David Pye

Biography · IVU

David Pye

Born in Liverpool, England, in the 1950s · Treasurer of the International Vegetarian Union

A research chemist who spent two decades replacing materials that failed or did harm, and who has spent the decades since keeping the books, the boards and the governance of the vegetarian movement in working order — convinced, by an answer he was given in the early 1990s, that his part in this life is to help other people achieve theirs.

 

Every organisation has someone whose name is not on the campaigns. David Pye has been that person for the vegetarian movement in Britain and internationally for close to thirty years — trustee, treasurer, chair, the one who reads the accounts and the constitution. It is a role he did not stumble into so much as recognise, and he can name the moment he recognised it.

He was born in Liverpool in the 1950s, studied chemistry and worked as a research chemist for more than twenty years. The projects ran from high-temperature furnace linings to impact modifiers for plastics to alternatives to ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons — a working life, as it turns out, spent finding substitutes for things that break down or cause damage.

He married Tina Fox in the early 1970s — a marriage that, as it turned out, put two future officers of the vegetarian movement at the same table. The decision that shaped the rest of both their lives came during an LSD trip, when they realised that the chicken they were eating had once been a living animal, killed for them to eat — and that the meal could just as easily have been made of something else. They gave up meat, and the reasoning held after the trip ended — if there are plenty of alternatives, killing animals for food is not defensible.

They joined the UK Vegetarian Society and did not stop at membership. They set up a local animal rights group and became active in the movement, which in Britain in the 1970s meant small rooms, stalls and a great deal of unpaid organising. Tina Fox would go on to lead that society as its chief executive and to write the UK Green Party’s animal rights policy; in January 1999 she was elected to the IVU International Council in her own right, the same year David became its treasurer, and she served as IVU’s membership secretary, deputy chair and then chair of council.

In 1979 a friend gave him an astrological birth chart calculated from the exact time of his birth. He found it accurate to a degree he had not expected, and that was the turning point: he studied astrology seriously, set up a local study group and ended up teaching it at an evening class.

Through the 1980s he organised a run of successful New Age festivals, and the guest list says something about how he works. Vegetarian and animal rights groups shared the floor with mediums, tarot readers, healers and spiritual groups — constituencies that rarely booked the same hall. Putting them in one room was the organiser’s instinct arriving a decade before the committees did.

Around the same time he came across the reincarnation research of Dr Helen Wambach. He describes the effect as life-changing, though not as a conversion: he had believed in reincarnation since he was a teenager, on grounds that were practically engineering rather than devotional. One life each, however short, followed by heaven or hell, struck him as a poor use of souls. Wambach’s books described what happens in the period between lives, and the account fitted what he already thought.

That thread runs the length of his life and eventually produced a book. The work of Dr Michael Newton took the same subject further; the Masters of the Spirit World website gave him somewhere to put his questions about the nature of the universe. The answers became Unconditional Love, published in 2024 — a travel guide, as he describes it, to life, death and reincarnation.

He and Tina divorced in 1989 and remained friends. In 1990 he met Christine Heron; they have been together since and became civil partners in 2024.

In the early 1990s he met a medium who channelled an entity called Bartholomew, and the message he was given was specific: his role in this life was to support others in achieving their goals. Whatever a reader makes of the source, the instruction describes the next thirty years accurately. He helped set up two environmental charities on Merseyside, Energy Projects Plus and Wirral Environmental Network, and has been an employee, a consultant and now a trustee of the first.

In 1997 he became a trustee of the UK Vegetarian Society, the charity founded in 1847, and in time its chair. IVU’s own records date his appointment as treasurer of the International Vegetarian Union to 1999; he has held the post ever since, alongside a seat on the International Council, which makes him the longest-serving officer in the organisation. Later he became a trustee and then chair of Vegetarian for Life, the charity dedicated to older vegetarians — a constituency almost nobody else was working for.

In 2004, in the middle of all this, he went back to university for a master’s degree in digital media production.

David and Christine moved to Glastonbury in 2009 and now live in a village a few miles outside the town. There he became chair of the parish council and held the post for seven years, standing down when deteriorating hearing made it the right moment to retire — the same support role, applied to potholes and planning applications.

He has sailed dinghies since the mid-1990s and is a qualified yacht skipper. On land, a long fascination with computing sits alongside astrophotography: telescopes, long exposures and a documented interest in the structure of the universe that is of a piece with everything else he has spent his life looking into.