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Western Mail, Thursday, 5 September 1929, p. 2.
Lieutenant-Colonel J. P. Clarke, D.S.O.
Lieutenant-Colonel J. P. Clarke, D.S.O., one-time commanding the 44th. will be visiting Perth as a delegate to a conference of civil servants from October 2 to 12. The Colonel is Public Prosecutor in Tasmania. He was wounded near Zonnebeke in 1918, when a "wizz-bang" came through a tiny opening, in which the signallers had hung a telephone, and burst in his headquarters. Colonel Clarke was sitting on a stretcher facing the aperture and how he escaped being blown to pieces is one of the wonders of the war. He and his adjutant. Captain C. Hillary, of the Education Department in Perth, collected sundry pieces of shell and most of the telephone, pieces of which army surgeons were extracting from their bodies for the best part of a month. Tom Sten, also of the Education Department (headmaster at Beverley, I think) and now touring the battlefields, was one of two signallers in the same dugout (6ft by 10ft.), and both escaped without a scratch.