John Seymour

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John Seymour

John Seymour (12 June 1914 – 14 September 2004) was an influential figure in the self-sufficiency movement. Precise categorisation is difficult: he was a writer, broadcaster, environmentalist, smallholder and activist; a rebel against: consumerisation, industrialisation, genetically modified organisms, cities, motor cars; and an advocate for: self-reliance, personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, conviviality (food, drink, dancing and singing), gardening, caring for the Earth and for the soil.

John Seymour was born in London, England; his father died when he was very young, his mother remarried and the family moved to Frinton-on-Sea in north-east Essex. A fashionable seaside town with a golf club, a tennis club and a population of 2,000 might seem an unlikely place to develop Seymour’s later philosophy of life. It was however surrounded by agricultural land, where the horse was king; the sea was on his doorstep, there were quiet backwaters where he could learn to sail within a couple of miles of his home. The life lead by those on the land and in small boats would have laid a foundation for his later vision of a simple cottage economy with farming and fishing providing the essentials of life.

After schooling in England and Switzerland Seymour studied agriculture at Wye College, which was then a school of the University of London.

In 1934, at the age of 20, he went to Southern Africa where his wish to experience life took him in through a succession of jobs. In the Karoo as a farmhand and then manager of a sheep farm; from Walvis Bay in South-West Africa (now Namibia) as a deckhand, later as a skipper, on fishing boats; in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in copper mines as a trainee mining engineer; later working for the Northern Rhodesia Veterinary Service as a livestock officer; making a game survey of the Luangwa River valley for the Game Department. Whilst in Africa he spent some time with bushmen where he gained friendship and an insight into the life of hunter gatherers.

1939 to 1951

At the start of World War II in 1939 John Seymour travelled to Kenya where he enlisted in the Kenya Regiment and was posted to the King’s African Rifles, a colonial regiment of the British army with white officers. He fought with them against Italy in the Abyssinian Campaign in Ethiopia. After defeating the Italians the regiment was posted to Sri Lanka (then a British colony called Ceylon) and afterwards to Burma where allied forces were fighting against Japan. For Seymour the war ended on a low note, he expressed his disgust when the Allies used fission bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

John Seymour

On arrival in Britain after the war Seymour worked for a while on a Thames sailing barge, these traditional craft were still operating around the south and east coasts of England, here he picked up the folk songs of a disappearing occupation. After working as a civil servant (labour officer for the Agricultural Committee) finding agricultural work for German prisoners of war (some had still not returned home in 1950) he found an opening into broadcasting when he created a series of short programmes on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), speaking on subjects that interested him. He then travelled overland to India for the BBC gaining experience of the subsistence farming still common in eastern Europe and the Asia. His experiences on this journey led to his first book The Hard Way to India, published in 1951.

The Smallholdings

Seymour was living aboard a Dutch sailing smack when he married Sally Medworth, an Australian potter and artist, in 1954. In this they travelled around the waterways and rivers of England and Holland, journeys later described in Sailing through England. As their first daughter grew older they felt that a landbase would be more suitable. They leased two isolated cottages on 5 acres (2 hectares) of land near Orford in Suffolk. The manner in which they fell into self-sufficiency on this smallholding is recounted in The Fat of the Land (1961).

At the beginning of the 1970s the family moved to a farm near Newport in Pembrokeshire. This decade saw Seymour’s publication rate reach a maximum, In 1976 The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was published, a guide for real and dreaming downshifters. Published shortly after E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – a study of economics as if people mattered (1973) and, more mundanely, The Good Life’s first showing on British television (1975), the sales of the new book exceeded all expectations. It was also set to establish the reputation of two young publishers, Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley who had commissioned and edited the work. His writing was not restricted to self-sufficiency: he wrote four guide books in the Companion Guide series and was now being asked to speak of his vision at conferences.

In the 1970s and 1980s he was also making television programmes: an early series followed the footsteps of George Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862), later he spent three years making the BBC series Far From Paradise (with Herbert Girardet) which examined the history of human impact on the environment.

His farm in Wales welcomed visitors seeking guidance on the smallholders life a project which expanded to the School for Self-Sufficiency when he moved to County Wexford in Ireland during the 1980s. Here in 1999 he was taken to court for damaging a crop of GM sugar beet.