Sir Thomas Edwin Clark (6 August 1916 – 14 June 2005) was a New Zealand industrialist who played a major role in a number of different enterprises.
[1] He was the driving force in the development of Crown Lynn, a ceramics manufacturer begun by his great-grandfather Rice Owen Clark in the mid-1850s.
[1][4] During World War II, the country started running out of cups and saucers, as they were no longer imported and had never been manufactured locally at a grand scale.
By 1948, more than half of the company's production was sold to Australia, but when the Minister of Finance, Walter Nash, changed the exchange rate by 25%, that overseas market was "lost overnight".
[1] Clark was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1986 New Year Honours, for services to manufacturing, export, sport and the community.