BRITAIN’S FOREST REVOLUTION
As the Forestry Commission celebrates its centenary, Charles Watkins reveals how the timber demands of two world wars transformed our countryside
On the Forestry Commission’s centenary, discover how the timber demands of two world wars shaped our countryside.
The First World War changed many things in Britain, and the country’s woodlands were no exception, with the conflict ultimately transforming Britain’s forests.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, there had been little anxiety about timber supplies, but there was soon a shortage. The Royal Navy found itself in greatest need. It desperately required coal for its fleet, which meant increasing production in coal pits around the country. Essential to prevent the new tunnels from collapsing were pit props – made, of course, from timber.
Unfortunately, Britain’s forests were not ready to meet the demand. Scientific, modern forestry – developed in 18th-century Germany and based on careful measurement and management of plantations – had been slow to catch on in Britain. While enthusiastic gentry had long planted trees from around the world, Edwardian forestry had been dominated by wealthy landowners more focused on growing woodlands in which to rear pheasants for shooting rather than for timber production. With the supply of timber from overseas imperiled by German submarine attacks, the government recognised that vigorous action was required to maximise home production. So, in November 1915, the Homegrown Timber Committee chaired by Liberal MP Francis Acland was established to control the supply of timber across Britain.
Progress was rapid. There were 182 government-run sawmills by the end of 1917, supplemented by a further 40 mills run by groups such as the Canadian Forestry Corps and Women’s Forestry Corps. By 1918, 182,000 hectares of woodland had been felled – an area larger than modern-day Greater London.
WOODS OF THE FUTURE
The tree-felling frenzy made the need to plan forestry policy clear. Another committee chaired by Acland was set up in 1916 to investigate how the felled woods should be replenished; whether new land should be planted with trees, and how private landowners could be encouraged to manage their woodlands effectively.
“By 1939, the Commission had acquired 276,000 hectares of land across Britain”
An influential committee member was the German-born forester Sir William Schlich, who, after many years in the Indian Forestry Service, was responsible for training foresters at Oxford University. His five-volume
Manual of Forestry was enormously influential in promulgating German ideas of scientific forestry around the British Empire. The secretary of the committee was the dynamic Australian Roy Robinson, trained at Oxford by Schlich.
The Acland report of 1918 made a strong case for the establishment of a national forestry policy. It identified the dependence on imported timber as a source of weakness during both wartime and peace. A massive expansion of forests over moorland and heaths was necessary, it argued. A new centralised Forestry Commission (FC) would, with help from others, plant 716,000 hectares of forest over the next 80 years.
Things moved quickly and the FC was established on 1 September 1919, with the tenacious Roy Robinson appointed to the key role of technical commissioner. The war had catalysed the introduction of a state forest service and the luxurious forestry traditionally practised on landed estates was now a thing of the past.
In its first 10 years, the FC aimed to establish 81,000 hectares of new woodland, and very nearly achieved it. The commission bought land on the open market, or leased it for 999 years.
Most of the land was marginal upland grazing land of relatively little importance for agriculture. In the lowlands, land chosen included heathlands in Hampshire, Sherwood Forest and Suffolk, and huge areas of recently felled woodland.
A NUMBERS GAME
Planting was by hand and felling by axe and saw; in the interwar years, forestry was barely mechanised. By 1939, 4,300 industrial staff worked directly for the FC; the peak in direct industrial employment was in 1954, at 13,600. This number then fell throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, with the arrival of labour-saving chainsaws. Later, mechanical harvesting made felling even more efficient.
By 1939, the FC had acquired 171,000 hectares (659 square miles) of plantable land in England and Wales and 105,000 hectares (407 square miles) in Scotland. It had planted and acquired 189,000 hectares (731 square miles) of coniferous woodland and 26,600 hectares (103 square miles) of broadleaved woodland.
The Second World War only reinforced the need for state control
of forestry. The war effort once more demanded timber; 11% of all woodlands had been felled by the time of the 1947/9 census. This new planting produced uncompromisingly commercial forests that were modern, regular, efficient and utilitarian. Most planting was in artificial, single-species blocks of conifers. The largest examples were at Galloway Forest Park in Scotland and Kielder Forest in Northumberland; both dominated by fast-growing Sitka spruce.
Meanwhile, private landowners had also been planting similar forests, often supported by the FC, which started paying tree-planting grants in the interwar period, improving these after the war with comprehensive grants for farmers and landowners. (In return, private landowners are obliged to apply for permission to harvest trees, as the FC regulates felling on private land.)
Well before the Second World War, the massive new forests were being criticised by the Friends of the Lake District for blocking public access and for replacing ‘wilderness’ with managed landscapes. The clergyman, schoolmaster and campaigner for national parks, Henry Herbert Symonds, argued that “natural beauty” which provided “emotional resources of escape from the frigid pattern of urban life” was being ruined by the “groping” and “mutilating hands” of the FC. There was an intense dispute in the mid-1930s, with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England negotiating a halt to the afforestation of the central Lake District fells.
ACCESS ALL AREAS
The FC experimented with public access by establishing a National Forest Park in Argyll in 1936 and Snowdonia National Forest Park in 1937. Robinson saw these strictly as a “by-product” of the commission’s primary function: timber production.
The Countryside Act (1968) led to a much greater emphasis on the leisure opportunities of the new forests. The legislation required the FC to take account of “the natural beauty and amenity of the countryside” and landscape architects helped to design less abrasive plantations. The act also encouraged the provision of forest nature trails, marked walking routes and recreational sites. Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000), public access is now allowed in all FC woods, while music festivals within forests are popular.
Increasing interest in nature conservation meant that, by the 1970s, much woodland once classed as worthless ‘scrub’ was highly valued as biodiverse ancient woodland. This led to the development of the Broadleaved
Woodland Policy in 1985, and in recent years the FC has managed woodland and carried out research on veteran trees, ancient woodland and increasing forest biodiversity.
The FC also undertakes important research on forest establishment and harvesting, mechanisation,
herbicides and production control. It has played a vital role in advising landowners about devastating diseases, such as Dutch elm disease in the late 1960s and, more recently, ash dieback, which could kill millions of ash trees over the next 20 years.
UNDER THREAT
In 2011, the future of the FC was threatened by a Government proposal to sell off much state forest. There was a public outcry and the campaign group Save England’s Forests – with the Archbishop of Canterbury, singer Annie Lennox and actress Dame Judi Dench among its vocal supporters – fought off the proposal. This broad level of support shows that the FC is now entrenched in the British imagination as a key element of rural life and landscape.
It is ironic that the First World War was the cause of the introduction of German forestry ideas into the management of British woodland. The FC has been enormously successful in acquiring large tracts of land, planting them uniformly with conifers, and encouraging the management of private woodlands. The thousands of hectares of trees that were planted not only formed the kernel of a strategic reserve of timber, but also challenged traditional landscape values. The geometric form of the new, extensive plantations marched starkly across the semi-natural moors and heaths.
The rise of modern forestry obscured the decline and the final collapse of traditional woodland practices, which were not revived by conservation management until the 1980s. FC policies have been directly responsible for doubling the area of English woodland over the last century, from around 5% of the country to 10%. But will they be able to do the same over the next 100 years? Next month: How will climate change transform Britain’s forests once more?