Molly Clutton-Brock

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Molly Clutton-Brock, born Frances Mary Allen on 3 February 1912 in Disley, England, was a British therapist and youth worker who helped disabled children. With her husband, Guy Clutton-Brock, she built a racially integrated farm and set up clinics in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Botswana so that disabled children could receive physiotherapy. They were expelled from Rhodesia for not supporting the white-minority government.

Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother moved the family to Eastbourne. Molly left school at 15 and travelled in Europe. She learned crafts and later worked with borstals (youth custody). She married Guy on 14 April 1934. During World War II they lived at the Oxford House settlement in London, where their daughter Sarah-Anne was born in 1942.

Molly studied a form of therapy developed by Detleff Neumann-Neurode in the 1920s and began using it with children. In 1949 they moved to Southern Rhodesia to work at St Faith’s farm near Rusape. They formed a cooperative that treated people of all races equally, which surprised many. Molly taught local nurses the Neumann-Neurode techniques and they opened the 35-bed Mukuwapasi Clinic to treat children with spinal problems, polio, muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy.

In 1960 they moved to Botswana, continuing to train nurses and open clinics. They later returned to Rhodesia to live at Cold Comfort Farm near Salisbury. The area became a place for farmers and nationalist leaders to discuss politics, and authorities often raided the farm looking for weapons but found only people talking about farming and politics. In 1966 they made a film about Mukuwapasi, now kept by the British Film Institute.

In 1971 Molly and Guy were stripped of Rhodesian citizenship and deported; their organization was banned. They published Cold Comfort Confronted in 1972. Back in the UK, they lived in North Wales. Rhodesia later became Zimbabwe, but they chose not to return. Guy died in 1995 and was later honored as a Hero of Zimbabwe. Molly Clutton-Brock died on 27 April 2013, aged 101. The Oxford House settlement has a plaque commemorating the Clutton-Brocks.