Mark Purdey - Personal Life

Personal Life

Purdey was born in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, to what The Daily Telegraph describes as a "long line of gifted eccentrics." The Telegraph reports that an ancestor of his reportedly walked from Inverness to London to set up Purdey's gunsmiths, and that, after suffering shell shock during the First World War, his grandfather, Lionel Purdey, lobbied Lord Kitchener to recognize shell shock as an illness that needed treatment.

He was educated at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire, but was reportedly expelled after his A-levels. He turned down a place at London University to study zoology and psychology and, according to The Guardian, "embarked on a kind of post-hippie bucolic existence."

In his mid-twenties, he set up an organic dairy farm, first in Ireland, and later in Pembrokeshire, on which he bred a herd of pedigree Jersey cattle. He wrote on his website that he introduced semen from New Zealand, Denmark, and Canada, in order to produce a "high fat, high yielding, pasture-fed Jersey cow" with an ability to produce milk from a "self-sufficient arable/legume-grass rotational system with minimal reliance upon purchased in concentrate feed." In 1997, one of his cows was the highest yielding Jersey cow in the UK, with 10,150-litre lactation, after she had been sold to a conventional farm. He is reported to have enjoyed playing the saxophone to his cows to keep them calm.

He married Carol MacDonald in 1974, a marriage that produced a son and a daughter. When that relationship broke up, he set up home with Margaret Unwin, with whom he had four daughters and two sons. They married one year before his death. He died of a brain tumour on November 12, 2006 on his farm in Elworthy, West Somerset.