The Man Who Reinvented Himself

 My paternal grandmother, Beatrice Maude Clarke (1896-1987) was born in Luton, England, the youngest of two sisters and three brothers, one of whom was George Clarke.  The sisters and parents came to Canada in 1906, two years after the brothers had been placed on farms to work in Western Canada.  It was there in Stephenfield, Manitoba that the entire family would be later reunited in 1907.

Clarke Family About 1904 - George At Right

George Clarke, born March 15, 1891 and later destined to reinvent himself, would have been only a boy of thirteen when brought to Canada and left in the care of his older teenage brothers until the later family reunification.  Although Beatrice and George, the two youngest siblings of the family, were very fond of each other, George would in due course sever all communication with his youngest sister and all other family members as well.  His fate would remain unknown for almost sixty years.  As a child hearing hearing tales of this brother who had simply disappeared, I was fascinated by the story and often wondered what had become of him.

Before the mystery began, George had, after being reunited with his family, for a time worked on their then farm in the Stephenfield, Manitoba area.  Later making his way to the United States in 1913 to seek work, he eventually settled for a time in Topeka, Kansas where he worked as a barber and supplemented his income as a musician playing the violin.

It was in Kansas that George married his first wife Frances.  A daughter, Beatrice Fay, who was born in
1915 was named after his favourite sister, my grandmother Beatrice.  The brother-sister bond was so strong that my grandmother, by then living in London, Ontario, joined her brother during part of World War I while her beau whom she later would marry was serving overseas.  Beatrice, finding work as a switchboard operator with Western Union, lived with her brother and family during this time. 

After the war, my grandmother returned to London but still remained in close touch with her brother.  She learned that, following the birth of her namesake niece, a nephew, Jack, was subsequently born in 1919.  About this time George sent his sister a photograph of himself and his now two children in addition to three amateurish oil paintings he had created.  These paintings would hang for decades in my grandmother's home as a reminder of a cherished brother who had vanished and whose fate was unknown. 

The catalyst for George's disappearance seems to have stemmed from a still surviving letter he had written to his mother from Eureka, Kansas in October of 1920, the year someone has pencilled in beside the postmark on which the year is illegible.  George, described by the family as something of a dreamer, wrote of having abandoned his work as a barber and musician in favour of working in the oil fields of Kansas. He bombastically bragged of being the manager of an oil crew and making the then handsome sum of between one hundred and two hundred dollars per week.  Claiming as well that his wife was "making a lot of money" running a hotel in Eureka, he said life was going to be easy for his children.  He suggested that his brother Tom, then still living in Western Canada, should join him. George boasted the he would "give him a job at the light end" at one hundred dollars per week until he could go rig building and could "finally go contracting himself" and make thousands of dollars.

Whether George's mother ever replied to this letter is not known.  Family lore, however, is that, after the letter was forwarded to his brother, Tom's wife answered.  In what was said to have been a particularly sharp response, she suggested that George, ever the dreamer, should keep his get rich schemes to himself.  It is believed that it was this response that caused he rupture in further family communication by George.  The original over the top letter from George was, following her death, found amongst the personal effects of Tom's wife, the purported author of the stinging reply.  It had been kept by her for some sixty-seven years after George had enthusiastically and bombastically written it. 

After all family communication ended, George's family over the years made various attempts to trace his whereabouts.  On one occasion when radio was the rage in the 1930s, his sister Beatrice heard a broadcast from near Kansas in which the musician playing was said to be a George Clarke. After she wrote a letter of enquiry to the radio station, she received no response other than a crate of several nesting chickens (times were different then) as a prize to the listener writing from farthest afield.  At other times, the family enlisted to no avail the assistance of the Salvation Army, then often a source for trying to find missing persons by searching their shelter records.  Eventually, however, the family gave up and resigned itself to having lost a brother forever.

One surviving document the family possessed was a handmade birth announcement which George has sent to his sister announcing the birth of his daughter Beatrice.  Because the announcement provided her exact 1915 date of birth, during the 1970's on a hunch I requested a copy of young Beatrice's original birth registration from the State of Kansas.  The hunch paid off when it was found that the previously unknown maiden name of George's wife Frances was shown to be McDavitt.  A search of Kansas telephone directories revealed very few listings for people of this not particularly common family name.  After a few blind calls, a great nephew of Frances (McDavitt) Clarke was located.  Although Frances had died, Tom McDavitt, knew not only the California whereabouts of George's daughter Beatrice but also of his son Jack's widow.

A telephone call to his daughter Beatrice started to fill in the gaps regarding her father's fate.  She advised that George and Frances had divorced about 1920 when they were living in Wichita, following which George moved to Oklahoma.  Although Beatrice grew up having no contact with her father for several years, she said that an Oklahoma City newspaper article she read about him in the late 1930s had prompted her to seek him our.  After tracking him down and arranging to visit him, Beatrice learned that her father had remarried and had two or three sons by that marriage.  It was her recollection that he had then left that wife and again remarried, having perhaps had one daughter.  His later wives had apparently been told nothing of his children from his first marriage to Frances.  In the intervening years George had continued with his earlier interest in music. He told his daughter that he was not only then teaching music but also trying to market a small instrument he had invented which was somewhere between a violin and cello with its own unique sound.  After sporadic letter writing following their reunion, Beatrice then again lost track of her father.  He clearly had little fatherly interest in this part of his past.

A later telephone call to the widow of George's son Jack yielded the Oklahoma City address of George's last wife.  With a bit more sleuthing her telephone was located and the last pieces of the George Clarke puzzle fell into place.  It was clear that the third Mrs. Clarke, by now a widow, had been exceptionally proud of her husband.  It soon also became clear that George had been a fraud who chose to reinvent himself after he severed ties with his family.

His widow advised that George, at the time of his death in Oklahoma City on May 26, 1972, had been running a small tax consultant business.  Mrs. Clarke spoke of the special viola her husband had invented and the fact that he had, at least according to him, made some 165 violins during his lifetime.  The story started to unravel, however, when she recounted what he had told her of his early life.  According to George, he had lost track of his family after World War I, something patently untrue since the address to which he had written his mother in 1920 never changed until her 1931 death.  He went on to claim that his family had eventually reported him dead, something that had not only not occurred but was manifestly impossible to know if he had in fact lost track of family members.  He also claimed to have settled in the United States after serving in the Canadian army when in fact he had never seen Canadian military service.  Also according to him, his mother had been a singer and actress when instead she had laboured for hat manufacturers in England and Canada.  Since Mrs. Clarke was quite old when spoken to, she was not disabused of the fantasy world her husband had created for her.

After digging into various other sources, it soon became clear that this fantasy world had started as early as the births of his first two children in 1915 and 1919 when he claimed to have been born in Brussels, Belgium rather than Luton, England.  Clippings about him held by the Oklahoma City library revealed that the deception only grew over the years.  Although he now claimed to have been born in England, lies included the assertion that he was making violins in Paris at the age of seven when in fact he had never been to France.  He also falsely claimed that his father was a concert violinist rather than a common labourer.  It seemed that the deception, perhaps unwittingly, even continued after his death.  His 1972 death certificate misstates his birth year as 1897, six years after his actual birth year.  It also claims that he was born in Arkansas.  His widow as the informant, perhaps misinformed as to his true age, certainly knew, based on her conversation with me, that he was not born in the United States.  Why she became complicit in this last deception is not known.

The rest of my Clarke family in Canada was naturally excited about the fact that the decades old mystery of George's disappearance had finally been solved.  They were equally disappointed, however, to learn that he had shrouded his life in such lies.  At the time in 1977 when the mystery was solved, still surviving were George's brother Harry, aged ninety-one, and favourite sister and my grandmother Beatrice, aged 81.  Unfortunately George had been dead for about five years when finally tracked down.  Given his new life built on lies, any reunion would clearly have been a most awkward affair.

The only happy conclusion to the story was that George's daughter Beatrice was put in touch with the Aunt Beatrice for whom she had been named.  Although she had no memory of the aunt who had stayed with her family during part of World War I, the telephone reunion with her aunt some sixty-two years after her birth seemed an appropriate way to close the circle and to bring closure to the complex saga of George Clarke and his life of deception and fantasy.

                                                                                                                                 David Arntfield