The Migrant's Story -- the Molteno Family

The Migrant’s Story – The Molteno Family

We who are members of the extended Molteno, Murray and other closely related families trace our ancestry back to George Anthony Molteno. He was the first Molteno to emigrate from Milan and settle in London. The first certain trace of his existence is the printsellers business he set up in Pall Mall in the 1780s, just a few years before the French Revolution. At that time, none of the great gentlemen’s clubs like the Athenaeum or the Reform existed on Pall Mall. Instead the street was a centre of bookshops, engravers, printers and printsellers. Anthony’s business prospered and the family continued as printsellers for over half a century.

But this was only the first migration in the family. Several of Anthony’s grandchildren were prompted to migrate again – to the Cape Colony in Africa in the 1830s; Hawaii in the Pacific and Jamaica in the Caribbean in the 1840s; and Australia in the 1850s. But these new beginnings of additional branches of the family were only the next chapter in our family’s migrant story. In each succeeding generation, descendants of George Anthony have moved to, and put down roots, in additional countries. Today, there are Molteno descendants in Scotland and Ireland as well as England; in Kenya, Botswana as well as all over South Africa itself; in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii; in the United States of America, and in Europe -- in France, and, by a strange turn of the wheel, in Italy again.

In each generation, members of the family have been acutely conscious of belonging to a rather special family. Molteno women, when they married , have often given their surname as one of their children’s first names in order to preserve some memory of the family in their sons and daughters. There are also a few reminders of the family in various parts of the world. Not just the original village in Italy after which the family is named (Molteno lying a short distance northeast of Milan near Lake Como in the foothills of the Alps). But there is another village of Molteno 6,000 miles away in the Eastern Cape of South Africa which was called after Sir John Charles Molteno who emigrated to the Cape in 1831. And if you happen to visit London and are in Trafalgar Square, you can go down into the crypt of St Martin’s in the Fields, and there you will find on the floor of the restaurant the gravestone of Anthony’s wife, Mary Molteno (nee Lewis).

There have also been some remarkable men and women in the family. Remarkable for what they did, or their personalities. Moltenos pioneered sheep farming in the Karroo from the 1840s; indeed there are still Moltenos producing wool there today. And Moltenos and Murrays – Ted and Harry Molteno, and Kathleen Murray -- did the same in the very early 1900s with largescale fruit farming in Elgin, the valley that lies just over the Hottentots Holland Mountains outside Cape Town. In a very different terrain of human action, there have been feminist pioneers like Caroline Murray and Betty Molteno, both daughters of the original John Charles Molteno. They asserted the rights of women to education, and to have the vote. In the political world, there have been several Members of Parliament. Percy Molteno was elected to the British House of Commons in 1906; he was the husband of Bessie, the middle daughter of the great Victorian shipowner, Sir Donald Currie. And in the old Cape Assembly in the 19th century, Sir John Charles Molteno who was an elected member right from its start in 1854; he eventually became the Colony’s first Prime Minister in 1872. And his sons John Charles Molteno and James Tennant Molteno also became Cape MPs, the latter also becoming an MP in the new Union of South Africa’s first Parliament, and its first Speaker, in 1910. And my own father, Donald Molteno, was elected to the South African House of Assembly by African voters in the Cape Province in 1937. There have been scientists, doctors and engineers in the family – Peter Molteno who worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for many years in Latin America; his son, Dr Anthony Molteno, the ophthalmologist who pioneered a world-famous surgical technique called the Molteno tube implantation. Another family member, Albert Arthur Molteno Durrant, was a mechanical engineer who led the team that designed the famous Routemaster bus, that iconic red double-decker that became a picture postcard symbol of London’s streets in the 1950s and 60s. Interestingly, during the Second World War (1939-1945), he transferred his skills to the war effort and became Director of Tank Design; it was his team that produced the famous Centurion tank. A greatgrandson of the original Anthony, Vincent Barkly Molteno, served in the Royal Navy, commanded HMS Warrior in the battle of Jutland, which was the only largescale naval engagement of the First World War, and rose to be a Vice-Admiral. Indeed many Moltenos and Murrays fought, and some died, in both the First World War, and the Second. Other members of the family, in an earlier conflict, the Boer War of 1899-1902, had followed a very different, and unpopular, course of opposing Britain’s going to war against the South African Republic and Orange Free State. And in a very different kind of contest there have been several prominent sportsmen and women, with members of the family riding in the Olympics for Britain (Penelope Molteno in the 1950s) and rowing (the brothers Anton and Rupert Obholzer in the 1990s). And in yet another realm of human action,the religious, there have been, particularly in the early decades of the 19th century when the whole family was still Roman Catholic, a number of women who became nuns, notably Catherine Molteno (Sister De Sales), who became a Sister of Mercy, and Mother Superior of its Bristol convent (1861-1867). And her brother, Father Thomas Mylius Molteno, who became a Catholic priest in the 1830s.

But quite aside from this panorama of lives, two things drew me to find out about and try to understand the history of our family. First, its known history – and I leave out the mythology of a Molteno namesake who negotiated with the Emperor Barbarossa or the Molteno who was one of the architects of Milan Cathedral -- spans the whole of the modern era, Many of the themes of modern history are reflected in, and impacted on, what happened to the family over the past two centuries. Anthony opens his business just as industrial capitalism is getting under way in Britain in the late 18th century. He was attracted presumably by the commercial opportunities that opened up as London was becoming Europe’s economic centre of gravity. So Anthony migrates, and in every generation that follows, members of the family follow his example and leave the countries where they have grown up in search of new opportunities. In the 19th century, this migration was often prompted by poverty. Since then, professional opportunities and politics have often been the drivers. Much of this migration took place against the background of the continuing expansion of the British empire which by the end of the 19th century had a presence in every continent and embraced a quarter of the world’s population . It was this that led to Moltenos and Bristows and Murrays landing up in Jamaica and Ceylon; South Africa and Kenya; Australia and New Zealand. And with this colonial expansion came the racism that entrenched itself in the attitudes and practices of British imperialism, as well as the struggle against that racism – a struggle in which many members of our family became courageous participants, notably in South Africa from the 1930s onwards. Other great historical processes also left their mark on the family, notably women’s struggle for the vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And, of course, the scarring of the 20th century by two world wars which, while originating in the internecine rivalries of the European powers, dragged in their attendant empires, as well as China, Japan and the United States. These scars of war were borne by many members of our family, as I have already mentioned, including those died like George Murray, Leonard Clark Molteno and Donald Ian Molteno, or whose subsequent lives were utterly transformed. Thus Paul Batley reacted to his horrendous experiences in the Dardanelles during the First World War by deciding, much against his mother Ethel Molteno’s wishes, to devote the rest of his life to God and become a Benedictine monk.

But there is a second circumstance that has fuelled my interest in the family’s history, and indeed made it possible. There is an extraordinarily rich paper trail that makes this historical detective work both possible and very exciting. Many members of the family have written their recollections. Some kept diaries. And one group of brothers and sisters, Sir John Charles Molteno’s offspring, not only wrote letters to each other from the 1880s right up to the late 1930s, but many of these letters have survived. This is not the place to thank all those family members who played their part in preserving all this material. But without their efforts, my project of reconstructing the history of the family would have been impossible. The downsides of this treasure trove of materials, however, must be mentioned. There is a constant danger of overlooking the lives of all of us ordinary members of the family who didn’t become famous; but our lives also are a product of history. And there is also a tendency for the stories that I will tell to be skewed to the South African branch of the family. But I very much also want to reconstruct, so far as possible, the story of those of Anthony Molteno’s descendants who did not emigrate to the Cape Colony. Theirs are very different stories. I have found it much more difficult to piece together what happened to many of them. Indeed the trail often goes cold. So their lives have up to now remained almost totally unknown. Part of this project is to find out and tell the stories of their lives.