Martha Elizabeth Blomfield was born at Wymondham on 11 December 1801, the second of six daughters of the Reverend Ezekiel Blomfield and his wife Mary Anne Fennel. As children, she and George Clarke had attended school together in Wymondham under the Reverend Henry Tacy. Their paths diverged when the Blomfields moved to Wortwell after 1809, but the ever-present Tacy apparently kept track of both of them, and it was he who arranged their marriage and performed the ceremony at Swanton Morley on 14 March 1822.
She nearly died on the voyage out, and her health was precarious through the early New Zealand years. Yet she endured. Her daughter Henrietta's memoir of childhood at Grove Cottage describes Martha as a steady, quietly courageous presence — a woman who stared down a chief with a cocked pistol across a table with nothing but calm words, and who nursed a household of children, a revolving community of Māori visitors and workers, and an unpredictable frontier existence with apparent serenity.
She outlived George by seven years, and died at Waimate North on 8 December 1882, surrounded by the family she had helped build.