Edwyn Clive Penley was born in Islington, London, in 1880, the second of four children of William G. R. Penley and his wife Louisa Arabella (Powell) Penley. In the late 1880s the family moved to the isle of Jersey in the Channel Islands. As a teen-ager, Clive belonged to the 1st R. W. Jersey Light Infantry Militia, and in March 1898, at the age of 18, with the South African War on the horizon, he joined the Gloucestershire Regiment of the British Army as a private. At the beginning of 1900, he and his Battalion boarded ship for South Africa, where he fought in the battles of Paardeburg and Driefontein, and at the relief of Kimberly. Clive returned to Britain in July 1900, and was eventually discharged from the Army.

In 1906 Clive married Blanche Ballantyne in London. He seems to have worked in and around London as a dispatch clerk for various stores or merchants. By the time the Great War broke out in August 1914, the couple had five children, and a sixth was born in late 1914. In spite of his age and large family, in September 1915 Clive (now 35 years old) enlisted in the newly formed Hampstead Heavies. Probably because of both his age and his previous military experience, he was quickly promoted as one of the seven Sergeants in the Battery. He trained with the Heavies through the autumn and winter of 1915-16, and sailed with the Battery to France in April 1916. Almost immediately after his arrival there, his two youngest children died of pertussis. Clive had a short emergency leave to home, but he quickly rejoined the Battery.

Clive remained with the Heavies for the remainder of the Great War. In the spring of 1918 he was promoted to Battery Quarter Master Sergeant, and he had a brief stay in hospital. After the Armistice, he stayed in France with the Battery (apart from two short leaves) until August 1919, presumably to help oversee the final hand-over of guns, horses, and equipment.

After the War, Clive and his family moved to Bournemouth, Dorset, and he later separated from his wife and opened a bakery in Havant, Hants, where his sister Gladys Penley (a QAIMNSR Staff Nurse and Sister during the War) worked as a Sister and later Matron in a veterans' hospital. Clive died in Havant in March 1939 of a stroke.