Excerpts from
Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography
By Neil McAleer

THIS PAGE: Chapter 1

Permission to reprint these excerpts was granted to MysteryVisits in 2004 by Neil McAleer. MysteryVisits is proud to be able to make this material available online. For the full account about Sir Arthur, however, please obtain the complete book, published by Contemporary Books (Chicago USA) and Victor Gollancz Ltd. (London UK).


Foreword by Ray Bradbury
Foreword by Sir Patrick Moore
Preface by McAleer
Chapter 1: New Moon over Somerset – This page
Chapter 28: 1984 [Part One]
[Part Two]
Photos of Sir Arthur: May 2004
Editorial reviews

Return to introductory page


Chapter One: New Moon Over Somerset

The stars were bright over Somerset in 1917. Across the English Channel, however, the skies of France were filled with the flares and artillery shells of World War I. Charles Wright Clarke was fighting in France when his first son, Arthur, was born in the seaside town of Minehead on the west coast of England. His birth date, under a waxing new moon, was December 16.

At right: In May 2004, Sir Arthur C. Clarke pores over a bound script of "2001: A Space Odessey" before signing it for the script's owner, actor/producer Tom Hanks, in Sir Arthur's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This photo – taken by Karl Anders, MD – was provided by Neil McAleer for use only on this page. It is not featured in Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography, which includes photos available up until 1992.

Few space cadets were born in the first decades of the twentieth century. They were a rare breed then, long before the deluge of cosmic images in film and television began to permeate our collective consciousness. But Arthur Charles Clarke was one of the early few who, before World War II, would point to the moon and stars and show us – future astronauts, engineers, scientists, and enthusiastic youth everywhere – the way. Describing his vision of the future in both nonfiction and fiction, over seven decades, he has entertained and educated us with his imaginative cosmic plots and unique view of planet Earth.

Why has Arthur C. Clarke become one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers and visionaries? The answer lies in his passionate enthusiasm and energy for exploring the universe around him – its celestial and terrestrial wonders and humankind’s unending stream of ideas, desires, and imaginings. Clarke has never stopped searching – for new questions and possibilities as well as answers about what the near and distant future holds for humanity. His imaginative extrapolations of science and technology have created many possible futures, most positive, that have reached millions of readers.

This quest constantly delights him. He derives great natural pleasure from what he does and who he is, and this quality comes through in his writing. All his work – books, articles, lectures, media appearances, TV series, films – is accented with a touch of personal enthusiasm, which has been an important element in attracting a global audience. Enthusiasm, optimism, and prescience about the future – rare characteristics in his chosen genre during the century of two world wars – have set Arthur C. Clarke worlds apart.

Minehead, England, a coastal town on the Bristol Channel, was a good place for an explorer to begin his life. It was located near one of the great world ports, and a long history of maritime adventure and commerce had been witnessed from its shores. The coastline offered vistas of the Atlantic Ocean that created the illusion of infinite space, and there was the regular excitement of ships leaving their ports and beginning voyages to distant lands.

From the shores of Minehead a person could set a course for anywhere and everywhere, and that’s what Arthur C. Clarke eventually did. His birthplace provided a convenient shore from which to cast off and see not just our world but other worlds as well – the moon, the planets, the stars, the galaxies – and Homo sapiens’ future adventures among them. Arthur C. Clarke’s childhood shore, with its expanses of sea and sky, helped provide him with the cosmic view of planet Earth and its place in space and time, a perspective that dominates his work and his philosophy to this day.


Mary Nora Clarke (née Willis) gave birth to her son on the morning of December 16, 1917, in her mother’s house at 4 Blenheim Road, Minehead. (The address was later changed to 13 Blenheim Road because the road was extended.)

At right: Arthur C. Clarke was born in this house on Dec. 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, UK (photo provided to John C. Sherwood by Nora Heal Clarke).

Minehead and the stone Victorian house known as Sunnyside, where Clarke’s grandmother had insisted he be born, remained his home for the first few years of his life. When the First World War ended in 1918 and Charles Clarke was discharged, he bought the family’s first farm. Called Beetham, it was near Chard, Somerset.

Charles Clarke was the eldest son of Thomas Clarke, postmaster of the village of Bishops Lydeard. Charles had grown up around the post office that his father had built, and that is how he came to meet Nora Willis, who had worked at various Somerset post offices and whom he married on July 29, 1915. Although his post office position had been reserved for him while he was serving in France as lieutenant in His Majesty’s Royal Engineers during the Great War, Charles Clarke decided against going back to it. Like many other returning soldiers, he could not settle for confining office work after the stress and action of the war. Seeking an outdoor life, he decided to become a farmer even though he had no experience. Despite Nora’s urging caution, it wasn’t long before he and a partner signed a purchase contract for a farm. Unfortunately, they came up short of funds, which had to be loaned by Nora from a sum she’d inherited at age three when her father had died, and by relatives of Charles Clarke’s partner.

The farm itself proved to be much worse than Nora had imagined. “The price was far too high and the house in a bad state. There was little water on the farm and in dry spells it had to be hauled for miles.” With the postwar slump beginning, some of the farm’s twenty cows had to be sold to pay expenses.

There was a bit of joy, however, during this difficult time: the birth of Frederick William Clarke on April 7, 1921. Nora again traveled to her mother’s house in Minehead for the birth. The Clarkes now had two sons.

Finally the Beetham farm had to be sold at a loss, but Nora soon heard of a suitable farm from her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Mary Clarke, the postmistress at Bishops Lydeard. “The name was Ballifants, and I knew nothing of it,” wrote Nora, “for it was away from all roads.”

The word Ballifants was an old English family name that the place had inherited. The farm came from the 1913 breakup of the Lethbridge family estate, whose fields and their buildings became the so-called smallholdings offered to veterans and their families. Ballifants was one such smallholding. Charles and Nora applied at once, and the family moved in in 1924. The five-hundred-year-old turreted farmhouse was the center of a farm that was productive but unremarkable for the area. And it was not the land that attracted young Arthur C. Clarke but the sea.

At right: Ballifants, the Clarke family farm in county Somerset, UK, in a photo taken about 1935 (photo provided to John C. Sherwood by Nora Heal Clarke).

He found it at his grandmother’s home in Minehead, where the Clarke boys spent school holidays and weekends. The Minehead Beach, no more than a quarter of a mile away from his grandmother’s house, became Clarke’s favorite haunt. There he built battlements of sand and explored the tidewater pools among the rocks. Even today Clarke admits that the only place he ever feels completely relaxed is by the edge of the sea, “or, better still, hovering weightless beneath it, over the populous and polychromatic landscape of my favorite reef.” Clarke is still actively scuba-diving at seventy-five and still loves to swim.

The Somerset coast of Minehead was Clarke’s childhood shore, his dream beach, where his body and imagination played, creating ideas for his future work and prophetic visions of what life would be like – on and off the planet.

the short story “Transience,” written more than twenty years later and first published in Startling Stories, describes a beach at three different times in geological history, over millions of years, through the eyes of a child playing there.

“Underfoot, the sand was coarse and mixed with myriads of broken shells. Here and there the retreating tide had left long streamers of weed trailed across the beach. …

“Beyond the sea wall and the promenade, the little town was sleeping through the golden summer day. Here and there along the beach, people lay at rest, drowsy with heat and lulled by the murmur of the waves.”

That second beach is no doubt the author’s childhood shore. Finally, in the far-future scene, Earth is abandoned as the solar system encounters an immense dark nebula that will eventually make the planet uninhabitable. In this last scene a boy named Bran is alone, guarded by a machine, “but he was a solitary child and did not greatly care. Lost in his own dreams, he was content to be left alone.” These few words and the author’s later choice of Colombo, Sri Lanka, on the Indian Ocean as home tell us more about Arthur C. Clarke than many of his interviews.


Arthur C. Clarke’s return visits to the coast coincidentally provided his introduction to science fiction, through the Kille family, who lived “about three doors along at the end of the road.” One of the Kille sons, Larry, provided Clarke with his first glance at the science fiction magazines that would captivate him a few years later. It was Larry Kille’s November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories that introduced the eleven-year-old Clarke to the genre. Its cover, painted by space artist Frank R. Paul, depicted the giant planet Jupiter dominating the sky of one of its moons, with a tropical moonscape and a cylindrical spaceship in the foreground. From the spaceship, earthlings disembarked.

The Kille family helped excite Clarke’s interest in science as well as science fiction. He remembers a small room in the Kille house that was filled with the most advanced knitting machines of the day. With foot power alone, Larry Kille’s grandmother produced yards of socks and sweaters. Sometimes Clarke was allowed to provide the pedal power.

“I can still hear the clicking of the hundreds of needles and the whir of the well-oiled gear wheels,” he recalled. “My own interest in science owes much to the fascinating hardware that Mrs. Kille operated with effortless skill.” She also loaned him books such as Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, which Arthur naively accepted as fact when he first read it.

During the same period Clarke took up his first hobby, fossils, in part influenced by Arthur Cornish, Nellie Kille’s husband. “He was an archaeologist and a very nice guy who definitely influenced my scientific interest. He gave me quite a lot of stuff, including fossils and a mammoth’s tooth.”

A casual gift from his father spawned a similar collection. Though Arthur was not yet seven years old when his parents moved to Ballifants, he vividly recalls riding with his father on the pony cart, known as a “trap” by the local folks. On the common of Bishops Lydeard, Charles Clarke handed his son a series of picture cards depicting prehistoric animals, which had come with cigarettes he’d just purchased. The cards – the first one depicting “a weird beast, a stegosaur” – became an instant treasure and created one of the lasting memories Clarke has of his father. They also served as visual aids for the tales of giant creatures he told to his classmates at Bishops Lydeard Elementary, where schoolmistress Maud Hanks encouraged his natural storytelling abilities.

The imagination that drove those abilities was fueled when, in the summer before his ninth birthday as Clarke recalls it, he took to the air for the first time. His mother took him flying in an aircraft owned by the Cornwall Aviation Company, Limited, of Austell. It was a British Avro 504 biplane, with its cross-wired wings and three-axis control. The passengers strapped themselves in with leather seat belts, and they heard the high-pitched singing of cross-wired wing rigging at times during the flight.

“It was a very famous type, with a skid under the two bicycle-type wheels,” says Clarke. From then on he was hooked; he’s been flying around the planet ever since.


It was not the integration of modern technology into his home that fostered Clarke’s fascination with communications. Telephone service did not arrive at the Clarke farm until around 1930, and electricity would have to wait until after World War II. Rather, communications was a family career specialty.

Charles Wright Clarke’s pre-World War I work at the post office had been as an engineer – the early equivalent of today’s telecommunications engineer. “He was concerned with telephone and telegraph circuits,” says Clarke. In fact his father got the contract for putting up the poles to bring the telephone to Ballifants, which paid for the phone for quite a few years. “And he had to install quite a few telephone poles to get there,” adds Clarke.

Nora had worked as a telegraphist at the Taunton Post Office and learned Morse code from her mother-in-law, accumulating some valuable experience on the two common telegraphic instruments: the single needle and the so-called sounder that superseded it.

Ernest Clarke, Arthur’s paternal uncle, was a post office telegraphist, and for many years his paternal aunt Zebah was the postmistress at Bishops Lydeard. So while the telephone may have come late to the Clarke farm, the post never did.

Clarke remembers having his first experience with global communication when he worked at the Bishops Lydeard Post Office in his teens.

“I was night operator for quite a long time at Bishops Lydeard, and one night there was a call from New York – very rare in those days. The call came by radio, of course; it was long before there was any telephonic cable. The operator in Taunton must have detected me listening in, and told me to unplug. I was probably weakening the signal.”

Communications – post, telegraph, or telephone – may have been a common career specialty for the Clarkes, but no one (with the possible exception of Arthur C. Clarke himself) could have foreseen how he would carry the family tradition into the future.


During the 1920s the lives of the Clarke family revolved not around communications but around farming. It was a hard life. The postwar economic slump caused real hardship, and the declining health of Charles Clarke made matters worse.

During the war Lieutenant Clarke’s lungs had been severely damaged by inhalation of poison gas and by the horrible conditions of trench warfare.

Soon after the family moved to Ballifants, Charles began having violent attacks of pain, and in less than a year he was an invalid, unable to do any work on the farm. Unfortunately, like so many veterans of the war, he had signed a release whereby he lost any right to a pension.

Nora Clarke took up the full burden of providing for the family, and as her husband’s physical condition worsened, she expected more help from her older children, Arthur and Fred. Siblings Mary and Michael were too young to do much work.

There were cows to be milked, eggs to be collected, clotted cream to be delivered, apples to be picked and pressed, and an assortment of animals – horses, cows, lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, geese, and dogs – to be fed and cared for. The beloved cairn terriers alone, sometimes more than a dozen around the farm at any one time, regularly ate substantial piles of food. But they were pedigreed and always sold for good prices. Clarke’s youth on the farm instilled in him a lifelong love of all animals.

Nora did just about everything to bring in extra income, including taking in paying guests. “She used to knit gloves, string gloves I seem to remember,” says Michael Clarke, who became the farmer of the family and the one to run Ballifants, now a dairy farm, ”and sell them for a very small amount.”

“We all had our work on the farm,” recalls Fred. “If anybody wasn’t doing their share, mother used to say, ‘Don’t let it ever be said your mother bred a jibber.’ A jibber is a horse which won’t do what you tell it to do – won’t jump over a fence, but swings to one side instead. Or won’t haul a heavy load, but puts its head down and refuses to move.”

As it turned out, Nora bred no jibbers. All the children were taught to work hard, and the example set at Ballifants no doubt gave rise to Clarke’s prolific literary production in future years.

At right: Nora Clarke with her children, clockwise from top: Arthur, Michael, Mary and Fred, in a photo taken about 1930.

Their father’s long illness also left its mark on the Clarke children. Both Arthur and Fred remember seeing Charles Clarke in bed, recall taking up his medication or a hot water bottle. “I had to walk a mile,” says Fred, “through fields and woods, in the dark, three times a week to get his medicine. It was probably morphine, issued only in small doses”

Charles Wright Clarke died in the hospital in Bristol in May 1931 under the ministrations of a doctor who was experimenting with mercury injections. He was forty-three years old. His eldest son was thirteen.

The loss was buried deep in young Arthur C. Clarke. At a critical time of life, when most boys turn to their fathers for self-definition, he was alone. As the eldest son, he assumed the role and responsibilities of the male head of household, and throughout his long career he has figuratively become the father to many sons, in his literary work as well as his life.

Arthur C. Clarke’s personal odyssey has been motivated in part by a deep need to seek what he lost in his youth. As his fiction illustrates, there are no heights (or depths) to which he won’t climb to find the missing element. His writing represents, on a biographical level, a search for his missing father and his own identity.

“More than his father had been buried today; the falling earth had covered his childhood,” Clarke later wrote in his novel Glide Path, when Alan Bishop, the young RAF officer, attends his father’s funeral. “He could never escape from its influence, for it had shaped his character irrevocably. …”


End of Chapter 1

© 1992 by Neil McAleer

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the above excerpt available to online readers. – John C. Sherwood

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