Jeremy Seabrook, who has died aged 85, was a social and political commentator, and the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles.
His work, over 60 years, covered the post-imperial and post-industrial world, focusing on the environment and on the victims of a development designed to enrich others. He early pinpointed the destructive consequences of inequality. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that the rich must become immeasurably more rich before the poor can become even fractionally less poor?”
Jeremy’s approach lay firmly in the tradition of the great Victorian social reformers Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, and the American historian Studs Terkel. Like them he took his research on to the streets, whether in provincial British towns or the teeming cities of Asia. His books and his thinking were constructed around the need to record and analyse human experience in the face of massive and often violent change.
Much of what he wrote was received unsympathetically. In both the hedonism of the 1960s and the neoliberalism of 20 years later, he was variously attacked as either a puritanical killjoy or a sentimental utopian.
This was largely the price of being ahead of his time. The range of his work is suggested by some of his titles – The Idea of Neighbourhood, Unemployment, The Myth of the Market, Consuming Cultures, Life and Labour in a Bombay Slum, Asking the Earth. Views that he pioneered decades ago are now part of the accepted discourse of social analysis.
The topicality of Jeremy’s work meant that much of his output had a short life, but he compensated for this by a constant revisiting of subjects that became more rather than less relevant over time. And whatever the cost to his career, he never gave an inch in his determination to expose what he saw as the betrayal and marginalisation of poor people, in Britain as much as in those of the former empire.
The Song of the Shirt, about the tragedy of the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013, is “a story of such appalling contempt for human life that it must rank among the most callous in the brutal history of industrialism”.
A different area of his work focused on gay themes, both in the UK and the Indian subcontinent. His final published book, Private Worlds (2024), an account of growing up gay in the 50s, was widely praised and shortlisted for the JR Ackerley prize for autobiography and memoir.
Jeremy – always Jerry from his early years – was born in Northampton to Gladys (nee Yule), the 12th child of shoe workers who had recently migrated from the countryside, and Sidney Seabrook, a butcher who – it would only emerge some 30 years later – was not his father. Illuminated in a searching memoir The Uses of Adversity (2014), the ghosts of Gladys and Sid, together with Jeremy’s true father, were finally laid to rest.
A bright pupil, Jeremy went from the town grammar school to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1957-60), both of which institutions he hated for their snobbishness, sexism and racism. After gaining a degree in French and Italian he had no particular job prospects – an interview with Wrigley’s Chewing Gum came to nothing – and returned to Gladys and the backstreets, Sid having long disappeared back to the countryside. Jeremy then took a job in the borough library, where I first met him. “People thought I’d had a breakdown. But I loved it there,” he said.
Spells of teaching followed, and during this time Jeremy wrote several pieces describing families which, like his own, had exchanged an ancient rural life for the alien disciplines of industrial work. These were published in the recently launched New Society magazine, and a book offer soon arrived, resulting in The Unprivileged, a volume of urban anthropology that remains fresh and insightful six decades on.
From now on Jeremy’s career settled into a pattern, as various commissions came his way and enabled him to branch out into both journalism and plays. For a while Play for Today and the Royal Court seemed to be where he was headed, but in the end it was journalism, in the Guardian and elsewhere, that brought him the greatest prominence.
One day a call came from Buckingham Palace – the then Prince of Wales had read some of Jeremy’s work and wished to discuss the unrest then blighting Britain’s cities. After the private interview at the palace (many of the ideas discussed appeared later in a royal speech) it turned out that the footman who had taken Jeremy’s coat had gone off duty, and the prince himself had the task (no easy one) of hunting down the missing M&S garment. Four digestive biscuits that Jeremy had smuggled out were taken to Gladys and his Aunt Em in Northampton, where they were declared “the best digestives we’ve ever tasted”. Jeremy would later ruefully concede that this was probably the high point of his career.
He was a tall, soft-spoken, gentle man who treated everyone with an equal interest, sensitivity and good nature. He was one of the true heirs of George Orwell – English to his bones, but entirely international in his experience and perceptions, an original and impassioned man whose indifference to ego and image were matched only by his pain at the unnecessary brutality inflicted by one set of human beings on another.
In his personal life, although possessed of a classically existentialist sense of the absurd, he was a warm and generous friend, with a fund of kindness, patience and wit from which many have benefited over the years. He bore his last cancer-ridden months with dignity and courage, looked after to the end by his partner, Derek Hooper, who had shared his life for the last half-century.
Jeremy had no illusions. He took pleasure in small things. For those who knew him he was the definition of what it means to be human.
• Jeremy Richard Seabrook, social and political commentator, and writer, born 14 November 1939; died 30 November 2024
