About the Author

Walter Seymour, one of the five sons of Richard Seymour and Frances Smith, was born on the 9th December, 1838, at Kinwarton, in Warwickshire, where his father, a Canon of Worcester, was Rector. Rev. Seymour had come to Kinwarton as a serious and godly young man of evangelical outlook at the very time when the Catholic influence of the Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian movement, was starting to have an effect across the parishes. Frances Seymour, born in 1804 at Marylebone, had first met Richard in 1832 while she was living at Mapledurham House, near Reading. Richard's diary (a copy of which is preserved at Warwick County Record Office) records his courtship, proposal and marriage and the appointment to his first living at Kinwarton. Richard and Fanny raised a large family at the Rectory. The 1851 census records three daughters and five sons aged between eleven months and fourteen years, with a curate, a governess and seven other servants in the household. Fanny died on 27 April,1871. Richard retired from the parish in 1877 and died in 1880 being buried with his wife in Kinwarton churchyard. Of the five sons, two travelled to South America. The eldest, Richard Arthur Seymour, wrote "Pioneering in the Pampas" an interesting racconto of his efforts to become a country esquire in the middle of a savage land. Walter Seymour, more mundane, wrote Ups and Downs of a Wandering Life, a most suitable title for the amusing biography of a predictable outcome of strict Victorian upbringing that led him to study at Christ Church, hold a seat in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy -now called the Controller-, in Whitehall, ask to be transferred to the office of the Secretary of the Admiralty and later on to act as junior accountant of the House of Commons, before resigning to lead an adventurous life.