Pioneering black doctor and civil rights trailblazer Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke will have a plaque installed in Elephant and Castle.
He co-founded the black civil rights organisation the League of Coloured People and ran a medical practice at 112 Newington Causeway from 1920 to his retirement in 1965.
The plaque will be installed on the corner of the London South Bank University (LSBU) Perry Library building, 112 Newington Causeway, the former site of the doctor’s surgery, from 11am to 4pm on Wednesday, April 12.
Community group Nubian Jak and Tony Warner of Black History Walks have organised the plaque to improve awareness of historically-significant Black Brits, especially given just 2 per cent of Historic England’s plaques denoted black figures as of October 2021.
Southwark historian Stephen Bourne, who will speak at the unveiling, said: “For me, Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke is one of many black historical figures in Britain that are just completely overlooked and marginalised.”
Belfield Clarke was born in Barbados in 1894 and won an island scholarship to study at Cambridge University.
He travelled to the UK after the outbreak of World War I, arriving on September 28, 1914, and got a BA from St Catharine’s College, of which he would become president in 1965.
Belfield Clarke established a GP surgery in Elephant and Castle in 1920. There are very few surviving photos of him or his practice, but Stephen was able to work out that his surgery was at 112 Newington Causeway which, pre-Blitz, was where the Perry Library now stands.
“His patients were all working class. The Elephant and Castle was a very working-class area…with slums and poor housing so he was very much rooted in that local community,” said Stephen.
The area was heavily bombed during the Blitz. An extract from Stephen’s book Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime in 1939 – 45 says: “In spite of the intensive bombing… Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke continued to work at his practice… and Clarke worked there all through the blitz.
“The worst air raid… took place on the 10th and 11th of May 1941, when German bombers targeted the area to create a terrible firestorm… but miraculously Dr Clarke’s surgery survived.”
In a letter he wrote to the BBC soon after, Belfield Clarke explained that an entire wall had been blown away, the gas and water were disconnected, and that a tarpaulin roof had been erected.
“When I found that letter that gave me a clue into the character of the man,” said Stephen.
Through the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke was central to the UK’s black civil rights movement, fighting to end the colour bar and the independence of colonial nations.
When people visited London to attend civil rights conferences, they often stayed at his Barnet home, which is now the Belfield Montessori school.
In his 1951 book No Green Pastures: The Journal of Negro History Roi Ottley described him as a “light brown freckle-faced man of 50-odd years inclined to corpulence with the buoyancy of one who has lived well and happily.
“His range of interests included horticulture and, as a hobby, he grew red roses. His friends… joined us for supper in the garden. They were equally urbane but the conversation as I remember was not high-flown.”
Clarke is believed to have been in a gay relationship with lifelong partner Edward ‘Pat’ Walter, a love he concealed by employing him as his secretary.
Clarke retired in 1965, and died on November 28, 1970, and his GP surgery was demolished soon after.
But before his death, he visited Ghana to see it become independent in 1957, no doubt a great moment for a man who was vociferous in his objections to British colonialism.