GOD'S VAGABOND- POET OF WWII

An ex-public schoolboy who fought in WW2 and cared for lepers in Zimbabwe before he was executed by Mugabe is set to become the first British martyr since the martyrs of the 16th century. (In 1970 Pope Paul VI canonized Cuthbert Mayne and 39 British companions -The 40 Martyrs of England and Wales -, who were executed for treason between 1535 and 1679, and the Scottish Catholic martyr John Ogilvie, canonized in 1976.)

JOHN BRADBURNE didn't just look like Jesus, with his long hair, beard and simple, austere clothes. He also gave his life for others.  

In September 1979, the English-born missionary, poet and warden of Mutemwa leper colony in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, was caught up in the country's civil war, the Rhodesian Bush War.

His friends told him to flee the imminent arrival of the bloodthirsty ZANU-PF guerillas who thought he was an informer. But he insisted on remaining with the lepers.

 When the guerillas came, they bound John's hands, took him on a forced march and humiliated him. They made him dance and sing, got him to eat excrement and dangled young women in front of him, before interrogating him and subjecting him to a rigged trial.

They offered him the chance to escape so long as he left the country and abandoned his beloved flock. He refused and, when he knelt down to pray, they shot the 58-year-old in the back, leaving him half-naked by the side of the road.

He was buried in a Franciscan habit, as he had requested, in a cemetery 11 miles outside the capital city, Salisbury, now Harare.

Born in Westmorland in 1921, he was the son of an Anglican rector and amazingly enough a relation of Lord Soames, last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, who oversaw the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, soon after John's death.

After private schooling at Gresham's in Norfolk, he fought in World War II with the 9th Gurkha Rifles, heroically escaping Singapore when it was invaded by the Japanese in 1942.

After the war, in 1947, he converted to Catholicism after staying with the Benedictines of Buckfast Abbey.  His desire was to become a Benedictine monk,  but the Order would not accept him because he had not been in the Church for two years. (a common practice for new Catholics). He opted to travel instead, wandering the world for 16 years, trying his hand at teaching and forestry, and toiling as a stoker on a steam ship. His only worldly belonging was a single Gladstone bag.

On trips home, John stayed with Carthusian monks in England, and with other religious orders in Israel and Belgium. At one stage, he walked hundreds of miles to Rome and lived for a year in the organ loft of a church in an Italian mountain village.

Throughout this period, he wrote over 6,000 poems, covering a wide range of spiritual, natural, elegiac and narrative subject matter. As he wrote his domestic letters largely in verse, new poems from the recipients are still occasionally found.

In Rodesia in 1969, he found his calling in the rundown leper colony of Mutemwa. John had asked a Jesuit friend,  John Dove,  if he knew of any African caves where he might pray. Father Dove took him to the Mutemwa leper colony at Mutoko, 90 miles east of Salisbury.

Where others had rejected the 80 cruelly maimed lepers, John embraced them and made his home among them, eventually becoming the warden of the colony. Before he arrived, the lepers were treated as outcasts, forced to wear bags on their heads to hide their disfigurement whenever an able-bodied visitor arrived.

In contrast, John prayed with them, drank with them and slept alongside them. He bathed their wounds, cut their nails, shooed away the rats that hounded the colony and, when they died, buried them with dignity.

He built them a small church, and wrote each leper a poem. With his fine voice and classical education, he even taught them to sing Gregorian plainchant in Latin.

Before he died, John said that he had only three wishes: to help lepers, to die a martyr and to be buried in a habit of the Franciscan Order. He achieved all three.

A service is held in John’s memory at Mutemwa every year, drawing as many as 25,000 people each time. In 2009 a Mass commemorating the 30th anniversary of his death was held at Westminster Cathedral in London, England. This year in 2019, marks the 40th Anniversary of John's assassination. This was marked both in Zimbabwe at Mutemwa with the pilgrimage and then an exhibition and talks at Westminster Cathedral on 21 September 2019, where John's relics were showcased for the first time.