In 1885 John Smith Clarke was born as the thirteenth out of fourteen children in the town of Jarrow, Durham. Clarke’s extraordinary early life as a circus performer, railway messenger, lion tamer, sailor and gun runner for Russian revolutionaries certainly foreshadowed an eventful career in politics, poetry and journalism. He was an active socialist and member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and while he admired the Soviet Union, he did not join the CPGB.[1]
Clarke was born into extreme poverty; his father was frequently out of employment and only seven of the fourteen children of the family survived into adulthood. In light of these circumstances, Clarke never received a formal education and was working as a messenger for Northeastern Railway at the age of sixteen. At seventeen he claimed to be the youngest ever lion tamer and performed for the circus his family worked in, even after leaving the ring, his love of wild animal training lasted throughout his life. When he was a Labour MP, for example, he brought a box of snakes into the House of Commons in order to demonstrate his skill in snake charming.[2] What knowledge Clarke lacked in formal schooling, he gained through worldly experience during his time as a sailor. He wrote several stories from his maritime adventures in the Sunday Mail, including an article called “Roughing it Around the World”. Clarke returned to the UK to work as a journalist in Edinburgh.[3]
Being a socialist himself and having been inspired by the works of Daniel De Leon, Clarke began writing for leftist journals such as Forward, Plebs, The Reform Journal and was editor of The Socialist.[4] When the First World War struck, Clarke joined a group named the “flying-corps” who were conscientious objectors and escaped arrest by fleeing from the military.[5] Therefore, he spent most of the war in hiding where he continued to write for socialist journals while avoiding imprisonment for his radical politics.[6] In 1920, Clarke was elected by Scottish Shop Stewards to be their delegate for the Second Congress of the Communist International, where he met Vladimir Lenin. Although Clarke admired the Soviet Union in some respects, he did not believe that Bolshevik methods could be applied with success in Britain. He writes of his time in Russia in Pen Pictures of Russia Under the ‘Red terror’ (1921). During the late 1920s he joined the ILP and was elected as MP for Glasgow Maryhill in 1929 while serving on Glasgow Council. He ran again in 1931 but lost and left the party a year after.[7]
While never having a classical education, the influence of antiquity on Clarke’s writing is significant. In his 1918 book A Young Workers Book of Rebels, he wrote profiles of historical revolutionaries and rebels aimed at young readers.[8] The textbook introduces socialist ideology and terms through heroised characters easy for children to understand, for example:
“It has always happened in the past that a great struggle has taken place between those who wished to destroy the institution and those who wished to keep it. That is what is meant by “the class struggle” …… The men and women who did the shaking in the past and who do the shaking now are called REBELS. […]”
One of these rebels was Spartacus, suffering under the oppression of the Roman Empire and the social institution of slavery. Spartacus was the perfect rebel to illustrate Clarke’s view of class struggle.[9] The influence of Greco-Roman antiquity in his work is evident in his book Marxism and History (1927) in which he dedicated a whole chapter to the Roman Empire.[10] Beyond writing on the ancient past, Clarke was a great appreciator of poetry and a poet himself. He published Satires, Lyrics and Poems in 1919. His study of Robert Burns in his book Robert Burns and his Politics (1921) was deeply informed by his socialism which offered an alternate reading of Burns to the imperialist interpretations that dominated the literary field.
In later life he collected art and curios. He was knowledgeable about early primitive and Renaissance art and was a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission for Scotland, serving as a trustee of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Clarke was also known to have a collection of medieval torture instruments in his home, alongside Mary Antoinette’s snuff box, Harry Lauder’s walking stick and a signed photograph of Lenin.[11]
This profile was written by Eligh Barnett (2025).
[1] Stead, H. (2025) ‘Red Antiquity’. Scottish Left Review, (147), p. 21.
[2] Stead, H. (2025) p. 21.
[3] Challinor, R. (2004) ‘Clarke, John Smith (1885–1959), politician, lion-tamer, and newspaper editor’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies.
[4] Hall, E. and Stead, H. (2020) A Peoples History of Classics, p. 398.
[5] Challinor, R. (2004) ODNB.
[6] Hall, E. and Stead, H. (2020) p. 398.
[7] Challinor, R. (2004) ODNB.
[8] Stead, H. (2025) p. 21.
[9] Stead, H. (2025) p. 22.
[10] Hall, E. and Stead, H. (2020) p. 398.
[11] Challinor, R. (2004). ODNB.
