Early Life
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 led 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: as a farmhand and then manager of a sheep farm, a deckhand and skipper of a fishing boat operating from Namibia (then South-West Africa), a copper mine worker in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) and for the government veterinary service. Whilst in Africa he spent some time with bushmen where he gained friendship and an insight into the life of hunter gatherers.
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