I was born on 21st July 1939 in the pottery cottage belonging to my grandfather Bernard Leach, in St Ives, Cornwall. My boyhood in St Ives was pretty idyllic; our playgrounds were all the coves and beaches round West Penwith, and I can remember when the distress rockets went up, running down to the harbour to watch the lifeboat go out, which was the most exciting thing for a small boy. It was wartime, my father was away in the army with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and mother invited a friend she’d met at the bus stop in St Ives to bring her two little girls round to have a bath, because we had a proper one, and they only had a galvanised tub in front of the fire. We were all aged about three or four, so my brother and I, who were nasty little boys and made the girls sit up the tap end, shared our bath tub with these two little girls and had lots of fun – and that was how Lizzie and I met. We married in 1961, so it’ll be our 50th anniversary later this year.

My father David was in partnership with his father Bernard in St Ives. Grandfather set up the pottery there in 1920, where there was already a very well-established artistic community going back to the 1880’s. After he returned from studying pottery in Korea, China and Japan between about 1910 and 1920, he’d been asked to join the Cornwall Handicraft Association, and had some assistance in setting up the pottery in St Ives. To put it into perspective, he started making pots in the old fashioned way, like I do now, during what was the post-industrial, post Victorian era, and his approach was controversial, very influenced by his experiences in Oriental culture, and caused questions to be asked. What was this man doing returning to the old ways, hand-throwing, when all the interest of the time was in new mould-making machinery, and mass-production? He would talk about spirituality, the “soul and personality” of the pot, and I’m the same, but the difference is that today there’s more acceptance of this approach, and I think Grandfather’s work had the same ethos as all craftspeople who go against the guide of modernity and the industrial process; they mind about their work, they care about it. If you ask me who am I making pots for, I’d have to say it’s for me. In designing and making pots, I’m trying to satisfy my own standards and criteria before I’m happy to present them to the customer; whilst I can’t ignore what the market wants, my work is product-led rather than market-led. When I have a cup of coffee from another potter’s mug, I like to feel I can commune with the maker, who may be someone I may already know, and although the coffee tastes the same no matter what I drink it out of, it’s a privilege to use a handmade object, and this adds an extra dimension to the experience.

I went to Dauntsey’s School, in Wiltshire, but I left school a very academically underachieved schoolboy. I loved school, but it was the sport I loved, and was in all the teams, so my parents were a bit disappointed with me. In about 1955/56, my father and mother moved to Bovey Tracey, and a year after that I left school and started my 5-year apprenticeship with my father. He’d helped set up a pottery at a Carmelite monastery in Kent, and I went there during my apprenticeship to work, which I really enjoyed. Then I went to work for a well-known potter called Ray Finch at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, who’s a lovely, humble man, still alive at 96. And then I worked with my Grandfather, so that was four different potters over a 5 year period, all very exciting, and in the process I learned to both pick up and discard different approaches to the job, and find out what suited my own style.

After our son Benedict was born I was looking for a good job, before I settled down; I had no money to set up on my own. One came up in California, at a lovely place called Mendocino on the coast about 150 miles north of San Francisco, and I worked at the Art School, and helped set up a pottery. We were there 6 months, in 1963, so it was an interesting time. I remember a story in the San Francisco Chronicle at that time; a woman had run naked through the streets of St Ives, ending up tolling the church bell in a dramatic fashion. This presented the authorities with quite a problem as to how to restrain her, as her arms were firmly attached to the bell rope, providing them with no convenient parts of her to catch hold of. And of course the Beatles had just exploded on the scene, so everyone was saying how very exciting life must be in England. Then when we came back to England, my dear mother-in-law lent us £3000 and that enabled us to buy this place at Muchelney, in ’64, and build a kiln.

These were all old farm buildings, where once they made cheese, and stripped withies. Often it was the woman left at home who would strip the withy using a brake, a single post with a v-shaped device which stripped the bark as it was pulled through. At one time nearby in Kingsbury Episcopi there were several withy merchants; also a blacksmith mending farm implements, a boot maker, strappers who dug the ditches, three bakeries, two butchers, and a saddlery, so there must have been dozens of little live/work situations; there were also two pubs and two grocery shops. Originally we didn’t have a shop; everything more or less was sold wholesale, but it was clear that people like to buy from the source. So we took down the old traditional double pigsty that was here, saving the blue lias stone and some tiles, and in ’67 built the shop, so that we could retail. And then nearly 7 years ago we built the gallery, which despite turning out to be quite a lot of work, does keep the place a bit lively. We’re lucky here at Muchelney, which is comparatively well-known with the historic Abbey and the Priest’s House, so there are lots of visitors and we enjoy a sort of symbiotic relationship. I couldn’t operate from an industrial estate, which is maybe what the planners would have preferred.

In 1972 Nick Rees wrote to me. He was a teacher, a bit disillusioned with his work, and wanted to do a pottery apprenticeship. That was 39 years ago, and he’s still working here, and then Mark Melbourne, who was originally taught by my brother Simon, rejoined us 7 years ago. So from Monday to Friday they work for the business, producing the repeat ware from my designs, but as my grandfather did, I encourage them to make their own pots in their own time, which are then put through the kiln and sold through the gallery, keeping their own creative spirit alive.

In 1986 I bought 9 acres of land here behind the pottery, and two years later dug the pond, landscaped it and planted 500 trees. Then in ’91 planted a further 3500 trees, a mixture of indigenous broadleaf species. I’d been burning wood in the kilns, offcuts from sustainable sources, and I began to think about how much this country needs more trees, about how we’ve used up all our own indigenous forests over the centuries, and now we’re exploiting other countries’ resources. And then finally, I heard about the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon who in the ’70’s were ruthlessly cleared from their villages by beef or timber barons; they were in the way, they just didn’t count, and I was shocked. So what I’ve done with my little scheme is a speck, it’s nothing, but lots of people are doing it. What started as a conscience thing has now become an indulgence. I enjoy it, almost more than I can say, watching the trees and the wonderful myriad of species within the habitat grow and develop. It’s quite amazing how quickly it’s all happened, and now because of the dragonfly population it’s a designated County Wildlife Site.

As for our family, as well as my eldest son Benedict, there’s Jennifer, who incidentally married an American, Doug, and they live in Glastonbury, Connecticut; there’s also Karen, and Joe, and Tobias. Between them there are 10 grandchildren, and all of them except Jennifer’s children over in the States live within about 16 miles of here. So we’re lucky, with our family, the pottery, and the land; they’re all so very close by.

“My Dad loved music, especially jazz, although his interest kind of stopped at bebop. He loved Oscar Peterson, Bennie Goodman, Fats Waller, people like that; Mum taught me to widen my taste in music, and encouraged me to take my playing seriously. I have two sisters, one eight years older than me, and one ten years, and I think they really got me going with music. Being that bit older than me, they were into the Beatles, who they’d seen play in 1963, the Stones, and Bob Dylan of course. They had loads of Bob Dylan records. We lived in south London, although I was born in Sutton, Surrey, and brought up in Merton. You couldn’t say I had any musical influences from where I was brought up – if it had been Brixton I’d have been into reggae perhaps – it all came from the Dansette record player really, one you could put a whole stack of singles on. We didn’t get a stereo until I was 16. So, thanks to my sisters, I began to get into all sorts of music, especially blues musicians like John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. More to the point, my sisters had a guitar which they shared, so I first picked it up when I was about 8 or 9.

When I was 12 or 13, my Mum must have recognised something in me, and organised some guitar lessons. These were classical guitar lessons with a really good teacher from the Royal Academy, but he was very strict and didn’t like anything that wasn’t classical, unless it was Django Reinhardt. I had lessons right up till I was 18, and did all my grades up to Grade 8. My teacher was constantly getting me to move my thumb position, which needs to be round the back of the neck of the guitar for classical playing, as opposed to where it ends up when you’re self taught, and techniques like that have been invaluable to me. Classical teaching on any instrument teaches you techniques which should enable you to do anything; playing with speed and fluidity, being able to reach big stretches with my left hand, all comes from that. Also, the discipline and structure of the lessons was important; they were once a week, you have to practice all the time, and learn the piece you’d been set by next week, or else. Once or twice I got a bit jaded with it, but my Mum encouraged me, and I’m glad I stuck with it.

At school I stayed on to do A levels, but unfortunately failed them; that was because I was just playing guitar all the time. I don’t think my Mum and Dad were all that pleased, but they began to realise that I was doing something I loved, and which was working for me. So although my Dad thought I should have “something to fall back on”, my parents were pretty supportive, quite proud actually. The first band I was in lasted a couple of years or so, and then I got a job with a builder’s merchants, driving a tipper lorry. It was great, one of the most enjoyable times of my life actually, £10 a day, plus I was playing at local pubs at night.

Then out of the blue I got a call from a guy who was with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and he asked me to join him in a band he’d formed to tour the States supporting the Doobie Brothers. That was my first big tour, and I was pretty young; it was fantastic, the first time I’d really seen America, and to be playing to audiences of up to 25,000 instead of playing in pubs in London was quite a jump. In a way I wish I’d been a bit older at the time, I might have appreciated it a bit more. Then that band split up, and I started doing session work in the early eighties. The guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, who I’d known for quite a while and was a good friend, had been asking me if I’d like to join the band he was with, The Pretenders, to augment their guitar sound. And then in ’82, he sadly died. He was only a little older than me. So in September ’82 the band asked me to join as guitarist, and this came at a pretty good time for me because I was badly in need of work; Flo and I had just got married, she was expecting Hannah, our first, and we were living in a squat. I had very mixed feelings about it, because Jimmy, the one I replaced, was a great guy, but then suddenly I had a regular gig, and so I was with the Pretenders for 5 years. When we weren’t touring or recording I did session work for Roger Daltry, Talk Talk, and other artists. In 1985, we moved to Weymouth from Surbiton, mainly because we’d had enough of London, and Flo’s sister lived here so we’d visited quite a lot. I admit the thought of moving terrified me at first, and I convinced myself I’d have a car crash driving up and down to London all the time. It hasn’t happened yet though.

I left the Pretenders in ’87, and was doing more session work, but in ’88 I began to work for Paul McCartney. Then in ’89 he asked me if I’d like to join his band, Wings. That suited me fine because we had two little girls by then, and in ’92 and ’94 we had two boys as well, and he said that if we toured, we wouldn’t be away for more than 2 or 3 weeks. With the Pretenders, we’d tour for such long stretches, and that’s really hard on family life. I played with McCartney for 5 years, until ’94, with his wife Linda also in the band. She was absolutely lovely, one of the nicest people I’ve known. She treated everyone exactly the same, cleaners or celebrities. I’ve got a photo she took of us all, with an old wooden plate camera, but I wish I’d looked after it a bit better. I played with Paul at the Albert Hall in ’97, in the house band, at the Music for Montserrat charity gig, but by then Linda was too ill to take part. She died in 1998.

After playing with McCartney, I did a lot of work with an old family friend called Diane Tell, a French Canadian living in France, and that kept the wolf from the door for quite a long time, along with the session work and local bands. I wasn’t really touring much, but in 2004 I got a call from Norah Jones’ management who asked me to go on tour with her. That was a world tour, lasting a year, the first world tour I’d done, and I really enjoyed that. I love her voice, the music was quite mellow so I didn’t have to play too loud, and I played different instruments, like mandolin, and lots of slide guitar, so I was a sort of utility musician, and even did backing vocals. Being away for a year was hard on Flo, but the children were old enough to understand, and of course the money’s pretty good. We also toured the Far East for 12 weeks, including Australia, China, and Japan, even somewhere called New Caledonia. In 2006, I got a job touring with John Mayer, who’s very big in America, and on and off I’ve toured with him for the past 4 years, mostly in America; he’s a great guy to work for, and they really look after me on tour. And now I’m working on two more albums of my own, one solo acoustic and one with a band, for release later this year, plus some solo shows.

Playing live is of course hugely exciting, and I find it so whether it’s a full house at the Albert Hall, or at local venues with friends like Steve Wilson and Jess Upton, or the Steamer Ducks. You can practice till you’re blue in the face, play fantastically in your own front room, but you have to be able to pull it off in front of people, and that’s what keeps the skills sharp – playing live and working with younger musicians. I’m generally the oldest guy in the band now, but I’m fine with that.”

“I’m the middle one of three children. My parents both went to Cambridge after the war – my mother read history, my father mechanical engineering. He’d been wounded in the Normandy Landings. Talking with my mother only recently, she said that today my father would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but then there wasn’t a name for it. Most of my childhood I was aware of him painting; he was painting around the theme of war, as if he was trying to paint his way out of trauma. This really carried on for most of his life, although he switched from painting to writing and back again; his surreal imagery was all around the house as we were growing up. I was also aware of his rather dark presence – this person who could be unpredictable and sometimes explode. My mother was the opposite, as if she was trying to counter that; she was sunny and bright, and tried to protect all of us, including my father, from the outside world. So it was quite a strange upbringing; it was very privileged, but in another way kind of deprived, in that we were always a bit cut off from other people. We always lived in isolated places, and there was a sense that the rest of the world was slightly contaminated; perhaps what we were deprived of was relationships; we had friends at the private schools we were sent to, but I think there was a sense of society at large being a rather threatening place. All this, along with my father’s imagery, has been a strong influence on my brother and I – he’s a singer/songwriter. As artists, I think we both have our roots in surrealism.

I was sent to a very enlightened private boarding school, Bedales, which has a great reputation for the arts, and is coeducational, but I was homesick. It was a misguided thing which so many middle class people did at that time – parents thinking they were doing the best for their children, when actually it was possibly the worst. I couldn’t wait to get home, and after I left school and went to do my foundation year at Winchester School of Art, I lived at home and walked in to college along the river every day, as if I still needed that umbilical connection. After Winchester, I went to Newcastle Poly, as it then was, to do a Fine Art degree. That was in the seventies, so it wasn’t as exciting as the decade before, when Brian Ferry, Alan Price, et al, were strutting their stuff, but it was before all the cut-backs, so there was no limit on materials. I was experimenting with, and wasting loads of materials like clay, and resin. I hate to think how much resin I used.

Newcastle then was just on the cusp of becoming a really exciting, vibrant place and I loved the landscape of Northumberland, and Cumberland, which we explored at weekends. I think somehow I missed out on popular culture. At boarding school there was no television, and at art school, half the time I lived in places with no electricity, and I think it just passed me by. I don’t know where I was; I think I was living in my imagination, and I wasn’t really aware of what was going on out there. I began to like Newcastle more and more; I had a good circle of close friends, and I might have stayed there but for the fact I had a boyfriend in London, so I moved down south again.
And then I got pregnant, and had my daughter Ruby, and we moved to Sydling St Nicholas here in West Dorset. That was over 30 years ago. We’d been visiting Dorset when I lived in Winchester; it seemed to have a magic about it then – ancient earthworks and forgotten hamlets with damp and collapsed cottages. Walking into a pub you’d get stared at, for not being a local, and none of the footpaths led anywhere, they were all so overgrown. It was frustrating, but there was something really mysterious about it, as if you really could still get lost.

I set up a printmaking studio, and found I could sell etchings quite easily. They were small and intense, and mostly based on landscape. Coming here was that classic artist thing of trying to find a retreat to work in, somewhere up a track, although actually we lived in the village. I didn’t drive, and Ruby and I would take the bus once a week to Dorchester to do the shopping, or if we wanted to go further afield, we’d walk the two and a half miles over the hill to Maiden Newton, (Ruby aged 2) to get the train. Without a car, you get to know an area more intimately, but I think I did feel a bit trapped, especially with a small child and not really knowing anyone. I became disenchanted with my work too, probably because I wasn’t being experimental enough. But because it sold well, it was hard to give up.

When Ruby was five, we went to live in Rampisham with George, her father, who’d moved from London. He’d bought a derelict farm, and that was up a track; I found it really liberating, and began to get back into 3D work. I needed to get away from the straight, tight, controlled part of me that was coming out in my etchings, and play about a bit. My son Edmund was born, ten years after Ruby, and I was very bound up with looking after him. I was growing vegetables and keeping chickens as well. And then my father died.

When Edmund was four, I left George, left Rampisham, and came to live here at Mapperton, and I went into therapy. That connects with my life now, because I’m training to become a psychotherapist. While I was in therapy, I began to work with the flotsam and jetsam washed up on Chesil Beach. Making sculpture out of rubbish, I now realise, was a kind of metaphor for what was happening to me in therapy; I was trying to redeem myself by connecting up all the different parts, and making myself into something whole. The therapeutic part was never knowing what I was going to make until I was actually making it. With the etching there was always a feeling of failure, of not being able to do justice to the landscape, as if my only option was to replicate it. Also the process of etching involves a kind of commitment; once you’ve put the metal plate in the acid, it’s very hard to reverse anything; you can add, but it’s almost impossible to take away. But with the beach detritus I can endlessly add bits or take them away again. I love working with worthless materials, I get self-conscious and a bit scared using anything new. Blank sheets of paper intimidate me. When I go to the beach, I try not to look for specific things, but inevitably I have a kind of unconscious wish-list. I feel very ambivalent about the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ there; stuff we throw away, or lose, or somehow manage to forget. We’re using the sea as a dumping ground, yet my work wouldn’t exist without it. It’s a strange kind of symbiosis. How these things arrive here, and what part of the globe they come from, never fails to intrigue me, as does the mystery of how the sea sorts them out – left footed flip-flops on one beach, right footed on another. Every beach has a theme, depending on the tide and the season.

I started running workshops with kids about fifteen years ago. I encourage spontaneity; try to get them to play around with different objects, different imagery and associations. They learn the skills of construction; how to join things, make them balance, stand up, or move. More importantly, they learn how to overcome difficulties – there always comes a point in every piece of work when I feel I’ve reached an impasse, and I can’t see a way of resolving it. But eventually I do find a way, and I try to encourage children to do the same. It’s like a microcosm of life – constantly confronted by obstacles, and trying to learn how to overcome them. It’s very satisfying when you do.”

“I was born and brought up here at Manor Farm, but my father’s side of the family had Cornish roots. He grew up in Bournemouth, but his father was a GP, who came from Cornwall. He was the son of a shopkeeper, had lots of brothers and sisters, and one of his sisters was the housekeeper on St Michaels Mount, home of Lord and Lady St Levan. So my grandfather, who was in his forties and unmarried, happened to be visiting his sister at the castle, where a female relative of Lady St Levan was staying. The relative was taken ill, so Grandfather’s sister suggested he, as a doctor, take a look: the unwell relative, also in her forties and unmarried, and my grandfather got on rather well, and a sort of upstairs-downstairs romance blossomed. This caused considerable disapproval in her family, but it didn’t deter them; Grandfather had been quite successful in his life, passing exams to become a doctor and working hard to expand his practice, but he was the son of a shopkeeper, a tradesman, and she had family living in a castle.

My father was lucky enough to inherit from the estate of a wealthy family friend, so, as he loved the countryside and farming, he found himself able to buy a farm. In 1937 he bought Manor Farm here in Godmanstone, partly because it was on the boundary of two hunts (the Cattistock and the South Dorset), but also as a devout Christian and a lay reader, he liked the fact it was close to the Franciscan Friary at Hilfield. I’ve always wanted to farm, never wanted to do anything else, apart from when I wanted to be an engine driver and play cricket for Somerset; I still love steam engines and cricket. So from a very young age I was the one to get involved in the farm, rather than my two brothers and sister. I remember vividly Fred Moxom and me on our David Brown Cropmaster tractor, which had a double seat; he’d sit me up alongside him, and he’d smoke while I steered, as we ploughed or rolled the fields. It was just bliss. I remember driving Tim Crabb’s Fordson tractor, while the men picked up bales of hay. Tim said, “when I do shout, staaand on the clutch, and pull on th’ brake!” I can’t have been much more than about five, and of course couldn’t really manage it, so was demoted for a while, though I was allowed to row up hay with the Cropmaster when I was 10. It was a different world then, when things seemed to happen slowly enough, so that children got to drive tractors.

After school, I went to Cambridge to read agriculture; not through any great desire on my part to go to Cambridge – it was expected of me as I’d passed the exams – but I did want to read agriculture. It was actually pretty hard work; people had made out agriculture to be a bit of a doss, but it was an honours degree like anything else, and we did all the agricultural sciences and I found it hard graft. Cambridge didn’t suit me all that much. Then during my first year, my Mum died, very suddenly. Father was pretty lost without her, and said that if I wanted to run the farm, I could start as soon as I’d qualified. Then Pam and I got together, and so it was graduation in June ‘69, wedding July ’69, started work August ’69. In October 1970 I became the tenant, our first dairy heifers started calving, and Laura our first daughter was born. Kate came along a couple of years later and Patrick a few years after that.

Farming in the 1970’s was very different, pretty dire really. My agricultural education, and the whole ethos of the industry, was about increasing production. Farmers were spreading more and more ammonium nitrate fertilizer, dosing the cows with antibiotics when they got mastitis, and there was aerial spraying on the hills around the village. We were looking for less intensive ways to farm, trying some nitrogen fixing crops like peas and lucerne; then Pam went on a homeopathy course in Devon, in about 1980/81. The people there were wondering why on earth Pam, as a farmer, was studying homeopathy, which is all about the effects of substances in tiny amounts, when we were using all these chemicals. That was really the clincher, that was when we said to ourselves “we have to do this”, and go organic. I was saying we’d probably go bust, but my protestations went unheard and Pam said we’d just have to make it pay somehow; she’s always been like that with what we’ve done, determined, positive, and brave, and none of this would have happened without her. The conversion took quite a long time because there wasn’t really a model to follow back then, nor were there any conversion grants, so we were feeling our way. Conversion was complete by 1988, with the dairy, lambs for the freezer, and wheat. We grow a very old variety called Maris Widgeon, for the long thatching straw as well as the grain for flour. Thatchers really like it, and it fetches a good price, so it was a significant part of the business, particularly before the milk got going. It’s also very beautiful; the binder cutting it, the stooks in the field and the ricks before it’s thrashed, like land art where it all appears in the landscape, then disappears, and then it all happens again the next year.

Our organic milk went first to Unigate in Devon, on a pilot scheme for organic bottled milk which didn’t work, then to Bussey’s Farm in Sussex, where they were making organic yoghurt. They found they also had strong demand for liquid milk, and suggested we put in our own processing plant to supply that market, which we did in’92. We soon found ourselves, Manor Farm Organic Milk, with production of about 1000 litres a day, supplying all the branches of Waitrose and all the branches of Safeway from Penzance to Inverness. We were the only commercial organic dairy farm in Dorset for 10 years. Then it all began to run away from us when the market took off; we needed to make a massive investment to supply Waitrose’s own label, which was far too scary, and we were bursting at the seams to process through the small plant we had. So eventually we contracted out the processing to Coombe Farm at Crewkerne; and then after attending a trade fair called Natural Products, at Olympia, we found ourselves with firm orders to supply our milk to a number of independent traders. That involved a delivery round in London, using our own vans and drivers, all of which completely changed our lives.

In the midst of what was probably the busiest time of my life, five years ago I suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage. I was in Yeovil market, washing out the trailer, having delivered some bull calves for sale, when I collapsed. I was found unconscious, drenched in very cold water, and that was one fact that may well have saved my life, the cold slowing everything down. The other was that I finished up in Frenchay hospital, Bristol, where they specialise in brain injury. A day and a half after collapsing, I woke up to find my family all lined up round my bed, so then I knew the situation was quite serious. Later, I had an operation, in which they accessed the damage via a blood vessel in my leg, through the heart, to my brain where a piece of platinum was inserted to plug the leaky vessel. The surgeon told me there was a two percent chance of not surviving the operation, but actually my chances of surviving the haemorrhage itself had been less than 50:50. Pam spent 3 days and nights on the ward in a chair by my bed, so she could get help quickly if needed.

The process of recovery allowed quite a lot of thinking time, of trying to make sense of what happened. I found myself not only wondering why I’d survived, but also wondering at my good fortune in having survived, and of course wondering what I was meant to do now. The love and good wishes from family and friends at the time, confirmed to me that what I do, as an organic farmer, as a Dad and a Granddad, is what I am meant to be doing, and so having been lucky enough to come through all of it, I’m carrying on as before. We sold the milk business a couple of years ago now; we’re still very busy farming, but trying to make life a little simpler these