Background
Helen Clark was born in Lewisham Hospital, London to parents Sheila, a teacher, and Geoffrey Banfield, a manager with Esso Petroleum.
Helen Clark was born in Lewisham Hospital, London to parents Sheila, a teacher, and Geoffrey Banfield, a manager with Esso Petroleum.
She studied Education and History at Cambridge University and in 1973, during her third year there, she met her future husband, Anthony John Clark, a scientist from Lincolnshire, who later became director of the Roslin Institute and was awarded an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
With John she has two children Charlie (born 1989) and Laurie (born 1991). Helen died on 14 August 2015 after a two-year illness with Motor Neurone Disease. She created a blog to chart her progress and share its effects with others
Helen moved to Edinburgh in 1977 where she volunteered at the National Museum before getting her first job as an Art Assistant at the Royal Scottish Museum, now the National Museum of Scotland.
In 1982, she became Assistant Keeper of Social History at Beamish North of England Open Air Museum in County Durham, where she first began getting involved in recording oral history. Helen returned to Edinburgh to become the Keeper of Social History at Edinburgh City Museums from 1985 to 2005.
Then Special Projects Manager until her retirement in 2012. She shared the task of setting up a new social history museum, the People"s Story Museum, which opened in 1989 and "explores the lives of Edinburgh"s ordinary people at work and play from the late 18th century to today", using oral testimony and first hand experience.
In 2009 Helen prepared the Votes for Women exhibition at the Museum of Edinburgh as part of Gude Cause.
In 2014 Helen was interviewed for the Western Economic Association, USA Scotland Breaking the Mould project which was researching material for a publication relating to women and women"s groups, with connections to Edinburgh, involved in Social and Political Activism in the 100 years after the beginning of World War I. The publication, Breaking the Mould: Edinburgh, includes a tribute to Helen who died just as it was going to the printers.
In the same year she became a member of the Gude Cause New Media Group (renamed Gude Cause Project) to develop links to a digital record of films, recordings and photographs made of activities organised nationally, leading up to the Gude Cause procession in Edinburgh. Foreign many years Helen was a member of the DRBs Scottish Women"s History Group and of Protest in Harmony, an Edinburgh-based radical singing group.