By Martin J Docherty, Chair, Clydebank Restoration Trust The last link to Clydebank's founding family, Commander Donald Clark CD RCN, has died. He was 92.
Born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, on September 7, 1915, he died on January 12 at Saanich Peninsula Hospital in Canada.
Clark was the son of Dr Donald Clark MB ChB and Esther Thomson, and the last surviving grandson of James Rodger Thomson of J & G Thomson Shipbuilding (later John Brown Shipyard) of Clydebank.
With the sale of Thomson's Shipyard to John Brown, of Sheffield, in the 1920s, the extended Thomson family began to break up.
Dr Clark eventually settled and remarried in Salonika, Greece, where he founded Harman Keiu Hospital. The effects of both diabetes and malaria ravaged Dr Clark's health and he and his new wife moved to Australia, where he died in 1928.
Esther and the couple's children moved to Canada in 1928 and settled in Montreal.
It was there that Donald was placed in Weredale House Orphanage for Boys in 1929. He stayed at the orphanage until 1933. By 1938, he had worked for RCA Victor and the Foxboro Instrument Company in Montreal and was training as an apprentice electrician.
In 1940, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve and, after receiving his journeyman's papers, worked on radar at the National Research Council before transferring to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1945. His work with the Navy led to an involvement in shipbuilding and he helped to write the manual for principal naval overseers as well as overseeing the building of HMCS Nipigon and HMCS Bras d'Or in Sorel, Quebec.
Clark had come full circle from the founding of the family shipyard of J & G Thomson in 1840 by his great grandfather, George Thomson, to overseeing the building of warships for the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960s.
Clark retired from the RCN in 1966 and became a successful estate agent in Victoria, Canada.
He gradually retired from his second career to care for full time for his wife, Phoebe, who had suffered a severe stroke in 1975.
Clark is survived by his daughter, Anne. Phoebe died in 1984 and their son, Grant, in 2005.
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