An introduction by his widow, Marion Molteno, June 2025
Robert began work on this project in the late 1980s, and worked on it until his sudden death in 2022 – well over thirty years. During that time he was also – as always – incredibly busy on other things. He was the senior editor for Zed Books, a not-for-profit radical publisher; he led local campaigns, first in education and them on local environmental issues; and he was a hands-on dad, and later an equally active grandfather. He was intensely interested in current world affairs, reading and discussing constantly. Yet all that time he was also immersing himself in the lives of his 19th century and early 20th century Molteno forebears, and travelling to meet and get to know any of their descendants he heard of.
He loved every one of those encounters, and had the lucky temperament of seeing only the best in everyone he met. He wrote copious notes after each visit (printed out, filling boxes), collected thousands of family photographs, and left behind a trail of warmth. His world filled out with a sense of being connected, and he loved nothing more than to put distant relatives he had got to know in touch with others. His friends joked that whatever people around him were talking about, Robert had a Molteno relative to fit. The one who designed the early iconic London bus. The one who was an interpreter at the Yalta meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The admiral who commanded a ship at the Battle of Jutland. The one who went to Hawaii and became a whaler. The one who went to Australia and whose children were musical prodigies.
Many people late in life develop an interest in their family history, but Robert was doing this from his forties. Initially it was for his own pleasure. He said it gave him a sense of being part of a community, which as a boy growing up in Cape Town he had lacked. There had been occasional extended family gatherings hosted by his father’s cousin, Kathleen Murray, a pioneering apple farmer in Elgin – known even to the younger generation as ‘Cousin Kathleen’. Another link was through his father’s Uncle Percy, who had been sent to Cambridge to study law and remained in Britain, marrying a daughter of a wealthy Scots ship owner. By the time Robert was growing up Uncle Percy was long dead but his grown children and their families often visited the Cape during the British winter, staying in their house at Miller’s Point where Robert was taken to meet them. From these occasional encounters, and from stories he heard from his father, he developed a sense of the wider Molteno family. When he and I met – he was twenty and I nineteen – I was taken to meet the somewhat formidable Cousin Kathleen, and her remarkable sister Cousin May, a frail looking elderly woman who seemed all gentleness but had a steel core of humanist principle. She once confronted the apartheid police who tried to stop her car from entering a sealed-off African area of Cape Town during a time of political demonstrations. She was simply going to visit her friends, she told them, as if it were obvious that therefore they would let her through. They did.
By the 1980s we had settled in Britain, and Robert had begun reconnecting with the second and third cousins of Uncle Percy’s family. From their home on a country estate near Aberfeldy had emerged a whole clan of Scots Molteno’s. One of his favourites, Fiona Lorimer, was a great enthusiast for his project, described him as the ‘family archivist’, and made sure he and I were invited to join their extended family gathering in a hotel in the Cairngorms. There were a hundred of them – five granddaughters of Great Uncle Percy, their children and grandchildren – all dancing Scottish reels to the accompaniment of bagpipes.
By the 1990s the political situation in South Africa changed and he was able to go back and visit, and began tracking down more family members, who embraced both his friendliness and his project. It now took on a different impetus. On each visit to South Africa he spent hours in the University of Cape Town archives, looking through family papers which Cousin Kathleen and others had lodged there. Back in Britain he began researching the family’s early history. He went on courses to learn the research tools needed, became absorbed in new aspects of history, like the anti-Catholic riots of the mid 18th century which would have greeted the first Molteno to leave Italy and make a new life as a print seller in London. Then on to the story, 3 generations and 80 years later, of how a very young John Charles Molteno was sent to the Cape to make his own way after the death of his father – to eventually become the first prime minister of the Cape. Robert was fascinated by the way you could see reflected in this one family story so many wider historical trends, and he began to write their stories to show this …
And so emerged the idea of a book – a Family History, but set against the history of their times.
Once he got going, the story expanded, as family stories tend to. John Charles Molteno, like many Victorians, had a large family, and among his sons and daughters were some really remarkable people. Robert knew fragmentary stories about some of them, but the more he researched, the more remarkable they seemed. The Family Book now had potential chapters about many of them, which mirrored times of great change in South Africa’s wider history.
Our daughters and I could see that this book, if it ever happened, would be unmanageably voluminous, and persuaded him he should not wait for it to be finished but should set up a website where he could post things as he finished them. He was resistant, intimidated by technology, until May found him a young technical assistant, who helped him set up the website and sat with him patiently month after month as they imported his documents and thousands of collected photos onto it. Each time he would be enthused, determined to carry on – until his other work intervened. When he next wanted to work on the website, he had forgotten how to manage it. After a few frustrating weeks I would say, ‘Maybe you should have another session with Kate?’ and eventually they would be off again. His computer was old, had to be replaced, operating systems changed, and he was in repeated anxiety that everything would be lost. Then Kate would be summoned, and he could restart. But though he knew he had produced a wonderful resource, it felt impermanent. Only a book would do.
He produced chapters, and gave drafts to me and a few older relatives to read. Book shelves were reorganised to create space for the box files which appeared with drafts and notes for each chapter, 1 to 22. My granddaughter was once sleeping in a bunk bed we had fitted on top of his filing cabinets, and lay looking at the boxes. Next morning she asked, ‘What happened to Chapter 14?’ Missing! Chapter 14, it turned out, was going to highlight some of the most remarkable Molteno women of that generation, but then he decided it would show their impact better if he integrated them into the other chapters. ‘What happened to Chapter 14?’ became a joke between us, symbolising the eternally-evolving, never-ending nature of the project. Each time he went back to Cape Town to spend more hours in the archives, and travelled around the country to meet and re-meet his growing support-club of relatives, he came back re-invigorated, determined to prioritise ‘finishing The Book’. When he could carve out a few months to work on it, he was deeply absorbed, and happy. He had come to care about the people whose lives he was rediscovering as if they were alive and present.
At the age of 79 he died suddenly – the book still unfinished. Perhaps even if he had had more time he would have found it difficult to produce a book of manageable length, for that would have involved him leaving out much of what he had collected – and each one of the long-dead people he had come to know through his research had become real to him. He had entered into their struggles, been saddened at love affairs that went wrong, mourned their loss of dear ones, watched their passage from childhood to adulthood to old age.
At the time he died his legacy included:
- one entire wall of a bedroom filled, floor to ceiling, with chapter by chapter box files
- two filing cabinets of letters to and from Molteno’s of all ages across the world
- another wall length set of shelving with source material, including photocopies of material from archives, the pages of which he had meticulously tagged with protruding coloured stickers showing which chapter of the book each page related to.
It was a while before I could see a way forward to dealing with it. It felt a huge responsibility, not just to his work but to all the people whose lives he had been trying to capture, and all the scattered Molteno younger generation who might one day discover their own past through this. I talked to historian friends about possibly getting it archived in some library. Three younger Molteno’s offered to take over the website, and keep it live. A year later I recruited another of his nieces to help me sort through the boxes, and discard drafts of any material that was already on the website. The remaining files filled a large trunk – and at that point a wonderful thing happened. Robert’s cousin Selina Molteno offered to take the papers and see whether she could make a book from them. She was an ideal person to take it over. She had been hearing about the project from the start. She had introduced Robert to relatives, shared his interest and fuelled it with her own store of family stories. He enjoyed her vivid style of telling stories, and she has a facility to write as she speaks.
She soon came to the conclusion that out of all the material he had collected she would select just those chapters which focused on the individuals who had made a significant contribution to society in the Cape. In a remarkably short period of time she has put together an excellent book, The Molteno’s of the Cape, which has been published by UNISA in South Africa and the academic publisher Routledge in the UK, and launched in June 2025. Two chapters are contributed by other cousins: Robert had been delighted to find that Catherine Corder was researching the life of Betty Molteno, one of the most remarkable of an earlier generation, and always hoped that she would write the chapter about Betty for the book – which she has now done. And he would have been particularly grateful that Catherine’s husband Hugh has done what Robert himself intended to do but did not get to, and recorded the unique contribution of Robert’s father Donald. It is wonderful that this book will now be available for so many people to read.
Robert might have regretted the people Selina left out – but perhaps there will be another book, put together by others in the family. In any case, as an editor with long experience he would have appreciated the need for selection, and the focus she has given it accords with what motivated him to think of writing a book in the first place. It can be traced back to his admiration for the political and legal work of his father, Donald Molteno, and to the stories he had heard from Donald of earlier Molteno’s who had fought to protect the rights of all South Africans.
Robert said of himself that when he was a naive and idealistic young man he hoped one day to be able to make a contribution to building a new South Africa. The circumstances of his life took him elsewhere, contributing to other causes; and maturity brought not only more realism, but perhaps also made him unnecessarily humble about what he personally could do. It’s a source of deep satisfaction to me that the dedication, political understanding and empathy he put into this project is now coming home to South Africa, and will perhaps give a younger generation an insight into the lives and motivations of individuals in previous times, in one remarkable family.