Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/384

 prosperity and security of the whole peninsula.

On 4 June 1875 Clarke arrived in India, having been appointed member of the council and head of the public works department for the purpose of constructing productive public works, such as railways and irrigation. Famine, frontier wars, and depreciation of silver left no money to spend on public works, and Clarke found little scope for his special work during his five years in India. But he was of service in other directions. On the occasion of the durbar at Delhi for the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India on 1 Jan. 1877, when he was made C.I.E., he in a long letter to Montagu Corry (afterwards Lord Rowton) sagaciously suggested the creation of an imperial senate for India on which the princes and chiefs should sit as well as the great officers of the paramount power. In the same year he succeeded in establishing the useful Indian Defence Committee.

During the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan he did his best to assist the military commanders in the field, although his urgent advocacy of the immediate construction of frontier railroads led to friction with the viceroy (Lord Lytton). In February 1880 Sir Andrew went home on short leave of absence, and was wrecked off Otranto with great peril in the P. & O. steamer Travancore, sailing from Alexandria. He travelled back to India with the newly appointed liberal viceroy, the marquis of Ripon, so as to advise him on current Indian affairs; but his term of office expired soon after they reached Simla, and he was in England again at the end of July.

In June 1882, after serving a year as commandant of the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, Clarke was appointed by Mr. Childers, then secretary of state for war, to be inspector-general of fortifications. Being only a colonel, he was given the temporary rank of major-general. The pending Egyptian campaign at once occupied him. He organised a railway corps, showing admirable discretion in the choice of men [see, Suppl. II]. For the general work of his office he secured both naval and artillery advisers, and welcomed every proposal of promise. He took up warmly the Brennan torpedo, the dirigible balloon, and even the submarine boat, which at that time found no support at the admiralty. To the defences of coaling stations and commercial harbours, which had been long deferred, he paid close attention, and he also found time to advise the government on many other questions. He sat on Lord Granville's committee, which recommended the permanent neutralisation of the Suez Canal, and on a visit to Egypt on business of military buildings at the end of 1882 he, after re-examining the canal, strongly advocated its widening in preference to a proposed second canal.

In 1884 he was one of the British representatives on the international committee, and was chosen its vice-president. The committee's decision accorded with his views. In 1884, during the difficult warfare with Osman Digna in the Eastern Soudan, Clarke urged the construction of a railway from Suakin to Berber, and subsequently supported the Suakin-Berber route for the relief of Khartoum, in opposition to Lord Wolseley's suggested Nile expedition. In 1885, when it was too late, Clark's advice was taken. He then worked out the engineering details of a railway from Suakin to Berber, but the contract was not carried out owing to the menace of war with Russia and the abandonment of the Soudan. On 6 June 1885 Sir Andrew was made G.C.M.G. In March 1886 he was permitted to act temporarily as agent-general for Victoria. The question of the cession of the New Hebrides to France was under discussion, and he induced the British government to recognise the right of Australia to forbid any such arrangement. Always an ardent liberal politician, Clarke resolved early in 1886 to stand for the representation of Chatham at the next vacancy. His term of active service was expiring in the summer under the age regulation. But on dissolution of parliament in June, after Gladstone's defeat on home rule, Clarke, on 27 July 1886, anticipated by a few weeks the obligatory date of his retirement from the army, and offered himself for Chatham in the liberal interest. He was given the honorary rank of lieutenant-general. Defeated in the parliamentary contest, he experienced the same fate in 1892, and he then abandoned his parliamentary ambitions. He found much to occupy him elsewhere. For acting without pay as consulting engineer in connection with the stability of the dam of the Vyrnwy waterworks, he received in January 1887 the honorary freedom of the city of Liverpool. After visits to Siam and Singapore (December 1887), he was busily engaged as director of Palmers Shipbuilding Company at Jarrow-on-Tyne, of the