Allen Clarke
ALLEN CLARKE (Teddy Ashton)
and
TOM CLARKE'S (ALLEN'S YOUNGEST BROTHER) BIOGAPHY
Little Dramas of Schoolboy Days - The Factory and After - A Half-penny Comic.
Allen as a boy made up little dramas of a melodramatic and gory nature to entertain his childhood companions which included using his sister as a ghost all enacted out in the coal house. Entrance fee a handful of rags!! and as he said "no free list."
Unfortunately one little girl he liked liked his friend better it dinted his small boy's pride!!
He wrote in his teens many 5 act plays all spurred on by his father's books on plays, Goldmith's, Bulwer Lytton's and Shakespeare. In later years one of his smaller pieces, "Our Sarah's Chap," became very popular.
Impish Pranks
He was renowned for being a prankster and amongst other things like roof top capers also tied to the old Donkey man's trailing coat tails a newspaper as the man was trying to haggle with Allen's mother over a second hand dolly tub she needed. At 13 he won a guinea for a poem written for Cassell's Saturday Journal and more than a dozen later the editor wrote to him asking him not to compete and give others a chance. Allen tricked him sent one in won in another boy's name then was upset when the boy got all the praise. The boy wrote to Allen saying he was ashamed when his class carried him shoulder high as he was not the winner. He was a young journalist who enlisted his latest sweetheart to teach him Pitman's shorthand so he could get up to speed. According to Allen there was no complaints on the cupid side of the arrangement.
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Allen Clarke, Eliza Clarke, Gwendoline Clarke Edward Clarke Allen's youngest son (Teddy) at Cartford Bridge.
Gwendoline (my mother) was Allen's companion when Eliza died and a fellow rambler, taking Allen's grandson's Noel and Gordon Clarke to many windmills in need of saving. She met many influencial people and at one newspaer convention at a stately home the guests thought he had another women and my mother and he thought it so amusing, they let them think what they wanted. My mother said, "He did more for Blackpool than he was ever given credit for." That is why this site and my fight for his recognition is ongoing.
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BOLTON DEAN'S MILLS
Allen Clarke, Eliza Clarke, Allens' sister and children, Lavina, Franklin and baby Charlie at Dean Mills.
I also have another shot of this picture of my family given to me by Caroline Cherry, Allen Clarke's sister's great grandaughter.in a slightly different pose. S Matthews. B.A. (hons)
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Picture courtesy of Bolton Civic Society 'The Barrowbridge Trail' pamphlet.
Allen wrote the book 'The Deserted Village.' It was based on the deserted mill workers houses which were left unoccupied after the mills closed.
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Allen and Eliza's Final Resting Place in Blackpool.
The unmarked grave of Allen Clarke and his beloved Eliza Clarke, at Little Marton Burial Ground, Marton, Blackpool.
There was a headstone at one time but it was vandalised. The Clarke family are grateful to, The Friends of Little Marton Burial Ground,' for the hard work they have done and continue doing in mowing the grass around the graves and clearing pathways, as at one time they were very overgrown.
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Allen Clarke as a young man
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Allen Clarke as a young man who was very popular with the ladies and according to his mother, "his moustache was the envy of other men."
He was a socialist and fought for others less fortunate, even standing for Parliament in Rochdale as a candidate for election. He did not win the vote but was the founder of the first socialist paper, 'The Labour Light.' He had many literary friends as well as socialists of the day. He was in Debrett's 'Who's Who,' and the King even read his Teddy Ashton Annuals. Sir George Benard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur ConanDoyle were amogst his friends. He was interested in everything and everyone (His tales were often through conversation with) as he called them "the travellers of the roads." He was close friends with the Boswell Romany family, camping at South Shore and loved their Romany company spending many a night sat around a brazier with a pipe chatting about their lives. He was a man of the people!
My mother said she would often have to prepare another breakfast meal for a tramp that had appeared at their door. He treated kings and the poor equally he had a great love for his fellow man.
He liked to be thought of as the, "Poor Man's Poet!"
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ALLEN CLARKE PARLAMENTARY CANDIDATE FOR ROCHDALE
Sept 22nd 1900
Socialist Election Committee, Labour Hall, Rochdale
Allen Clarke better known to the majority of Lancashire folks as Teddy Ashton, is the son of factory people and was born in Bolton in 1863. He worked in the cotton factory half-time, and full-time before becoming a teacher, winning several prizes under the thomaddon Exhibition and the Prize Scheme of the Bolton Board School and securing a Queen's Scholarship in the Sciences. But he always had a hankering for journalism, he left teaching when out of his apprenticeship and went to work in a newspaper office. Eventually starting a paper of his own The Labour Light, one of the first Labour papers in Lancashire. Then under the name Teddy Ashton he began to write those famous Sprigg's Sketches which have made two such popular characters. Hundreds of thousands of the Sprigg's Sketches have been sold. Yet Allen Clarke or Teddy Ashton did not confine himself to light humorous writing. Ten years ago he published his novel, The Knobstick,' a tale of the engineer's great strike. The critics praised this book highly, saying that Lancashire had at last produced another clever author. Since then Allen Clarke has published many other stories including, 'Tales of a Deserted Village,' Lancashire Lads and Lasses,' 'The Little Weaver,' etc all of which show his intimate knowledge of Lancashire everyday life and his sympathy with the workers. For several years he was on the staff of, 'The Cotton Factory Times,' then he published a paper of his own, 'The Northern Weekly,' which had a great circulationin Lancashire and the North. He is probably the only man in the kingdom who started a paper on nothing and made it pay from the first number. He writes for the, 'The Municipal Reformer,' under the pen name of Ben Adhem. Allen Clarke has also written much on social subjects in pamphlet form and for various papers, feeling as he says that it is his duty to devote whatever gifts he has to bettering the conditions of labour, and thus helping humanity in its march of progress!
THE BLACKPOOL RAMBLING ASSOCIATION
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Fenwick Ashworth President of the Ramblers Association
and Allen's fellow companion on many a ramble
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Allen President
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Charles Allen Clarke was also President of the Ramblers Association
He and Eliza were avid ramblers and here he is pictured at his desk
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POSTCARD OF POEM
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'A Gradely Prayer' (January 1922)
written by Allen Clarke
at one of the lowest points in in his life.
Written under the pseudonym name
of 'Teddy Ashton'
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TOM CLARKE
BIOGRAPHY
courtesy of Joyce M Bellamy & John Saville
His early career
Thomas Clarke Allen's youngest brother (1884-1957) was a journalist, author and broadcaster. Tom Clarke went to Clarence Street Higher Grade School, forerunner of the Bolton County Grammar School. After contributing to the Northern Weekly, a Bolton paper, he won a year's scolarship at Ruskin Hall, where Dennis Hird guided and sharpened his intellectual zest. Clarke's second venture in journalism was on the Lewisham Journal, at South China Post in Hong Kong to find himself close to world shaking events. He acted as a correspondent of the Daily Mail and Chicago Tribune in French Indo-China, and, and always eager to see as much of the world as he could, visited China., Japan, Korea, and Russia, including Siberia. When the Russian-Japanese war ended he returned home and became a special writer for the Daily Dispatch and Manchester Evening Chronicle. An article on the flying meting at Blackpool in 1909 helped to win for him promotion to the London News editorship of the Daily Sketch.
Lord Northcliffe
In 1911 Clarke joined the foreign staff of the Daily Mail. This was followed by service as night editor from 1914 until the end of 1916. On his return from military service he was made news editor by Lord Northcliffe who presently sent to the United States and Canada to study newspaper methods. Clarke studied his chief's methods and character keenly.
Northcliffe said, "What I want every morning in the paper, Tom, is something new and strange."
Clarke devised many talking points (Northcliffe's expression) for a mass public, obtained much exclusive news, and excelled in featuring the element of surprise. In the words of a colleague, F. G. Prince-White, he was the spirit of news-editorial efficiency personified. After Northcliffe's death Clarke, on the invitation of Sir Kieth Murdock, went to Australia and became assistant editor of the Melbourne Herald from 1923-1926. Some of his experiences were related in Marriage at 6 am (1934). He returned to London to be managering editor of the Daily News in 1926 and, on its merging with a rival, editor and director of the News Chronicle until 1938. Then owing to a divergence of views from colleagues on the board, different sections of Liberalism he found it hard to reconcile, he resigned.
War broke out
He turned to freelance work, in the course of which he visited Finland. A spell as an adviser to Berlingske Tidende, Copenhagen, in 1934, was followed by a tour with the Australian Cricket Team in England for the Daily Mail. In 1935 he became a stimulating director of practical journalism at London University. When war broke out in 1939 he became deputy director of the news division of the Ministry of Information, but gave up this work in 1940 because of his wife's ill health which called for rest in the deep countrside.
Next he joined Sir Edward Hulton in a chain of specialised news agensies set up with a parent company under the title Brianova. He returned to London to assume editorial direction and broadcast a weekly newsletter from London in the B.B.C. Latin-American service from 1942-1948. One product of his South Amrican experiences was The Word of an Englishmen (1943)
Tom Clarke's Illness
Clarke who often worked almost to the point of exhuastion, collapsed
02 April 2009, shirley