Rebel Britannia

4th February 1885:

If you've searched without success in every pestilent latrine
For a sample of the most revolting filth the eye has ever seen;
If the garbage of the midden and sewage of the drain
Reward you not, and all your efforts seem to be in vain,
Let not barren explorations fill your busom with despair,
Just trot around to Downing Street, you'll sure unearth it there.

The author of that depressingly timeless masterpiece - a man known as "the Poet Laureate of the Revolution" - was John S. Clarke, briefly a member of parliament, whose day-job was lion-taming. In fact, in his time he was Britain's youngest and oldest working lion-tamer, at the ages of 17 and 67.

But in case that makes his life sound too ordinary, I should add that he was also a gun-runner, a ships' boy, a lecturer who'd had no formal education, a nationally acknowledged expert on renaissance art, private secretary to a feminist novelist, a zookeeper, an accomplished amateur vet (he once cured Lenin's dog of something unmentionable), a professional horse-whisperer having been a bareback rider from the age of 10 - and in later years he earned his living writing for children as Uncle Mack in the Scottish Daily Express.

John Smith Clarke (4th February 1885 - 30th January 1959) was born to a circus family in Jarrow, the thirteenth of 14 children. He was always proud of his Gypsy background, but his first career, starting at the age of 12, was at sea. An insatiable curiosity - a desire to see everywhere, meet everyone and learn everything - seems to have been the main driving force of his unusually varied life.

He spent a few years travelling the oceans until, finding himself serving on an unsafe vessel, he jumped ship in Durban, South Africa, and set out to hitch-hike back to Tyneside and his circus family. It's not surprising that he often found work writing books and journalism - he had no shortage of material to draw on, after all.

(I can think of one other professional big top performer amongst Labour politicians; Ben Tillett, union leader during the historic "dockers' tanner" strike of 1899, and later MP for North Salford, ran away from an abusive stepmother as a youngster, and found work as a circus acrobat. Can anyone add to this list?)

Revolutionary socialism was one constant in John S's life, from an early age. In 1906, for instance, he was arrested for smuggling weapons to Russian revolutionaries, but, possibly because of his much-noted eloquence, got away with it. He was a member of various left-wing groups, as most activists at that time were, and during WW1 was a member of the "flying corps" of anti-war campaigners who were constantly on the move from one safehouse to another, one city to another, flying from the secret police and the military.

His post-war adventures included attending a conference in Moscow, as a delegate from Scottish trade unionists. He had to travel in secret, evading the British authorities and their continental allies, and even so was arrested on his way home. He escaped by stealing a boat and sailing it single-handedly across the North Sea.

By the 1920s Clarke was married, to the daughter of a Russian rabbi, and had settled in Scotland, Glasgow eventually becoming his home town for the rest of his life, where he sat as a city councillor. Between 1929 and 1931 he was the Labour MP for Maryhill. He seems to have found parliament rather dull (no, really? Who could possibly have predicted that?) and rarely spoke in the House, instead relieving the tedium by slipping live snakes into fellow members' coat pockets.

He also continued "doing the lions" during and after his time in the Commons, partly to prove his belief that the taming of wild animals could be managed humanely, without whips and threats, through kindness and empathy. Clarke was a very successful lion-tamer; nonetheless his body was said to be covered in scars. Later in life he wrote a lion-tamer's manual which included two frightfully useful insights: it's the claws that kill you, not the jaws, and "No lion is safe."

He continued as a Glasgow councillor until the 1950s, but his last decades belied the rebelliousness of his early days and he appears to have led a quietly respectable life as a local politician, an arts administrator, a magistrate, a journalist and a local historian. And, always, a poet. He lived modestly, in a small rented house. His wife died before he did; they had one son.

Even then, though, it wasn't all dusty meetings and old paintings. In 1944 his local zoo burned down; John S Clarke went into the lion cage and calmed the animals by bathing their eyes, until they could be led to safety.

*

Sources:

John S. Clarke by Raymond Challinor (Pluto, 1977)

www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/activists/john-s-clarke/

The bumper book of British lefties by Paul Routledge (Politico's, 2003)

https://spartacus-educational.com/CRIclarkeJS.htm