Dorothy Clutterbuck

Dorothy Clutterbuck (19 January 1880 – 12 January 1951), was a wealthy Englishwoman who was named by Gerald Gardner as a leading member of the New Forest coven, a group of pagan Witches into which Gardner claimed to have been initiated in 1939. She has therefore become a figure of some significance in the history of Wicca.

Clutterbuck was a practising Anglican Christian, and never publicly identified herself as a witch. Researchers have debated whether the surviving evidence of her own writings indicates that she had unconventional religious leanings.

Clutterbuck was born in British India, and was the daughter of Thomas St. Quentin Clutterbuck, a British army officer. After her father's retirement, she appears to have moved back to England and to have lived with him in the Christchurch area of the New Forest in southern England. After her father's death, she continued to live in the same house alone, but at the age of 55 she married Rupert Fordham, a local Justice of the Peace who was of high rank in the Salvation Army. Fordham died in May 1939 in a car accident.

Clutterbuck appears to have been an outwardly respectable member of the local community, a supporter of the Conservative Party and the Church of England. She left a sizeable legacy to the local Anglican priest in her will. Her estate was valued at £60,000, a very large sum for the time. The one scandal attached to her was an allegation that Rupert Fordham was already married to a mentally ill woman, so that the two were not legally married. Clutterbuck had reverted to her maiden name by the time of her death.

After her death in 1951, Clutterbuck was identified by Gerald Gardner as a leading member of the New Forest coven of witches into which he claimed to have been initiated in September 1939. Gardner referred to her only as "Old Dorothy" in his publications, but gave her full name to personal acquaintances. Gardner's statements were interpreted by his pupil Doreen Valiente as implying that Clutterbuck had personally initiated him into the coven, but later authors such as Philip Heselton and Eleanor Bone claim that his initiator was in fact Edith Woodford-Grimes. Some writers, such as historian Jeffrey Russell, suggested that "Old Dorothy" had been invented by Gardner, but Valiente, knowing her full name, obtained her birth, marriage and death certificates and published a basic outline of her life in 1985 to prove that she really existed.

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