Gaston Thomas Thornicroft was a leader of the Coloured (mixed-race) community in Southern Rhodesia from the 1930s to the 1960s.
His father was Harry Scott Thornicroft, a British colonial administrator, who married a native African woman.
[1] Gaston was president of two groups advocating rights for Coloureds: the Coloured Community Service League from 1933,[2] and the Rhodesia National Association from 1952 until it was eclipsed in the early 1960s by more radical black unity groups.
[4] Initially, he emphasised the Coloured community's separateness from and superiority to black Africans,[5] but later he was sympathetic to the non-white unity movement, without ever formally joining it.
[8] He represented "Coloured & Eurafrican Communities" at the 1961 Southern Rhodesia constitutional talks.