Scotch College

Who was Pegg Clarke?

The archives hold several sets of well-taken and well-composed photographs, handsomely mounted within folded cardboard, and signed Pegg Clarke. Some sets are bound loosely together.

The photographs are undated but the bound sets have outside covers dated variously as 1938, 1939, and 1940.

Apart from a traditional shot of the Memorial Hall seen from across the Main Oval, most of the photographs are of the Hill (Arthur Robinson House and the Hospital), the Music School, the Chapel, and the Monash Lodge; that is, the recent buildings put up in the late 1930s.

(There is a legend that these photographs were commissioned by Alfred Stirling (Dux 1918) who had became a diplomat. Perhaps, being overseas, he wanted a record of the School’s recent changes? Or perhaps Stirling’s putative role in commissioning the photos has arisen only because a set of these photos was among the books he left to the school when he died.)

So the questions remain: Who was Pegg Clarke? How did she come to produce her fine sets of mounted photographs of the school?