Like many others Alexander Cullen Clark’s brush with both football and Australia, was brief, having arrived in Australia in 1911 from, of all places, Fiji.
Born in Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire in January of 1889, Alex was married and became a father as a nineteen-year-old. Somehow he had ventured into the South Pacific around 1909 and subsequently found himself travelling on to Sydney and into employment with the NSW Railways, Alex becoming ‘Clark the Clerk’.
Whether Alex abandoned his wife Jessie and son Robert or left to find stable employment one can only speculate but given the circumstances of the marriage one will always speculate. Clark settled in the Sydney inner-west suburb of Annandale, and he played his football with Petersham the neighbouring Annandale club. One has to assume that Alex had played football back in England given where he was from, but nothing can be proven, yet.
Alex’s was one of the early signatures added to the enlistment forms. He was assigned to H Company of the First Infantry Brigade, 4th Battalion of the AIF and embarked for foreign shores on 20 October 1914. Four days later Clark was promoted to the rank of Corporal. Clearly his superiors saw something in him, this ‘Clark the Clerk’.
On 6 August at 5.30pm in Gallipoli, Clark was killed in a bayonet charge at Lone Pine and died instantly. He had been in the army ten days short of a year and like most other elements of his life this association too, was short lived.