German prisoners of war who had still not returned home, he started writing and broadcasting on the BBC Home Service. He travelled overland to India for the BBC, gaining experience of the Subsistence agriculture still common in eastern Europe and Asia. His experiences on that 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, 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 of land near Orford in Suffolk. These 5-acres are still called Seymour's Bit by the current owner. The manner in which they developed self-sufficiency on this smallholding is recounted in The Fat of the Land (1961). At the end of the 1960s, Seymour, along with other radical voices like Herbert Read, Edward Goldsmith, Leopold Kohr and Fritz Schumacher, provided a stream of articles for the journal Resurgence edited from 1966 to 1970 by John Papworth. In 1964 the family moved to a farm near Newport, Pembrokeshire. The 1970s saw Seymour's publication rate reach its peak. In 1973 John and Sally wrote Self-Sufficiency and in 1976 The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was published. Appearing shortly after the publication of E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) and The Good Life's first showing on British television (1975), the sales of the 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. In addition to self-sufficiency he wrote four guide books in the Companion Guide series. John also made many television programmes: an early series followed the footsteps of George Borrow's Wild Wales (1862). In the early 1980s 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 smallholder's life, a project which continued when he moved to County Wexford in Ireland. Here in 1999 he was taken to court for destroying a crop of GM sugar beet. For the last years of his