VIEW PROFILE: Mark Culme-Seymour

Making his mark with the arts

MARK CULME-SEYMOUR always felt he would like to spend more time carrying out voluntary work for the local community. And after retiring as a comoditiy broker, Mark has fulfilled his dreams by helping to launch the Bridport Literary Festival and as Director of the Eype Centre of the Arts. Here, he tells View reporter TOM GLOVER about his passion for the arts.

MARK Culme-Seymour has been influential in the local cultural scene as a driving force behind the inception of the Bridport Literary Festival and now as Director of the Eype Centre for the Arts.

Mark’s passionate support of cultural development in West Dorset is in many ways the realisation of a repressed dream of his youth.

“I remember thinking once on the underground, that I wouldn’t mind retiring in my early forties and doing some more charity or voluntary work. I remember that thought crossing my mind on the tube on the way to work and I forgot until I stopped working and now I find myself doing totally voluntary work. Maybe it was planned I don’t know,” he said.

That thought lay dormant in the back of Mark’s mind until the end of his highly successful career as a commodity broker.

Having left school aged 16 Mark moved to Australia to begin a career in the media as a lowly copy boy on the Australian Daily Telegraph.

After working his way onto a small group of newspapers Mark began to get itchy feet and got a job as an unpaid crew member on a Brigantine headed back to England.

After a brief spell as a driver Mark fell back into the media working for a Bond Street based public relations firm.

In less than a year Mark knew this wasn’t for him.

He said: “I didn’t want to go back into newspapers because of the hours. You are always off work when everybody is at work and I decided I wanted a bit more of a social life.”

Mark eventually settled in a career beginning work as a trainee with sugar brokers Czarnikow.

After working as a commodity broker for nine months Mark was moved into the cocoa department.

“After nine months I was in tears,” he recalled. “It was so mind-bogglingly repetitive and boring. I went to see them and they said I could go and work for the cocoa department.”

Mark was working with the biggest cocoa crop in the world and worked his way onto the futures market as a floor trader.

After ten years Mark moved to the American firm E F Hutton where he soon found himself running the cocoa department.

Mark eventually left the company to pursue his own venture but when the financial climate changed in the late 1980s, he and his partner were forced to sell their business as banks became increasingly reluctant to lend money to commodity houses.

During his time in the industry Mark became Chairman of the Cocoa Association in London and Chairman of the London Cocoa terminal and futures market. He was an influential figure who saw the rules of the cocoa organisation changed and opened up the membership to Europe.

Despite being a long time behind him now, Mark still has a good word to say for his favourite trading commodity.

“I’m not sick of chocolate at all,” he said. “It’s my favourite thing in the world and I have some everyday. I highly recommend it to everybody. Not the milk stuff but the plain chocolate is very good for you and for your brain, it’s full of antioxidants.”

After settling in Dorset, and with a successful career behind him, Mark became the director of the Eype Centre for the Arts in 2004, realising the repressed dream from his early days as a London businessman.

The previous director, Dr Ray Shorthouse, had retired and the running of the centre had become highly disorganised and this was something that attracted Mark.

He said: “I went to this meeting and we sat round the table and discussed what was going to happen and who was going to run it. They all looked round and they seemed to be looking at me all the time. There was no organisation and that is something that I am particularly good at, so that’s how it all started.”

Mark’s involvement has seen the centre’s membership increase ten fold from 120 to 1,200, calling on his public relations skills honed in the sixties.

A highlight of Mark’s time at the centre is undoubtedly his involvement with the launch of the Bridport Literary Festival.

“When I first got involved my brother’s partner Josceline Dimblebey had just written a book and was telling me about literary festivals and I thought it sounded like a fantastic way to raise money and it would be interesting for people to come and hear all the authors,” said Mark.

He shared his plans with Bridport based author Gijs van Hensbergen whose wife Alex Coulter had recently become chairman of the Bridport Arts Centre.

A few weeks later Mark attended a meeting at the arts centre with artist Tanya Bruce-Lockhart and it was agreed that the Bridport Literary Festival would be launched to coincide with the already established Bridport Prize.

The first festival was a great success and attracted the likes of Louis de Bernières, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Fay Weldon to St Peter’s church.

When the literary festival decided to keep all its events within Bridport, the Eype Centre for the Arts started its own festival. It now hosts two festivals a year, in April and October.

Mark said: “Books generally come out in the first half and second half of the year so we thought we would have one in April and then one in October.

“Some people find it a bit strange to have two literary festivals so close together with ours in October and Bridport’s in November, but actually it works very well. People like Kate Adie, who we had last year, always draw a full house and I understand that the Bridport event always draws good crowds too.”

It’s not just the literary world that is attracted to Eype. Mark also launched “Artists of the Jurassic Coast” an exhibition, which attracts around 1,000 people a year during the month of September.

As an international trader, with offices across the continents, Mark is a well travelled man. But for the time being at least, he has found a haven in which he has settled.

“At the end of 2000 I went for a walk down here and looked at all this amazing West Bexington landscape and thought what a wonderful place to have a house.

“I just absolutely love it down here,” he said. “I take the dog out and it’s an amazing place to live. You’ve got to like the sea and being slightly apart from everybody but it’s completely different from Bridport and Netherbury. All the birds are different, the climate is slightly different; it’s very strange.”

Mark seems very settled at his home in West Bexington but he does have a tendency to live on the spur of the moment.

He said: “The plan for the future is to live day to day, that is the best way to live. You have to have some vague plan but you never know what’s going to happen to you.

“I’d like to carry on out in Eype for a little while longer but I always find I have a threshold of about 10 years and towards the end of that, and sometimes I haven’t earned it, I tend to get quite bored.

“I like building things up and I like creating something and that in a way is the challenge, so who knows what I will want to create next. I’m halfway through my memoirs so if I had a bit more time I might be able to finish the second half.

“There are always new things to get involved with and do and it’s fun.”

Mark is certainly a man who gets things done, but whether he will continue to do that in England is another question.

Mark spent seven years of his childhood in Paris and he is still very fond of France. He said: “There are times when I go over and French people think I’m French because I have somehow retained the language. I have to say there are times when I think a nice place in Paris wouldn’t be too bad, but you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

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