Cecil Clinkard

Cecil Clinkard
Portrait of Clinkard
1st Mayor of Rotorua
In office 1923–1927
Succeeded by	Thomas McDowell
Member of the New Zealand Parliament for Rotorua
In office 14 November 1928 – 1 November 1935
Preceded by	Frank Hockly
Succeeded by	Alexander Moncur
Majority	200 (1928); 57 (1931)
Personal details
Born	1862 Oxfordshire, England
Died	24 March 1941 (aged 79) Rotorua, New Zealand
Political party	United
Children	George Clinkard (son)

Cecil Henry Clinkard (1862 – 24 March 1941) was a United Party Member of Parliament in New Zealand, and the first Mayor of Rotorua.

Clinkard was born in 1862 in Oxfordshire, England, where his family had been freehold farmers for many generations. He came to New Zealand with his parents in 1867. His father, Thomas Clinkard, was the first settler at Makarau on the Kaipara Harbour, where for three years his mother did not set eyes on a white woman. Being brought up to bush work, he commenced as a bush contractor at the age of 16, and mainly worked in the timber industry as a young adult. He took up large tracts of bush country and then worked out the timber, having it towed to Wairoa, from where it got shipped to London, Sydney, Adelaide, and the southern ports of New Zealand.

Clinkard was then one of the original settlers of the Mamaku area in the Bay of Plenty. Later, he lived at Devonport. He moved to Rotorua in 1917 and became a taxi proprietor.

Clinkard was secretary to the Kaukapakapa Road Board.

Clinkard first stood in a general election in 1905 for the Liberal Party, when he challenged the incumbent in the Waitemata electorate, Ewen Alison. He unsuccessfully contested the Rotorua electorate in the 1922 and 1925 elections, coming a close second in 1922, and a distant second in 1925.