John Seymour (author) - 1939 To 1951

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.

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 Asia. His experiences on this journey led to his first book, The Hard Way to India, published in 1951.