George Thomas Clark

Colonel George Thomas Clark (26 May 1809 – 31 January 1898) was a British surgeon and engineer. He was particularly associated with the management of the Dowlais Iron Company. He was also an antiquary and historian of Glamorgan.

Biography Clark was born in Chelsea, London, the eldest son of the Revd George Clark (1777–1848), chaplain to the Royal Military Asylum, Chelsea, and Clara, née Dicey.

By the mid-1830s, Clark was in the employ of Isambard Kingdom Brunel as an engineer on the construction of the Great Western and Taff Vale Railways. His position was a senior one with overall responsibility for some stretches of the line and for civil structures.

In 1855 Clark took control of Dowlais Ironworks. Clark's wife, was a descendant of Thomas Lewis, one of the original Dowlais Ironworks partners. The family's interests in the firm had been passed to John Josiah Guest, who after his death named Clark among the trustees. When Guest's widow Lady Charlotte Guest remarried in 1855, de facto control fell on Clark. ).

Work

Dowlais Ironworks

In 1855 Clark took control of Dowlais Ironworks. The works had been, for a while, in some decline and Clark took rapid steps to improve management controls, attracting additional capital and persuading Henry Austin Bruce to share with him the responsibility of the trusteeship. Clark took up his residence at Dowlais and devoted all his energies to the development of the works and the redemption of the estate. As Bruce devoted himself to politics, the whole responsibility of management devolved on Clark alone, whose rare capacity for administration was displayed no less by his rapid mastery of a complicated situation than by his wise selection of heads of departments, chief among whom was his general manager, William Menelaus.

By the mid-1860s, Clark's reforms had borne fruit in renewed profitability and he was rewarded with an annual salary of £3,500 and five percent of the profits. Clark and Menelaus invited Henry Bessemer to Dowlais, where he perfected his process for making malleable iron direct from the ore. Dowlais became a centre of innovation, and, though the Bessemer process was licensed in 1856, nine years of detailed planning and project management were needed before the first steel was produced. The company thrived with its new cost-effective production methods, forming alliances with the Consett Iron Company and Krupp. He was retained by the General Board of Health and worked on analysing the sanitary condition of towns and villages countrywide.

He opposed incorporation of Merthyr Tudful as he believed it would harm the Dowlais business interests. Days before he had written a letter to the press about Roman discoveries at Cardiff Castle.

Publications