Abstract
On a sunny Saturday afternoon, 4 April 2009, a blue plaque was unveiled to commemorate Smith-Clarke's 1 birthplace at 6 Lower Park, Bewdley. He was the oldest of seven children and received his elementary education at school in Bewdley until he was 13. He continued evening classes for a few more years while working as a chemist's messenger and a bus conductor before he left home to join the Great Western Railway (GWR) in 1902. He transferred to the road motor department of GWR in 1905 and became a draughtsman. Promoted to Chief Draughtsman in 1913, he was made a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. In this post his responsibility was the inspection of thousands of aero engines made in Coventry and elsewhere. After World War I he became Chief Engineer of Alvis Car & Engineering and designed several classic motorcars including early front wheel drive sports cars. Before World War II he and Alvis diversified into military vehicles and aero engines but his interest in medical matters had been aroused and he became Chairman of the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital in 1935. On the plaque is FRAS (Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society). Astronomy was one of his hobbies but he became a Fellow after assisting successive Astronomers Royal with the Jodrell Bank installation.
He was involved with many medical specialities: contributing to a book The Eye in Industry, devising a loudspeaker to help deaf children, re-designing a pair of nasal scissors when used unsuccessfully on himself, designing a device for removing a broken femoral pin and a hoist for lifting patients out of baths. He also built an apparatus for changing X-Ray plates rapidly for cardiac investigations. His most important medical contribution was during the polio epidemics of the 1950s. First he designed modifications and improvements for ET Both's 2 now elderly Iron Lungs in the Birmingham Region and then countrywide. Then with ex-Alvis employees at the Cape Engineering Company he produced a new and much improved Iron Lung called the Alligator, so named after the way it opened to allow access to the patient. At the same time he designed an intermittent positive pressure respiration ventilator that developed into the trusty and long lived Cape Waine anaesthetic machine. He died without being honoured by his country.