George Clarke, 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe
British Baron (1848-1933)
George Sydenham Clarke, 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe (4 July 1848 – 7 February 1933) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator.
Biography
Background and education
Clarke was born in Swinderby, Lincolnshire, son of the Rev. Walter John Clarke and his wife Maria Frances Mayor. He was educated at Haileybury, Wimbledon and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
Military career
Clarke entered the Royal Engineers in 1868, served in the Egyptian Expedition and as Assistant Political officer during the following Sudan expedition.
From 1885 until 1892 Clarke was secretary to the Colonial Defence Committee, for which he was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1893. He was also secretary to the Royal Commission on Navy and Army Administration in 1888, a commission which did much to improve cooperation between the two services. In the late 1890s he was Superintendent of the Royal Carriage Department at Woolwich.
Fiction
In 1891 his book The Last Great Naval War. An historical retrospect.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5537938. VIAF identifies the subject as 5830206. The Library of Congress control number is nr94027365. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1848, 1933, 1868 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Clarke, 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.