Nigel Seaman is a Royal Anglian Regiment veteran and founder of Combat2Coffee.
Ipswich born and bred, he joined the Army at 18, in 1992, a proud infantryman with the 1st Battalion (The Vikings). He was a resilient young man, trained to operate wherever and whenever the Army needed him, to do whatever was asked of him. Several demanding tours of Northern Ireland and Bosnia during the 1990s were part of the job.
He found a coffee caravan for sale, bought it with the limited funds available to him, and started doing outreach, going to events, serving coffee, starting important conversations about mental health, sharing his own experiences and offering support and hope. True to his word about supporting others, he bought his coffee from another veteran.
‘It wasn’t good, but people bought into the message,’ he says. Indeed they did; Nigel’s first social media post drew 10,000 hits. Word really got out when he appeared on BBC’s One Show just before the first Covid lockdown and talked about his own battles, how Combat Stress had helped him and his work with Combat2Coffee.
Since that time, Combat2Coffee has continued to gather momentum. Even an operation in September 2020 to amputate his troublesome leg didn’t slow Nigel’s energy and drive.
