SIR RUPERT CLARKE was a rarity — an Australian baronet. And that was not his only distinction. He was a decorated soldier, a well-respected company director, an innovative pastoralist and an enthusiastic racehorse owner and administrator.
The Clarkes have had a presence in Australia since William John Turner Clarke, the son of a Somerset yeoman, arrived in Hobart Town in 1829 to seek his fortune. By his death in 1874 “Big Clarke” owned almost one million acres in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia. He was called the “Great Van Dieman’s Land Leviathan”.
His son, also William, followed his father’s big-hearted advice: “If they get as much fun out of spending it as I had in making it, I won’t mind.” His gifts to charities and institutions were colossal, and in 1882 after he presided over Melbourne’s International Exhibition of 1880, he was created a baronet. Only four baronetcies have been conferred on Australian residents. The only other extant holders of such a title with an Australian territorial link are the Coopers of Woollahra, New South Wales, but the first baronet had already returned to Britain by the time of the creation in 1863.
The Clarkes remained in Victoria, although Sir Rupert spent most of his youth in Britain. His early years were spent in Monaco, where his father, also Sir Rupert, the 2nd baronet, sought relief from bouts of malaria. He died in 1926 and young Rupert succeeded to the baronetcy at the age of 7. Two years later his mother, Elsie née Tucker, married the 5th Marquess of Headfort. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1940 and in April 1941 appointed ADC to Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Alexander (later Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis).
He was to spend four extraordinary years with “Alex” — from the withdrawal from Burma, through the conquest of North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and almost to the conclusion of the Italian campaign. Clarke’s account of this time, With Alex At War — From the Irrawaddy to the Po 1941-1945 (2000), is a fascinating study of one of the war’s outstanding generals, to whom Clarke was military assistant from October 1944. He was appointed MBE in 1943 and mentioned in dispatches for his service with Alexander in Italy. In January 1945 he rejoined the Irish Guards, serving with the 3rd Battalion in Germany. While serving with the battalion he took part in the liberation of the concentration camp at Bremervörde.
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He returned to Australia in 1946 and in 1947 married Kathleen Grant Hay, daughter of a Melbourne brewer. Both more than 6ft tall, the Clarkes were a striking couple but one of contrasts: he reserved, she ebullient; he reflective, she impulsive; he the soul of discretion, she the life of the party. Sir Rupert referred to his wife as “a package-deal hydroelectric scheme”.
Home was a grand town house, named Richmond, after the Grant Hay brewery. Their country property, Bolinda Vale at Clarkefield in Victoria (once part of the family estate, Rupertswood), was home to a set of Ned Kelly’s armour and commemorates the spot where, in 1882, Sir William, who was president of the Melbourne Cricket Club, presented the English captain, Ivo Bligh, with an urn containing the ashes, it is thought, of a bails from the game the visitors had just played at Rupertswood. A match of a different kind also ensued. It has been speculated that the veil of the Clarkes’ music teacher, Miss Florence Morphy, had also been reduced to ashes and placed in the urn. Within 14 months, Ivo Bligh and Miss Morphy were married.
For decades the Clarkes hosted legendary lunches there on the Sunday of Melbourne Cup week and regularly answered calls from the Foreign Ministry to play host to visiting crown princes and other dignitaries.
Perhaps nothing, apart from his family, brought him as much joy as racing. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of the Victoria Amateur Racing Club and spent 40 years on its committee, 16 of them as chairman. The Clarke colours of pink with black sleeves and cap, that brought his father such success, were also seen in the winner’s enclosure in his time. He was also a partner in the Milton Park Stud with the late Sir Stephen Hastings and Victoria’s Lieutenant Governor, Lady Southey, and he regularly attended major race meetings in England.
While his great-grandfather had introduced Leicester sheep almost a century before, Clarke, as chairman and founder of King Ranch Australia, brought Santa Gertrudis cattle from Texas to northern Australia, where they thrived.
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His abilities, and his links with Britain, brought him several directorships. He was chairman of Cadbury Schweppes Australia and P&O Australia, deputy chairman of the Distillers Group, and, like his father and grandfather before him, was on the board of the National Australia Bank, in his case from 1957 until 2001.
Given his standing in Victoria and his early life in Monaco, he seemed a natural choice as the honorary consul for Monaco from 1961 and then consul-general from 1976. As the principality was smaller than his own property, it may have seemed like a sinecure but he was a conscientious consul.
He continued a family tradition of giving energy and funds to institutions and causes, including Queen Victoria Hospital, the University of Melbourne and Christ Church, South Yarra.
He was also president of the Royal Humane Society of Australasia. For this, and his contribution to racing, he was, in 1999, appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).
The seemingly indefatigable Kathleen Clarke died in 1999. In 2000, Sir Rupert married an old friend, Gillian de Zoete (née Grant, formerly Lady Forres). She survives him together with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage; another son having predeceased him. His eldest son, also Rupert, succeeds as 4th baronet.
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Sir Rupert Clarke, AM, MBE, pastoralist and company director, was born on November 5, 1919. He died on February 4, 2005, aged 85.