IV, pp. 228–9. 22 April 1894, IV, p. 240. 26 Jun–12 July l894, IV, p. 252. 14 July 1894, IV, p. 252. 29 Aug. 1894, IV, pp. 260–1. 15 May 1895, IV, p. 282. 31 Dec. 1895, IV, pp. 293–5. 16 Feb. 1896, IV, p. 299. 2–5 March 1896, IV, p. 300. 1 April 1896, IV, p. 305. Daily Telegraph (Jamaica), 6 Aug. 1907. 12. 23–26 Feb., 2–9 March 1897, IV, pp. 328–30. 13. 16–19 March 1897, IV, pp. 331–2. 14. 7 March 1897, IV, p. 331. See also his article The Taxation, Currency and Agriculture of Jamaica (Kingston, 1886).

Chapter 11, pp. 102–108 1. Parliamentary Papers, Reports and Commissions, 1898, LV. ‘Report of the West India Royal Commission’, 1898. Written evidence of Henry Clarke, pp. 377–8. 2. Evidence of Rev. Henry Clarke, ibid., pp. 286–91. 3. Diary, 1 April 1897, IV, p. 334. 4. Ibid.


5. Lord Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London, 1933), p. 128. 6. 7–9 June 1897, IV, pp. 356–7. 7. 10, 21 June 1897, IV, pp. 357–9. 8. 2, 10 Dec. 1897, IV, p. 388. 9. 23 March 1898, IV, p. 395. 10. 25 April 1898, IV, p. 398.

Chapter 12, pp. 109–118 1. 2. 3. 4.

1 May 1898, V, p. 1. 30 April 1899, V, p. 32. 19–2 1 May 1899, V, p. 35. 21, 24 March 1901, V, pp. 136–7.

Chapter 13, pp. 11 9–129 1. 2. 3. 4.

10, 15 Aug. 1903, V, pp. 192–3. 24 Nov. 1903, 20Jan. 1904, V, pp. 201, 205. 2 Nov. 1904,V, pp. 225–7. 8 Feb. 1907, V, p. 313.

Conclusion, pp. 130–144 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Gleaner, 11 May 1903. The Gleaner, 5Aug. 1904. The Gleaner, 6 Aug. 1907. D.G.Hall, The Westmoreland Building Society, n.d., typescript, pp. 13–16. 5. The Daily Telegraph (Jamaica), 6 Aug. 1907. 6. The Gleaner, 7 Aug. 1907.

Sources

The Diary of Henry Clarke Handwritten version. Vol. 1 1828–1857, 214 fols. Vol. 2 1857–1873, 229 fols. Vol. 3 1873–1884, 171 fols. Vol. 4 1885–1898, 185 fols. Vol. 5 1898–1906, 185 fols. Vol. 6 1906–1907, 26 fols. This diary is also in typed format (the typing arranged by Henry Clarke’s grand-daughter, the Jamaican sociologist Edith Clarke, in the 1960s). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1828–1857, pp. 378. 1857–1873, pp. 430. 1873–1884, pp. 341. 1885–1898, pp. 403. 1898–1907, pp. 341 (incorporating Volumes 5 and 6 of the manuscript version).

This diary is a summary (made between 24 Nov. 1903 and 4 Aug. 1905) of a bigger, 14-volume diary. By 24 October 1905 Henry had completed a second copy of this abbreviation. We know, from internal evidence in the abbreviation (see 3 Sept. 1902), that there were 12 earlier volumes of the original. We have volumes listed as XII–XIV of the original and can compare what was included and left out in

144 SOURCES

the abbreviated version. On the whole daily trivia were excised (2 Nov. 1897, ‘packed my clothes for the voyage’; 1 Aug. 1898, ‘Took my walk round the race course this evening’; 12 Sept. 1898, ‘resting’; 20 Sept. 1898, The day is at hand’. There are occasional lapses in dates between the original and the abridged version (e.g. 13 Sept. 1894 becomes 14 Sept.; 30 Sept. 1897 becomes 29 Sept. 1897). Searches through family and official papers have failed to trace the missing volumes at the time of writing. How much valuable evidence has been lost in the abbreviation? Did Henry paint a different picture of his life in editing his diaries? It is impossible to know. But even the abridged form was not destined for public scrutiny. Henry gave instruction that his diary should be left to his daughters, thence as a family heirloom via male descendants. Any of my descendants, male or female may be allowed to read my journals if they wish… There is no evidence that Henry wished the diary to be made public, and much that he would surely have preferred to remain forever secret. The diary we possess was clearly not written to convey a favourable picture. It was basically an old man’s hobby; the whiling away of free time by editing. Sermons Two bundles. A. Numbers 153–99. B. Numbers 353–568. Each is numbered and dated (where and when delivered). They vary between 16 and 22 sides of hand-written text. They begin with a biblical quote and consist of scriptural exegesis.


Most were subsequently altered (Henry sticking them together, using the glazed edges of sheets of stamps—further proof of his parsimony). They were written between 4 July 1858 (No.153) and 27 Jan. 1895 (No.568). The last alteration appears to have been made on 25 June 1899. Henry Clarke’s Letter Books. 17 volumes These are often described on their covers as Henry Clarke’s Notebooks, containing copies of letters he sent. 1. 1855–1857. 2. 1858–1862. 3. 1861–1863. 4. 1863–1864. 5. 1865–1866. 6. 1866–1869. 7. 1869–1871. 8. 1871–1872. 9. 1872–1875. 10. 1862. 11. 1875–1878. 12 . 1878–1881. 13. 1881–1883. 14 . 1883–1890. 15. 1896–1904. 16. 1904–1907. 17. 1904–1909. Plus 1880–1907.

146 SOURCES

Many of these books are in extremely poor condition; eaten by termites, rotting or illegible. Some of them have been typed up. Typed copies of letter a. 1855–1866. b. 1867–1876. In addition there are three volumes of manuscript letters in photocopied form A. 1877–1879. B. 1880–1881. C. 1882–1883. Miscellaneous papers There are numerous files and collections of papers by and about Henry Clarke, all unclassified. The main items are: 1. File; typed; loose letters and articles, 1880– 1907. 2. File; typed; letters 1873–1877. 3. Letters to Anti-Slavery Society, 1876; 1886. 4. ‘Miscellaneous’. 5. What is Money, by Rev. Henry Clarke. 6. The Taxation, Currency and Agriculture of Jamaica, by Rev. Henry Clarke. 7. Typed index to the abbreviated 5-vol. diary. There are various unclassified pieces, typed extracts from the above papers and letters to and from Edith Clarke about the project to type Henry Clarke’s papers. All these papers are in the possession of Mr Oliver Clarke, Managing Director of The Gleaner Company.

The Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828-1907

William Clarke Quantrill: his life and times

The Life and Times of the Shah

The Life and Times of the Wicke

The Life of the REV. Adam Clarke

The Life and Times of the Wicke

The life and times of liberal democracy

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

The Life and Times of Postmodernity

The Life of Henry the Fifth

Life of the Late Henry Harris

A Simples Life: The Life and Times of Aleksandr Orlov

Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Allen Lane

The Life Of King Henry V

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Hebrew life and times

The Famous History Of The Life Of King Henry VII

War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch o

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Black Heart of Jamaica

Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope

the Life and Times Of the Thunderbolt Kid

the Life and Times Of the Thunderbolt Kid

Rescuing the World: The Life and Times of Leo Cherne

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid- A Memoir

The Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828-1907

William Clarke Quantrill: his life and times

The Life and Times of the Shah

The Life and Times of the Wicke

The Life of the REV. Adam Clarke

The Life and Times of the Wicke

The life and times of liberal democracy

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

The Life and Times of Postmodernity

The Life of Henry the Fifth

Life of the Late Henry Harris

A Simples Life: The Life and Times of Aleksandr Orlov

Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Allen Lane

The Life Of King Henry V

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Hebrew life and times

The Famous History Of The Life Of King Henry VII

War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch o

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Black Heart of Jamaica

Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope

the Life and Times Of the Thunderbolt Kid

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