John Howard Clark

John Howard Clark (15 January 1830 – 20 May 1878) was editor of The South Australian Register from 1870 to 1877 and was responsible for its Echoes from the Bush column and closely associated with its Geoffry Crabthorn persona.

John was born in Birmingham, son of Francis Clark (1799 – 1853), a silversmith also born in Birmingham. Grandfather Thomas Clark ran a school for boys, then a factory.

His mother Caroline (1800 – 16 September 1877) was a daughter of mathematician Thomas Wright Hill (24 April 1763 – 13 June 1851) founder of what became Hazelwood School in Birmingham under her brother Rowland Hill (famous for inventing penny postage and important in South Australian history as the Secretary to the Commissioners for the Colonization of South Australia). Her eldest brother, Matthew Davenport Hill, was Recorder of Birmingham, penal reformer and a supporter of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

John was educated at Birmingham and Edgbaston Proprietary School and King's College London, where John Lorenzo Young (later to found the Adelaide Educational Institution) was a fellow student.

Clark worked for a time at an iron smelter in Dudley, but after a bout of serious illness, emigrated with his parents to Adelaide, South Australia, arriving on the Fatima in June 1850. After a short period of work as an assayer, he joined his father as accountant in the firm which, with A. Sidney Clark as proprietor in 1853, became Francis Clark and Sons, hardware importers and shipping agents of Blyth Street. John Howard Clark became one of the colony's most sought-after accountants, as with the 1862 audit of the Duryea mine.

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