“I was born in Bristol but when I was eight we moved to Castle Cary. I’ve always thought of myself as a South Somerset man. We used to go to Yeovil to see the optician or to go to the cinema. On rare occasions we’d go back to Bristol or cross the county line to Sherborne, in Dorset, to buy school uniforms. I went to school at Hazlegrove House in Sparkford and then to Kings School, Bruton. I felt just as much at home in Dorset as in Somerset, as we’d often go on day trips and outings to Weymouth or West Bay.

It seems I did quite well at school and it seemed logical to try to get into university. There was one particular English teacher who saw potential in me, although I don’t think I realised that potential until after A Levels. After university I went to London. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I was interested in filmmaking but it was very difficult to get into the industry in those days. I thought of joining the BBC or the British Council (because I wanted to travel), but instead I went to Greece and taught English for a year in Corfu, where I met my wife, Maria. I then returned to study filmmaking at Bristol University. In August 1969 I got married and was employed by the British Council, where I was given additional training in educational television and film production.

My first posting was to Ethiopia, as a producer of television programmes, a British aid and technical assistance project. It was widely believed that the media could make up for the shortage of teachers, not just to teach the children, but that you could, in the process, actually train many hundreds of teachers. I also shot some film of the famine at that time, and when it was shown on schools TV in Addis, children and parents were asking ‘what are we going to do about it’. It was only later when Jonathan Dimbleby made his documentary, The Unknown Famine, that the rest of the world saw what was going on. So I was there at the beginning of the revolution, when Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown and we had the Derg ― the provisional military government. It quickly became difficult to operate. The Ethiopians suffered what was called the White Terror and Red Terror. People started killing each other on the streets, settling old scores. I spent five years there and then I went to Nairobi and did a similar job, seconded to the Voice of Kenya and the Institute of Mass Communication. We made 16mm films about modern methods of teaching science and other subjects, and training new Kenyan staff at the same time.

After Nairobi I went back to London as a media consultant and editor of a journal called ‘Educational Broadcasting International’. I travelled to places like Ghana and Singapore, running courses in filmmaking for development purposes. In 1980 I was offered the job of British Council Regional Director for Northern Greece. We had a large cultural and English teaching institute in Thessaloniki. The role involved a mixture of cultural relations work, arts and staff management. One evening our building was bombed. We were actually showing Death on the Nile. Somebody must have put a bomb in the dustbin outside the library. Luckily nobody was killed. It was never clear who did it. We must have seemed a soft British target. Two years later one of my friends was assassinated in Athens. He was the Deputy Director; he was going home at lunchtime, and he’d given a lift to one of the Greek librarians. He was shot through the head when stopped at a traffic light and the bullet killed the librarian too. For many months my wife, children and I were given police escorts armed with machine-guns.

For a while, life seemed as insecure as it had been in Africa, where we had barred windows, to deter thieves from breaking in. During the early days of the Ethiopian Revolution we woke up to the sound of volleys of rocks being hurled onto our tin roof ― very disorientating with a young baby in the house.

In 1986 I went to Czechoslovakia as Director of the British Council/ Cultural Attaché. There, the Secret Police ― the StB ― took a much greater interest than I appreciated. Almost every place I went they were recording and following me. Some days, I was to learn, as many as 27 different cars and agents followed me, swapping over every ten minutes. Many years later, after the fall of Communism, I was given access to the StB files and there were about 1400 pages of reports on me. What a waste of effort! I was just a very straightforward British Council cultural relations worker. I’ve written a book about it but it’s not been published yet. It’s provisionally called The Secret Journals of the Poets’ Revolution. Unfortunately I missed much of the Velvet Revolution as my posting came to an end and I was on a three-month research trip around Eastern Europe when it all started unravelling. I was back in Prague for some key events, and I did watch the Berlin wall come down in November ’89, from my East German hotel room.

I was touring Yugoslavia when things were beginning to heat up there; I interviewed people who were predicting violence. Back in London, I became Head of the East and Central Europe Department and Deputy Head of Europe Division. For nearly three years I had various HQ policy roles, which, at a time when it seemed as if there was a revolution happening every five minutes, with many new building projects, it was a highly pressured, very busy job – and in the days before we even had computers and email. I went to Moscow, Ukraine, Georgia and many parts of the region. It was interesting to be at the centre of it all when these changes and revolutions were happening or just stirring. I went to Albania before we had diplomatic relations with Tirana.

Every posting was like a totally different life. I then spent seven years in Australia and had a leading role in developing and managing the British Government’s first big international campaign ‘newIMAGES’ – which set out to try and modernise the whole bilateral relationship across the board, between Britain and Australia. After that I was posted to Sweden ― so from Sydney to Stockholm ― both beautiful cities by the water, but they couldn’t be more different.

Throughout my career I’ve helped promote the arts, theatre, literature, classical orchestras etc. I’m quite eclectic in my tastes, but I think I always loved rock and roll from the early days of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. I remember buying an early 78 of Elvis’ Blue Suede Shoes in a shop in Bristol where they had these little listening booths. I was absolutely hooked from about the age of twelve. At Hazlegrove we even formed a trio called the ‘Hazlegrove Hepcats.’ By the time I went to Oxford I’d already started collecting blues records by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Howlin’ Wolf. I did some backstage interviews for ISIS, the university magazine, at the American Blues Festivals. I met Howlin’ Wolf and Sleepy John Estes and then, when I made a film in 1964, I managed to interest John Lee Hooker in recording the blues soundtrack I’d written for the film. I’m not a trained musician. I do play some raw, basic blues. It would be generous to say that ‘the lad’s got the soul, if not much technique!’ I’m better on the blues-harp.

I did record my own CD at the Sun Studios in Memphis. The studio wasn’t exactly as it had been in the ‘50s, but it still makes recordings. I recorded there on the 50th anniversary of what many consider the true birth of rock ‘n’ roll, exactly 50 years to the day since Elvis had made That’s Alright, Mama in that same studio. I felt that the spirits that had been there at that historic moment were in there with me. I included my version on the disc and all the songs were a tribute to all the old blues singers who’d recorded for Sam Phillips before he discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Johnny Cash. It was a heartfelt tribute to rockabilly blues, and, for me, it had a very meaningful sense of musical history. Another kind of revolution.

The poet Michael Rosen once played a track from the CD (On the Memphis Road!) on the BBC’s Home Truths in 2005. On the same programme, a week earlier, he’d made the comment about me (as a student at Oxford), that ‘at the touch of a plectrum Jim could transform himself into a Mississippi Delta blues-singer’. Perhaps we’re all capable of many types of self-transformation.

I still keep pretty busy. We’re at the shortlisting stage of a Dorset poetry, prose and photography book project, Dorset Voices, due to be published in 2012 by Roving Press. I recently performed in a blues and gospel-blues concert, part of a music and arts festival hosted by the Anglican Church in Corfu. My wife Maria’s novel, The Cat of Portovecchio, Corfu Tales has recently been published in Greek translation. My most recent publication, The Ionian Islands and Epirus, A Cultural History (Signal Books) was the outcome of years of research. We are both currently engaged in research for new books.”

“I can remember wartime as a very small child, seeing my mother in a tin hat going off on her bike to do ARP work. My father worked in the War Ministry reinstating the gas lighting in places that had been bombed, like Coventry. At night I watched Very lights and tracer bullets on the nearby firing range; the front garden was dug up to grow vegetables. I used to be in Sunday School Nativity plays, progressing from being a white angel to a pink one, which meant you could be part of the Shining Throng, although I never got to be the gold angel, Gabriel. I think the dramatic setting of those plays, the darkened church with the tableau magically illuminated, and the inevitable hilarious moments, was probably the beginning of my love of theatre.

We lived in a small village in Bedfordshire, in John Bunyan country, and my father would take us, my brother and sister and me, looking for orchids on the chalk downs of the Chilterns, the kind of experience which I think is at the heart of my love of the countryside. The only way I excelled myself at school was in drama, and once had to perform a piece in front of the whole school; my horrible maths teacher, who invariably made at least one girl cry every day in class, said sarcastically ‘I had no idea we had such talent in our midst’. I still panic with numbers.

Although I wanted to pursue an acting career, my father sent me to a technical college to do combined sciences, because he thought I should become a vet. I was completely out of my depth and finally rebelled. My mother convinced my father that I’d resent him for ever if I didn’t get the chance to try for an acting career, and I was allowed to audition for RADA, but failed to get in and was advised to ‘get more life experience’. I worked on a smallholding for a year, tending pigs and chickens, exercising a point-to-pointer and milking a cow.

I auditioned again at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and was accepted. There, I was told I needed a professional name, so I chose my mother’s family name, Lansbury; her grandfather was the Christian Socialist politician and pacifist George Lansbury. Another granddaughter is Angela Lansbury. Many of my contemporaries at Drama School are still working actors, the most well known being Julie Christie. My first job was with the Royal Court Theatre, in a play starring Rex Harrison; Donald Sutherland had a small part in it as a reporter. I had my 21st birthday when we went on tour to the Edinburgh Festival which was brilliant. Afterwards, I took over a part in The Kitchen, by Arnold Wesker. Amongst the cast were Jeremy Brett, James Bolam, Edward Fox and Glenda Jackson. Then I joined the 1962 Keswick Summer Season weekly rep, with the Blue Box Theatre, which was a truly portable theatre, complete with tip-up seats, a box office, foyer, stage and dressing rooms. We lived in caravans and there was a mobile dining room and bathroom, but you had to light a fire to heat the water when you wanted a bath.

Having met my husband to be, I came back to London and started working in TV including a ‘Monitor’ documentary about D.H. Lawrence. When my boys were toddlers, I appeared with them in Z Cars. I have been in several detective series: a P.D. James, Morse, two Ruth Rendells, Bergerac, The Chief, and Sherlock Holmes. I have only been in two films. Blink and you’ll miss me as the magistrate in A Fish Called Wanda, but you can’t miss me in Ever After as I am there throughout in a quaint, mediaeval hat. The film starred Drew Barrymore and Angelica Houston.

In ’65 I was in the opening season of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, and played Katya in A Month in the Country, with Ingrid Bergman and Sir Michael Redgrave, which later transferred to the West End. From there I joined the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic led by Sir Laurence Olivier. Many young actors in my group are now stars; Anthony Hopkins, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi amongst others. I had only a tiny part in A Dance of Death, with Laurence Olivier and Geraldine McEwan, but the rehearsals were really electrifying, watching the play develop through highly experienced players.

After I left the National I was cast as Charlotte Lucas in a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Then I became seriously ill and had a 3 month run appearing in an operating theatre. My wonderful parents looked after my two boys and helped me to recover. Fortunately, more TV followed and I came to Dorset for the first time, on location at Melbury House, Evershot in another BBC Classic Daniel Deronda. As Catherine Arrowpoint, I had to be trained by the Beaminster Bowmen to compete in an archery contest.

I was unhappy being away from my children so often, so I changed career, trained as a teacher, and taught in a Primary school for three years. My concerns for what was happening to the countryside were growing, with wildlife and their habitats disappearing. I reintroduced nature walks, but with health and safety issues they became impossible.

We had come to Seatown on holiday every year since the filming so I came to Dorset for a fresh start after my marriage failed. I started as a supply teacher, but had more offers of TV work, including parts in I Claudius and the Duchess of Duke Street. Eventually the acting had to give way to a permanent teaching commitment. I was asked to teach drama to the older pupils, some of whom found it a bit strange, ‘all that ponceing around on the stage, Miss’, but they were very forgiving and did try to understand the purpose of Drama lessons.

Ann Jellicoe’s first community play opened at Woodroffe School where my boys were, and I thought it completely marvellous. I met Ann and we worked together on the Axe Vale play, a joyful piece called The Tide. Ann asked me to join her on a permanent basis producing The Poor Man’s Friend at Bridport, and that enabled me to leave teaching and gave me a re-entry into the acting profession.

In 1985, after 2 years with an excellent Theatre in Education company in Nottingham, an actress I knew from Somerset wanted to start a theatre company. We co-founded and ran the Somerset and Dorset Theatre Company for 7 years. We were a professional company inviting established actors to join us, our aim being to take theatre to places other companies didn’t visit and performed in theatres, Arts Centres, village halls, hotels, stately homes, schools, a prison, playgroups, and on a steam train.

To me, the two most important things in life are children and the environment, because without a sustainable environment, our children have no future. I’ve been a speaker for Save the Children and support Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. In ‘82 I joined with others to save some ancient trees on Lambert’s Castle, and later, we formed the West Dorset Safe Energy Campaign and held two exhibitions demonstrating alternative sources of energy such as wind and wave power. We fought the proposal to build a nuclear power station at Langton Herring. Hard to believe now, but there would have been a view from the top of Abbotsbury Hill, past St Catherine’s chapel, to a nuclear power station beside the Fleet had it succeeded. We held a huge picnic there and released balloons to show how far any fallout would drift – the winning balloon reached Southern Germany. People forget or ignore the fact that nuclear waste has a half life of 48,000 years. I’ve always campaigned against nuclear weapons, joined the early Aldermaston marches, and in 1981, helped to form Bridport and West Dorset CND, after showing the banned film The War Game to a packed Bridport Arts Centre. We took coach loads of local supporters to national demonstrations and at Greenham Common we were some of the first campaigners to enter the air base, dressed as waiters and waitresses offering Peace Pies to the guards.

I still try to ‘do my bit’ for the community and have been a Parish Councillor since 1993. I was a founder member of the Chideock Society and in 2000, with my partner, Anthony Broad, compiled A Wander Through Chideock, an illustrated history of the village. Eight years ago I helped start and run The Bopper Bus, a leisure bus for children in and around the Marshwood Vale, which is still going strong.

Recently, I have had some very scary health problems which have clipped my wings and made me take stock of my life. I am extremely fortunate to have enjoyed both my chosen careers, to live in the most beautiful place I know, to have a wonderful partner, two talented musician sons, 6 beautiful grandchildren, 4 gorgeous great grandchildren, loyal friends and a dog who makes me laugh every day. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“I was born in Portsmouth, a navy brat. But we never had exotic postings, we always ended up in places like Plymouth and Faslane in Scotland. I did spend a lot of time in Weymouth as a youngster. I remember Weymouth very distinctly as a summer place with peeling paint and windswept sand blown streets My mother was German born, married my father after the war, he was a Yorkshire man. And in deference to her continental background, he would let her keep the rural Germanic traditions in the house. We celebrated Christmas Eve, for instance. Food wise, my dad had grown up with a very austere Yorkshire kind of diet. He quite welcomed the flamboyant variety of food that he was not used to. So I grew up taking a lunch box to school with things like rye bread with cream cheese and salami and a gherkin, which got a lot of strange looks from people who had a jam sandwich and a cold sausage.

After that I went to Scotland. My dad helped build Dreadnought, England’s first nuclear sub. We lived in a small cottage where we ate very much the Scottish traditions of sausage and soda farls and all these other delicacies. But my greatest food memory, certainly from that era, was when my dad was doing torpedo trials. We lived with a Scottish lady who would always give us venison and that was my first taste of venison. I suspect it was poached because a man came to the door with a brown paper parcel under each arm and I think a sixpence or a shilling, passed between them. And my father asked the lady after a while, what was in the other parcel. She eventually admitted it was salmon and when my father asked if we could have some she said, “Commander, fish is not fit food for man.” And that shocked me because we’d always regarded fish as absolutely acceptable. When I was about 10 she gave me a shotgun. This was at an age when I wasn’t even allowed an air rifle by my parents. She told me to go and hunt for rabbit up the glen at the back. And I just thought I was in heaven. She was a widow woman and she thought it was a man’s job to bring home the rabbit for the pot.

I remember good food on board ship, I had my first fillet of beef carved at a function. And although forces cooking has always got the billycan reputation, the officer’s mess was pretty damn good. It was the era of sherry and canasta. I remember the sea being frozen over and the postmen bringing the mail over on a sledge, those were very innocent days of growing up.

And then it was boarding school in Wiltshire. I belonged with the crowd that had a good time and partied, and I was actually expelled from there. I was never academically brilliant, I scraped by. In the ‘50s, I remember my father went to Trinidad on a trip and he sent us back a crate of fresh grapefruit, which I’d never had. I think it was one of my earlier taste epiphanies, a fresh grapefruit. And he brought back Calypso music and a whole waft of exotica, and suddenly at the parties, there was still sherry, but also cocktails. Suddenly there was limbo dancing – my mother’s friends in slacks and beehive hairstyles doing limbo.

I suppose the food influence was always there, because my mother came from very much a peasant background. They believed that if you didn’t have art on the walls or silver on the table, even if you were of quite poor means you could demonstrate hospitality by the stiffness of the drink and the size of the portion on your plate. So there was always this philosophy in our house that all was well if your fridge was full. I learnt a lot of my early cooking hints from my German grandmother. I had oxtail and neck of lamb years before it ever became, in modern British terms, fashionable.

I had kids very young and went to Oxford and worked on a rose growing plantation. With my first born on the way I decided that I had to do something settled and sensible. I had a vision of going to work in publishing. In the ‘vision’ I would be sitting in a tweed suit with a bow tie flicking through the odd manuscript, sipping cognac, smoking cigars and occasionally going out for very long lunches. But I worked for Robert Maxwell, so it was anything but. It was a sausage factory of production. Maxwell, as we know, was quite an entrepreneurial character. He had a lot of agendas that we didn’t know about at the time. But we did regard him as a rather charismatic figure. I was involved with the NUJ at the time and came across him, as it were, head to head at the negotiating table, and he was a man who was not to be trusted – which we found out in much later years was par for the course.

Then I went to work on one of Richard Desmond’s music magazines and I went from moving typography around a page at the desk one day, to sitting at Monterey Jazz Festival the next day drinking beer in the sunshine and thinking, “This is it.” Because I’d always been a music fan. So suddenly I was having supper at a table with Peter Tosh, Rory Gallagher from Taste and all my kind of childhood heroes. I then moved to the advertising side which didn’t sit well with me because I had to wear a suit. I went from one extreme to the other.

After that I helped start an outside catering company. We worked on a few feature films. I remember doing the War Requiem particularly. The young German soldier was an unknown called Sean Bean. The nurse was Tilda Swinton, she was quite mesmerising. The old soldier was played by Lawrence Olivier. My infamous part in it all was that after a late shoot in Kent, we were in some chalk pit which was made to mimic part of the First World War trenches, we had a late break where I cooked something, I think it was a shepherd’s pie. It was a typical paper plate and plastic fork kind of job, and he died that night and all the crew teased me mercilessly saying that I’d killed England’s best actor of the 20th century.

Around then I teamed up with a chap I had worked on a commercial with and we became the Cooking Duo. That was the Nosh Brothers. The idea was that we were going to try and create a stir in an industry that had become a little bit above itself. We regarded the world of food as rather over embellished. We’d just come into a recession where we couldn’t afford to eat out how we’d like to.

Marco Pierre White was the new enfant terrible. People were still speaking French in kitchens and as non-trained chefs, but what we call good eaters, we couldn’t understand why this was. We started the restaurant, in ’92, ’93, in Fulham and had an influx of chefs who came from New Zealand and Australia. We had to close in ’96 because I had a bad car accident so it was impossible for me to continue in the kitchen. And we realised that, rather than get other people in who would not follow our style, we would rather close and go elsewhere. So we opened up in All Saint’s Road after that.

And the whole Nosh philosophy was all about robust cooking and getting away from the needless frills that we paid through the nose for. We had a very mixed bunch. There were a lot of rock ‘n rollers, a lot of actors. And minor royalty. We had engagement dinners with Viscount Linley and would tease him to see if he could sort our chairs out. I used to feed lunch to Laurie Lee who wrote Cider with Rosie. It wasn’t quite Chelsea Arts Club, and it wasn’t quite some of the nightclubs but it was a strange mix. We had a lot of fun. One day we were arrested by the Special Branch for trying to depose the King of Tonga. That was the sort of mad thing we used to do. He was losing weight and planning to democratise the island so we wrote a letter to him saying, “Obviously becoming thinner, as your girth diminishes you are losing the grip on your kingdom. So because we have more massive girth than you, we would ask you to desist, cease and abdicate in favour of us. If girth is a mark of nobility, then we would like to take over.” Special Branch swooped in to check us out. We ceased the partnership around the millennium as I had become ill with diabetes. So I decided I had to click down a gear which is how I came back to the country. After writing the Eat Dorset book I cooked at The Fox Inn at Corscombe and would have stayed there if I hadn’t become ill. I think I mourn for my lost cooking activity, but then I’ve done a hell of a lot. So it’s not like I’m clamouring to get back. It’s a hot sticky old environment, the kitchen. I am nearer 60 then 50 these days so I’m allowed to slow down. As I put on my Facebook page: ‘People always remembered me as the short cropped haired chef, now I am the slightly sort of eccentric furniture restorer.’ But I don’t want to lose touch with food and people, because that is where my passion is”.