Robin Mills went to Cattistock, West Dorset, to meet Merrily Harpur. This is her story.

“My upbringing was in Surrey, although I was born in Buckinghamshire. All the while I lived in Surrey, I was wishing I lived in Dorset, and it’s taken me this long to get here. My father was youngest son of a rector of the Church of Ireland, from County Laois in the Republic of Ireland. He came to England after his education, and was working in newspapers when he met my mother. She was from a Scottish/English family who had been living in France, so they both had a slightly foreign take on England, and although they were very English in their attitudes they perhaps considered themselves a bit foreign. I think that might have rubbed off on us, especially as my mother, who was a witty person, found the English very funny. I have three brothers and they are all very droll in different ways—tremendous company.

I went to boarding school, Headington School, in Oxford. Oxford’s an interesting place to be at school; there are undergraduates everywhere which is just the job if you’re a certain age. I didn’t know whether to go to Art School, or to university to read English which was the other great interest of my life. In the end I chose the latter, because I thought I’d never get round to reading Anglo-Saxon unless I was forced to. I went to Trinity College, Dublin, got a degree in English, and set about trying to live by my wits. I had made a vow to myself, which was that I would never have to set my alarm to make myself get out of bed, ever again, and I don’t think I ever have. It comes from a horror of having to be constrained by anyone else’s timetable, but if I give the impression of being slothful and unreliable I’m certainly not: I get up at 5.30am every morning, and I think that’s because I don’t have an alarm—I get up just dying to start the day.

So I’ve always been self employed; I started off as an apprentice picture restorer, living in a farmhouse in Herefordshire with various artists and craftspeople. About that time I began to get into cartoons. I’ve always had a feeling I could draw cartoons, even at school, and that I could make them funnier than the ones I saw in newspapers. Then I got an agent, and that made a huge difference. They force you to produce a huge amount of work, very quickly, on typing paper, and none of these beautifully crafted images I used to do sitting at a table. And then I suppose my little vow of never having to undergo formal constraints rather went out of the window, because I had to reel off all these cartoons, rather like having to do an exam every day. If you’re working for a newspaper you have to produce a cartoon by say 2.00pm on Friday or else forget it, and you have to produce four or five different ones because the editor chooses the one he thinks is funniest, and you’ve maybe only started that morning.  Luckily I’m quite good at exams.

Getting into cartoons was actually brilliant, especially as it was during the 1980s which was the absolute heyday for cartoons. Most of the magazines had cartoons, and I had a double page spread to myself in Punch every week, when Alan Coren was editor. I was lucky enough to surf that wave in the 1980s, coinciding with the success of  Steadman, Trog, McLachlan, John Glashan and Michael Heath, wonderful cartoonists, when having great cartoons in a magazine seemed to be the coolest thing. Anyway, I moved to London and became—what seemed to me then—rich and famous. My work was based on social satire, and I worked for the broadsheet papers, mostly the Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph. Mac’s cartoon was on the front of the Sunday Telegraph, and I was on the back, quite annoying really, but he is the best pocket cartoonist. I’ve had several strip cartoons running in newspapers, and they’ve always been on the same subject, which is about London people who move to the country. The idea was to satirise both the London people and the country, so I had a lot of fun at the expense of people who live in “Ye Olde Pigsty”, etc. These days there’s a bit of a dearth of good satire, especially political.

At about this time I learned to fish, thanks to a keen salmon-fishing boyfriend. We used to go to Scotland two or three times a year, but these days I love trout fishing—it’s more skilful—and I’ve been a member of the Dorchester Fishing Club for 12 years. It’s a life support system for me, and it’s what I do in the summer when I’m not painting.

I then found I was actually in a position to sell my flat in London, pay off the mortgage, and buy a house in Ireland. So I moved to South West Cork, the Mizen Peninsula, my idea of heaven because of its remoteness and beauty. I could do that because the fax machine had been invented, and that meant I could still produce the work, while enjoying the blissful freedom of living where I liked. Later of course came email, which was even better. Originally I would drive to the offices of the paper in Fleet Street and put the cartoon on the editor’s desk, so I was one of the first people to have a fax machine, even before the Guardian had one.

South West Cork contained quite a lot of English, Germans, and Dutch people, and after a while I thought I’d prefer a more undiscovered part—the Ireland I remembered from family holidays when I was a child. So I bought a sort of hovel in County Roscommon, in the middle of Ireland, the nearest town being Strokestown which is a delightful backwater. That was marvellous, and I got to know all my neighbours who said I was the first “blow-in” they’d had living there. The local postman was a chap called Pat Compton, who said what we really need is a festival. So we cooked up the idea of Strokestown International Poetry Festival, and I was the first director, a kind of founding mother. And I run it to this day. It’s tremendous fun, and keeps me in touch with Ireland.

In the early 1980s I became very intrigued with the idea that there were big cats roaming the countryside, and started to do research. Perhaps the seeds of my interest were sown by what was known as “The Surrey Puma” which provoked many fruitless police hunts there when I was a child in the 1960s. It’s a very puzzling idea, and one of those that becomes more puzzling the more you know about it. Dorset’s a bit of a hot spot for big cats, although sightings have been recorded in every county. In my earliest research I tried going out looking for them, but quickly cottoned on to how hopeless that was; you are more likely to come across one completely by chance. In fact I’ve written two books on the subject, and could for all I know be a world authority, but the fact remains I’ve never actually seen one. There are many mysteries—you never find one dead beside the road, 85% of them are black, there are no spotted ones; all these anomalies, and yet the sightings are by completely reliable people like farmers and gamekeepers who know very well what they’re looking at. I thought the first book would take me 6 months to write, but there was so much to get my head round, it actually took 6 years. And my head’s still not round it. I do talks on big cat sightings, and I also do talks on hunting; the anthropological and philosophical aspects of it, its history and mystery.

After my mother died my brother and I moved to Dorset. She had been living in Wiltshire, so I’d got to know Dorset a bit more through visiting her. West Dorset’s really an earthly paradise, and no one who lives here, myself more than most, ever stops congratulating themselves on living here, rather smugly. About 4 years ago I sold my place in Cork and bought my cottage here in this wonderful village. I’m still doing one cartoon a week for the London Evening Standard, which is a very welcome bit of regular income, but for the last two or three years I’ve been painting full-time, every day. In fact if there’s a day when I can’t paint I feel quite uneasy. And it’s been brilliant because the work has sold well—about 90% sold in my first Dorset Art Weeks—which has spurred me on even more. I’ve had a lot of help from the other artists here in the village. We sometimes call ourselves, rather cheekily, ‘Tate Cattistock’ ”.

Robin Mills went to Bridport to meet Alan Heeks. This is his story.

“I was actually born in Bournemouth, which was Hampshire in those days, but my mother’s side of the family was very West Dorset. Grandfather was called Robert Wakeley, and he came from Loders, and then moved to Bournemouth. Mother’s mother was a Dashwood, from Piddletrenthide. So having finally moved to West Dorset only a couple of years ago, it’s been like coming home because this is definitely where my roots are.

At school I loved English Literature, and went on to university at Oxford to study it. At university I’d enjoyed promoting functions like exhibitions and theatrical events, so when I’d finished I decided I’d go into marketing, and got a graduate trainee job with Procter and Gamble. I went straight into work, no gap year, from Oxford to work in Newcastle upon Tyne, and I still have mixed feelings about that move. It was quite a shock, going from a free-and-easy Oxford student life immersed in literature and philosophy to a hard-nosed, structured business world. The company operated like a machine, which from the word go raised the question with me about how to bring about human fulfilment in work, and still make a business profitable. In a sense that was quite a fruitful shock for me, because that was a question that has stayed with me ever since, and once I become passionate about something, I stay with it. That marketing job was also hugely beneficial, in that I have been able to apply the same methodology to non-profit ventures I’ve undertaken in later life.

I spent four years with Procter and Gamble, and although I progressed in the company, it was clear the work wasn’t for me. I’d met my wife in Oxford, married in Newcastle, so I took the gap year then, and we travelled in Africa and Asia. Then I got a scholarship to go to America and study for an MBA at Harvard, where there was research into human fulfilment within working life. When I came back from the States, I got a job in Merseyside, as marketing manager of Hygena Kitchens; then I became a founder member of a group called Caradon, and worked as the managing director of  the largest subsidiary, Twyfords Bathrooms. During the four years I was there as MD I was able to put into practice some of my ideas about improving human fulfilment, as well as the business results. One of my favourite films is the Ealing comedy I’m All Right Jack, and this company was straight out of the film. There were five dining rooms, each for different levels of staff within the company from the directors down to the ‘peasants’, and basically the workers had never seen, or met, the management. So I introduced a single canteen where everyone ate, and regular meetings between management and staff in which eventually all 1600 staff got to meet and talk to everyone in management, and once it was clear we were genuine, everyone went along with it, results improved, and more importantly morale improved as well.

After four years, I was ready for a major change. I was 40, had been working incredibly hard, and was missing out on family life; I was worried about what sort of life I was bringing my kids into. So, I gave back the Jaguar XJ6, gave up the big office and full-time secretary, and set myself up as a management consultant and trainer. However, as well as the consultancy work, since 1990 I’ve been involved with creating non-profit ventures. The thread of these has been what could be called land based sustainable education, using some sort of project which gets people into closer contact with nature, with two aims; to bring about not only better understanding of environmental sustainability, but also human sustainability. I firmly believe that the same principles apply to both; I think many people are being factory farmed in their working life, in the same way that the natural environment is.

When I left my business career behind in 1990, I already had a vision of these ideas; meeting some visionary and like-minded Dorset people, like Mark Measures, and Will Best, helped me put things into practice quite quickly. I never had any doubts about establishing this project in Dorset, because there do seem to be more inspiring and innovative people here, and pioneering centres like Pilsdon, Monkton Wyld and Othona have suceeded. We formed a charity and bought a run-down 130 acre beef farm on the Somerset/Dorset border, called Magdalen Farm, with a courtyard of buildings that lent themselves to conversion into a residential centre.

In one sense it was a crazy idea for me; I had no background in farming, running a charity, or education, but I had the time and the commitment. Also, the Harvard training does teach you to be a business paratrooper, to land in unknown territory and find the right people to provide the expertise. Over the first few years we learned as we went, and experimented a lot. We converted the farm to organic, evolved curriculum-based education for school children in a residential setting, with added personal and social education—things like trust games, night walks, learning about food and farming, the differences between organic and conventional. The Magdalen Project is still going strong, 21 years later.

From the experience of creating the Magdalen Project, I realised that organic farming was actually the model I had been looking for in my search for human fulfilment within the workplace, so I started to run business training workshops at the farm, using organic farming techniques as examples of sustainable production which people could apply their own businesses. In 2000 my first book was published, The Natural Advantage: Renewing Yourself, which I wrote both for individuals and business organisations.

I had been thinking a lot about what I call the next level of sustainability. There is a limit to how much energy consumption we can reduce in our homes with technical solutions like double glazing and insulation in our lofts. Food and travel accounts for more than half the average household’s energy consumption, and whilst I was interested in sustainable building, I was also concerned with human sustainability in a community sense; my marriage had by now broken up and I was living on my own. In about 2002, I found out about cohousing, a well-established concept in Scandinavia, although quite new here. It’s based on small self-contained dwellings, so everyone has their own front door and their own space, but there are shared facilities like a garden courtyard where people can easily meet and chat. There is also a common house, a bit like a village hall, in which there can be shared meals, parties, meetings, film shows, etc.

It can meet the needs of people who are very sociable as well as those who aren’t, unlike a commune. I formed a group of interested people, and in 2004, the project came about in North Dorset, called the Threshold Centre, near Gillingham. It’s the first project of its kind in the UK done in cooperation with a housing association, so half of the properties are affordable, and it’s successfully demonstrating ideas of lifestyle sustainability, with its own one acre community garden growing food for the householders, and a pool car and ride-sharing. I’m also very proud of the fact that the ecological footprint per household has been measured at half the UK average, despite its rural situation and poor public transport service. There are 14 households, with young families, older people, and a wide range of social backgrounds.

I always intended this to be a stepping stone for a bigger project, one in West Dorset, so in 2009 I began to look for local people to put together something similar in Bridport. By now we have 24 members, and we are working with the same Housing Association as at Gillingham who will act as the developer, so that at least 40% of the properties will be affordable to people on the Housing Register. The District Council is now open to innovative forms of affordable housing, and we’re hoping to submit a planning application within the next year for 30 dwellings, which means that we’re still looking for more members to join.

One of the things I’ve been involved with over the last 15 years or so has been men’s groups, and this relates to the second book I’m writing. When my marriage broke up, the best support I had came from a men’s group. I’m particularly interested in men over 50, who these days, possibly up to age 80, often have quite good health, have more time, enough money, and opportunity, but can suffer from loneliness, depression and addictions, because they need the life skills to deal with the ‘shipwrecks’ that often occur at this time. So I’ve set up a website and a blog to help men in this situation, and I’m working with a retired GP from Maiden Newton, Max Mackay-James, to offer resources to men in this age group. Perhaps men aren’t good at collaborating; it’s been said that men get to know each other shoulder to shoulder, not face to face.”