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 land-base would be more suitable. They leased two isolated cottages on 5 acres (2.0 ha) 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 end of the 1960s John Seymour with other radical voices like Herbert Read, Edward Goldsmith and Fritz Schumacher provided a stream of articles for the journal Resurgence edited from 1966–1970 by John Papworth.
In 1964 the family moved to a farm near Newport in Pembrokeshire. The 1970s 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 far and wide.
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 continued 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.
John lived back on his old Pembrokeshire farm with his daughter's family for the last years of his life. He died there on 14 September 2004 and was buried in the top field in an orchard that he had planted.
Read more about this topic: John Seymour (author)