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 Tacy kept track of both, 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 remained fragile through the early New Zealand years. Her daughter Henrietta's 1914 memoir describes Martha as a quietly courageous constant: a woman who once stared down a Ngāpuhi chief with a cocked pistol across a table using nothing but calm words, who nursed a large household of children and a revolving community of Māori visitors with apparent serenity, and who created a home in the rough mission world that her youngest daughter could still recall with warmth more than seventy years later.
George's 1865 letter to his brother William describes Martha's daughters with vivid tenderness — one a brilliant scholar, another a splendid housewife, a third studying as though her existence depended on it. The picture is of a household shaped by her as much as by George.
She outlived George by seven years, and died at Waimate North on 8 December 1882.