Herbert Hamilton Foot - Clara's Husband

 

My post yesterday included this picture of Herbert and wife Clara in the context of Clara's life but blogger friend Steve over at Shadows and Light asked what Herbert was doing in Bahrain which written on the back of the photo above, he was evidently departing for by train. I did not know the answer but I had a bit of time on my hands when responding to Steve's question and so I thought I would just do a quick search to see what there was to find.

Prior research told me that Herbert was born in Canada in Oct of 1887 so he was actually 4 years younger than Clara. He immigrated to the United States around 1912 at the age of 25 and married his first wife Annie who was a native of New Zealand six years later at age 31. According to the census records he was a boat builder/designer living in Berkley, California.

Annie would died after 20 years of marriage to Herbert at age 54 in 1938 and I have found no records of them having any children. One year later, he married Clara Kuck and they lived in his house in Berkley for the remainder of their lives. 

I started by digging up an obituary for Herbert which listed his career as a "naval engineer" which fit the boat builder or boat architect descriptions census takers had used. The obituary said Herbert had worked for a company called Colberg Boat Works which I was able to look up easily enough and see they had spent most of World War II building Mine Sweepers and Sub Hunters. 

Herbert's passion for boats evidently ran deep because among the many pictures are several of Herbert on boats likely in his free time. The above photograph is him and according to the writing on the back was taken on Lake Tahoe in 1914 which would have been four years before he married Annie his first wife. 

Another thing I had to work with was the picture above that Clara had written on the back in pencil that said, "Herbert Foot, Island of Bahrein, Persian Gulf 1948." If you enlarge the picture, you will see the word "Messhall" written on the building behind Herbert. I had assumed that it was likely some sort of military base but when I asked A.I. Gemini, it said that the picture was likely taken at Awali which at the time was a major oil camp for Bahrain Petroleum Company or BAPCO.

Next I turned to one of my most trusted sources of information and ran a search on archived newspapers using the search terms, "Colberg Boat Works" and "Bahrain" and immediately struck gold. Although I hadn't constrained my search to articles including Herbert's name, the third article I turned up mentioned him by name and also the reason he was in Bahrain. By the way, google informed me that Bahrain is the modern English spelling and Bahrein is the older French spelling.

Once again, A.I. comes out the winner and correctly said that Herbert went to Bahrain for the oil industry and not the military as I was quick to assume. Unless of course that was just his cover...

I don't know much else about Herbert's life other than he died in the spring of 1966 at the age of 78 and was cremated and buried near John Kuck's family plot back in Charles City, Iowa. Clara would died that fall and followed suit. Many decades ago, when I first discovered John Kuck's gravesite, a site that had been lost to my family, I was wandering around the nearby gravestones as I often do to see if there were other Kuck's buried nearby who might be related. Little did I know that someday I would come to know Clara in a much deeper way than I would have ever guessed. 

The first three pictures of this post were all ones found in that first photo album of Clara's that was rescued by the Good Samaritan and mailed to me leading to the discovery of all the rest of the stuff. Among the rest of the stuff was a small photo album which is missing about 90% of all the pictures it once held. But among those remaining is another one of Herbert running around in a boat on some lake which A.I. also identifies as Lake Tahoe and specifies that it was taken from "the south shore looking to the north shore" 

Since A.I. has saved me countless hours of musing and researching, I threw it a treat and while on the subject, asked me to restore the photo which you can see had even been nibbled on by a mouse in the upper right hand corner. (Unshown but the entire corner of that photo album had been nibbled on through both covers and all the pages.) A.I. not only obliged me but even fixed the mouse damage.

Restored using A.I. Gemini 2026