Percy Clive

Percy Archer Clive DSO, DL (13 March 1873 – 5 April 1918) was a British army officer and Liberal Unionist Party politician.

Percy Clive was the eldest son of Charles Meysey Bolton Clive of Whitfield, Herefordshire, by his marriage to Lady Katherine Feilding. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and entered the Grenadier Guards as a second lieutenant in 1891. He was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant of Herefordshire in December 1894, and was attached to the Niger Field Force from 1897 to 1899 based in Lagos, rising to the rank of captain. In May 1899 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

He was elected to the Commons as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Ross division of Herefordshire in the "khaki election" of 1900, while fighting in the Second Boer War. He did not return to England to take his seat until February 1902. In December 1903 he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to E G Pretyman, Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty.

He was unseated at the 1906 general election, which saw the Liberal Party win a landslide victory. He returned to Parliament at a by-election in January 1908, and remained Ross's MP until his death. Following a merger of the Unionist parties in 1912 he became a Conservative.

He returned to the army in World War I and was wounded twice. Clive was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the Legion of Honour, and the Croix de Guerre, and was twice Mentioned in Despatches. As Lieutenant-Colonel of the Grenadier Guards he was killed in action when attached to the 1/5th Lancashire Fusiliers, 5 April 1918 at Bucquoy. Memorial services were held on 17 April at St Margaret's, Westminster and Hereford Cathedral.

His elder son Major Meysey George Dallas Clive (1907–1943) was killed with the Grenadier Guards in North Africa on 1 May 1943. His younger son Lewis Clive (1910–1938) won a gold medal for rowing at the 1932 Olympics and was a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, killed in action in August 1938.

His papers were deposited in the King's College London archives in 1997.