Other livesBooks This article is more than 6 years oldObituaryJohn Pepper obituary
This article is more than 6 years oldMy friend John Pepper, who has died aged 75, was a counsellor, teacher and award-winning author. His writing never brought him fame, but it was recognised. Cockley Beck: A Celebration of Lakeland in Winter (1984) was listed by Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian as “one of the great classics of British nature writing”. Other titles include How to Be Happy (1985), with an introduction by the Dalai Lama, Seeing the Light: The Art of Becoming Beautiful (1993) and The Good God Guide (2002), a collection of cartoons on religion.
John was born in Doncaster to Irene (nee Holmes), a clerk and former dancer, and Leonard, a methodist, furniture salesman and sergeant in the Irish Guards. The family moved to Southampton, and John attended King Edward VI school, leaving at 16 to train as a reporter on the Southern Evening Echo, and study part-time at the Southern College of Art.
In 1962, after a brief spell with the East London News Agency, he went to Turkey as administrative secretary with the US air force in Nato. By the age of 21, he was a freelance reporter in Bristol, where he landed a “front” job on the nightly independent TV news programme and made documentaries. In 1969 he was elected British fellow of the World Press Institute in the US; that same year he married Wendy Godwin, a nurse, but they divorced four years later. His first book, Amerigrope (a collection of essays) came out in 1971.
In 1972, he gave up paid employment and embarked on a “quest for meaning”, living in the US, Spain, a caravan in Wales and on floors of friends while trying to make a living as an author. He eventually turned to Buddhism and moved to London, where he combined temporary jobs such as subediting for the BBC World Service and drawing strip cartoons for the Listener with winter-long retreats to a Lakeland cottage, to focus on his writing. By 1984 he had received a Northern Arts award for Cockley Beck.
Three years later he moved full-time to Lancaster, where he taught meditation, healing and expressive arts at the adult college and university summer schools. In 1994 he trained as a counsellor at Wigan and Leigh College and in 1998 he and a friend, Ruth France, volunteered with the Healing Hands Network in Sarajevo. His grief following Ruth’s death in 2008 found expression in Cry Downriver (2011).
I met John in 2000, after enrolling on one of his meditation courses. An inspiring teacher, he encouraged me in my return to art and subsequent retraining in art psychotherapy.
John was never more content than when wild swimming, or watching the antics of the birds and other creatures who shared life on the margins. He leaves behind a circle of much-loved friends, who will miss his mercurial spirit, his comments on the weather and the wonderful cartoons that accompanied his many letters.
He is survived by his sister, Linda.
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