John Bradburne

John Randal Bradburne was born in 1921 at Skirwith in Cumberland, in the north of England, the son of an Anglican rector. He was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk. During the Second World War he was commissioned into the Gurkha Rifles of the Indian Army and served in Malaya. When Japanese forces overran the peninsula he escaped through jungle and by sea, an ordeal that later biographers and his own recollections treat as decisive for his turn toward God. After the war, in 1947, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Buckfast Abbey in Devon.

For some fifteen years he lived as a wanderer and pilgrim rather than as a settled religious. He tried his vocation with the Carthusians and with other communities but did not remain. He took odd jobs, travelled in Italy, and attached himself for periods to Benedictine and Franciscan life without taking solemn vows as a monk or friar. He was professed in the Third Order of St Francis, the Secular Franciscan Order. Friends and later writers describe him as unconventional, musical, and intensely prayerful. In 1962 a Jesuit priest, John Dove, invited him to Southern Rhodesia. Bradburne accepted and spent the rest of his life in that country.

He worked at Jesuit missions before settling in 1969 at Mutemwa, a neglected leprosy settlement in the tribal trust land near Mutoko, east of Salisbury. There he became warden and made himself the companion of the residents. He washed and bandaged their wounds, pressed for better food and housing, helped organize a chapel, and lived in great simplicity, at times in a small hut on a nearby hill. His daily round mixed the Divine Office, care of the sick, and an outpouring of verse. He was a prolific poet, and thousands of poems, many of them hymns and meditations, survive.

His independence and his refusal to treat Mutemwa as a mere institution brought him into conflict with the Rhodesia Leprosy Association, which eventually removed him from the post of warden. He would not leave the patients and continued to live at or beside the settlement. In the late 1970s the Rhodesian Bush War closed in on the Mutoko district. Missionaries were killed and Mutemwa was exposed. Bradburne declined to seek safety in the cities.

In September 1979 guerrillas of the nationalist forces abducted him from Mutemwa. He was shot on 5 September 1979. His funeral was celebrated in Salisbury Cathedral and he was buried in the Jesuit cemetery at Chishawasha Mission. Popular stories of unusual signs at the funeral, including bees settling on the coffin, circulated at once, and a cult of remembrance grew among Catholics in Zimbabwe and in Britain. The Holy See later granted permission for a cause of beatification, and Bradburne is styled Servant of God. He has not been beatified or canonized. He is remembered as a lay Franciscan, a poet, and a man who chose to remain with people suffering from leprosy until death.