"Molly" Clutton Brock

Frances Mary Clutton-Brock ( Allen; 3 February 1912 – 27 April 2013), known as Molly Clutton-Brock, was a British therapist and youth worker, noted for helping physically disabled children. She and her husband developed a racially integrated farm and Molly developed centres in Rhodesia and Botswana where disabled children could receive physical therapy. She and her husband were expelled from Rhodesia (subsequently Zimbabwe) for not supporting the white minority government.

Life Frances Mary Allen was born in Disley, Cheshire to Frances Hannah ( Smalley) and John Nelson Allen. Her father was the director of a tobacco company but he died when she was a baby and he was in his forties. Clutton-Brock and her mother moved to Eastbourne on the south coast after her father's death. She married Guy Clutton-Brock who was a probation officer working with borstals on 14 April 1934.

The Clutton-Brocks lived in London at the Oxford House settlement during the Second World War and that was where their daughter, Sarah-Anne (later Mrs Roschnik), was born in 1942.

In Rhodesia In 1949, they travelled to Southern Rhodesia to work at the St Faith's farm and school in Rusape. The farm was not thriving and the owners (the St Faith's charity) anticipated that it might be taken over by the Rhodesian government. It was anticipated that stronger management could be established, but instead a co-operative was formed. The co-operative grew crops, reared cattle and did some carving work.

The collective farm alarmed observers as it was not based on racial discrimination but on integration. The district commissioner and the farm's neighbours were surprised that the home treated everyone on an equal basis. The farm became a location for talks and her husband was involved in drafting the constitution of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress in 1957. Molly was teaching local nurses about the Neumann-Neurode techniques which could treat spine abnormalities. Molly continued to train nurses and establish clinics based on the therapy she used on small children in Botswana. They returned to Rhodesia to live in "Cold Comfort Farm" just outside Salisbury, to find that nationalist leaders were in prison.

In 1966 she and David Hughes made a film of the Mukuwapasi Clinic, this film is preserved by the British Film Institute.

Return to England In 1971 Molly and her husband were stripped of their citizenship and deported. The organisation that they had founded was declared illegal. Returning to the UK, they lived in North Wales and when Rhodesia achieved independence as Zimbabwe they decided not to move back. Guy died in 1995 and he was declared a "Hero of Zimbabwe". Molly died in 2013, aged 101.

The Oxford House settlement has a plaque to the Clutton-Brocks.