Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain's WWII Lumberjills

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

The Second World War placed a tremendous strain on Britain's natural resources. One of the most important materials for fuelling the war effort was wood - used to make everything from ammunition boxes to Spitfires, Britain's timber would be harvested at an unprecedented rate during the war. It was a forgotten army of women who stepped up to make this happen, felling trees through freezing winters, splitting logs in hazardous sawmills and managing entire forestry operations.So what did this job entail? How risky was it, and how were these 'Lumberjills' considered by society at that time? Dan is joined by Joanna Foat, author of Lumberjills: Britain's Forgotten Army, to uncover the obscured world of the Women's Timber Corps.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. During the Second World War, Britain faced a grave crisis. Well, several grave overlapping crises, to be honest, but one of them was a shortage of wood. Britain imported a vast amount of its wood, and it needed wood for a galaxy of reasons to support the war effort. As a result, the British government was so desperate

that they did the unimaginable. They turned to women. I know. They turned to women to chop down Britain's trees. So this is a podcast which, unusually for me, celebrates the chopping of trees. But let's give them a pass on this particular one, given they faced a crisis of fascist forces on the other side of the channel, and before anyone had joined the dots on the catastrophe that we were unleashing on the planet, these women formed the Women's Timber Corps. They went into Britain's forests and chopped down trees.

They became Lumberjills. It is a great story, and I've got the expert on the Lumberjills on the podcast right now. She's Joanna Fote. She's written a book called Lumberjills, Britain's Forgotten Army. And you can look at some really cool pictures of these young women at her website, thelumberjills.uk. It's really worth going and looking at some of these incredible, strong, powerful young women.

Chop and wood, chop and wood. Everyone's favourite pastime. So on the podcast, there is yet another contribution by women in the Second World War that's been largely overlooked. Not anymore though folks, it's been on the podcast. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Jo, thanks for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Lovely to be here. It's yet another secret unit of women working away to advance the war effort who we've forgotten to remember who are the women's timber core so the women's timber core were a group of women who were working in the forests in world war ii they were actually doing the same job in world war ii

but there was thousands of them and they were up and down the country and they were felling trees with an axe and saw and working in all different branches of forestry. But Jo, surely that's lumberjacking, that's man's work. Yeah, well, that's what people thought at the beginning of World War II. So at the beginning of World War II, we were desperately short of forestry workers. We needed timber for the war effort. Can I jump in there, Jo? Why do you need wood in a war of steel and high explosives? Well, that's a good question. So wood was very, very important during wartime. We were the largest importer of timber in the world at the beginning of World War II. We imported 96% of our wood. We needed it for many different uses during wartime. For example, pit props.

Half of the wood we needed went down coal mines. Really? We needed pit props to keep the coal mines running. And we needed coal for all of the industries of war. So it was really important for munitions, factories. And a pit prop is just like loads of little support. You know, they keep the coal mine from collapsing on the miners. Yeah, that's right. They hold the ceilings of the coal mines up we needed millions of tons of pit props during

the wartime and colliery owners were desperately worried that we wouldn't have enough because we imported so much of our wood and we only had seven months stockpiled so therefore we needed to rely on homegrown timber that was kind of one use wood, but the other uses were railway sleepers, telegraph poles, ship building, and it was also really important for aircraft construction. So mosquito aircraft were built with a lot of wood and were really important during wartime, obviously. We also needed it for packaging for bombs and construction for army bases, packaging for food supplies. The list goes on and on. And we also needed to put charcoal to make gas masks and a special wood was used for making

high explosive, charcoal's high explosives. So you say that Britain used to import a lot of this wood, so I guess from Canada or Scandinavia? Yes, that's right. The Baltics, one of the last countries we imported from was France. And then we had to rely on imports from further afield, like from Canada. However, it was such a bulky import that we couldn't keep bringing it in because we needed those ships for food. And with the kind of advent of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942, pretty much those timber imports stopped. And we had to solely rely on our own homegrown timber. But we only had a tiny forestry industry at the time because in World War I, we had felled half our trees and woodlands. And so our main effort then was to replant and grow our forests again in case there was another war.

So the Forestry Commission was set up after the First World War in 1919, and their remit was to rebuild our forests and replant our forests. We chopped down half our woodlands in the First World War. Yes, that's right. Just when you didn't think we needed another catastrophic consequence of the First War, that is wild. So we needed lots of muscle to start chopping these trees down for the war effort. Yeah, we only had 14,000 forestry workers and some of them worked in furniture kind of workshops and things. So basically people were worried because all of the young, fit, strong men

were going off to fight in the war. So the government and the timber industries were thinking, well, who can we employ? Meanwhile, the Women's Land Army is forming and lots of women are making themselves ready for work because they wanted to do their bit for the war like their brothers. But the timber industry was looking at all of the men they could kind of try and find during this desperate time. So they were looking at dockyard workers. They were looking at British prisoners, male students. And they were even thinking maybe kind of men that are kind of on the dole or kind of on street corners that don't have jobs, that are homeless, maybe they could get, you know,

like children, male schoolboys to come and fell these trees before they even considered the Women's Land Army. And the Women's Land Army were there and waiting. But of course, this was a very tough man's job. And women were the fairer sex. So they really didn't think that women could do this job. When you think about the lumberjack, I'm not thinking about Monty Python, but it seems like the most male job imaginable, isn't it? I mean, it's just the sort of most masculine thing you could possibly do. And then so here are these just army of women getting it done in the woods. army of women getting it done in the woods. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, your typical kind of like stereotype is the kind of muscly, checked shirt, kind of beer drinking, kind of pipe smoking,

bearded man. So it was really out of the question at the beginning that the women could do this job, but they needed measurers. They considered women for lighter forestry duties to begin with. These measurers were needed to measure the diameter of a tree to work out the cubic quantity of wood. And they decided to begin with that they would need these kind of super highly qualified women that had been to university and studied maths. But of course, women didn't really do that back in the 1940s. It was very uncommon for families to send daughters to continue their education. It was normally only the more wealthy families that could afford to do that. Most women back in those days, they were sent out to work in domestic service. They worked, you know, a shop assistant and

hairdressers. And so they really hadn't been to university to study math. That wasn't a thing they did. Anyway, so they did employ measurers to begin with. And those were that type of women that were called the brains of the outfit. But aside from that, there was all this heavy felling work that needed doing. That was a bit of a problem. When I started researching this, it was back in 2012. And it was that wonderful, exciting year of the London Olympics. And I met this lady called Enid. And she was based in Cornwall, but she was very excited to tell me that she had just missed out on an opportunity to compete in the Olympics in 1938. She was an incredible athlete. She was a swimmer, but she also competed at golf. And I think that must have helped her with the swing of the axe. Because when she joined forestry section of the Women's Land

Army in Scotland, within a month she was promoted and put in charge of 40 women and training them up to fell trees. And then so all over the country, Women's Land Army workers were recruited into forestry work, but at a very slow rate because the prejudice was still there that they didn't think women could do this job but women were up and down the country were felling trees it wasn't until 1942 when the battle of the atlantic started and our timber supplies were so urgent they then decided to set up the women's timber corps and that was the first kind of official mass recruitment and training of women in that forestry sector and so training camps were set up across the country where 120 women a month

were sent to these training centres and were trained in four lines of work felling, sawmilling, haulage and measuring. Did they recruit particular kinds of women? Did women volunteer for these sort of duties rather than aviation or encryption or anything like that? How did they end up in this role? I think it depended to a degree on what was on offer at the time. So sometimes they were given a couple of offers when they kind of, you know, it was either the Wrens or the Women's Land Army. Most of them went in through the Women's Land Army and it was only later on that they moved over to the Women's Timber Corps. went in through the Women's Land Army and it was only later on that they moved over to the Women's Timber Corps. But some of them chose it because, you know, if given a choice between working in a

munitions factory or a happy, healthy life outdoors, working in the Women's Land Army, they kind of preferred that option. So there's a little bit of personal choice in that. And there's quite a few women that I met that they said, oh, well, my friend joined up and she said it was so fantastic. I wanted to join too so um yeah word of mouth and and that kind of thing because I've talked to lots of women who served in the war and lots of jobs and some of them were pretty quite boring but this would have this I mean I love chopping wood but have I got a romantic view of it or would this have been one of the better postings do you think well there's definitely two sides of it. There is that romantic view of it. And

the women that I met, they loved being out in nature and being out in the forest and being there, a group of women together. They were kind of under the canopy of these beautiful trees and seeing the wildlife around them. And they love that side of it. But they also love the freedom that gave them, you know, they were free from the rules of society about how women should behave. So there they were doing this job, wearing trousers, which was unusual for women in the 1940s. So they could sit if they wanted to with their legs astride a log and smoke a pipe if they wanted to. You know, they really could. They were assimilating into the work and into the job. They were felling 10 ton trees.

They were driving haulage trucks. They were measuring timber to calculate the figures that the government depended on during wartime for timber supplies. And this was something that they could never have imagined they'd be doing before the war, having come from very domesticated and kind of feminine jobs, leaving home for the first time to finding themselves out in the forest, living out in nature with a group of women, there was incredible camaraderie and confidence, physical confidence that they had. They developed very big muscles and just this great kind of friendships with

each other. They would love sitting around a fire and kind of making tea and but yeah if they were lucky they were getting to a dance in the evening i bet they were dancing that was one side of it so that was the kind of nice side of it the other side is the winters so you know a lot of the women said the thought of getting through another winter was absolutely terrifying and grueling you know know, they would be working in, often in damp, wet clothes if it was raining. Their clothes wouldn't dry overnight next to a little kind of wood stove. And so they'd be putting on their wet boots and their wet clothes the next day and going out to work again in the forest. And, you know, some of them said we were working in snow, standing knee deep in snow, eating beetroot sandwiches,

thinking we never want another picnic ever again in our lives. Yeah, so very gruelling in the winter times. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about the lumberjills. More after this. To be continued... we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

And did they face prejudice or abuse? Yeah, they did. Certainly to begin with, at the beginning of the war, they were told that they were more ornamental than useful. The men said they never intended women to take over the jobs of skilled men. And they were told that they weren't wanted. Some of them were told they were useless. And they got really quite fed up with it. I think when people don't believe that you can do something, there's this kind of inner drive that kicks in where you think, yeah, I'm going to prove to you I can do this job. And so there's often stories about the girls working kind of like through blizzards, felling trees, and the men are saying, why are you doing this? And they're like, because we want to prove that we can do this job to you. There was a girl called Bella, and she heard her supervisor saying, I don't know why these

women are here. They're really not helping very much. So she said to him, why don't we work either end of a crosscut saw? Then we can see kind of like how good you think I am kind of thing. And so he accepted the challenge. And the next day they worked either end of a crosscut saw. They worked all morning into the afternoon. And Alan said to her you know Bella you can stop now if you like that's it's fine you know you've been doing quite well and she said no I'm absolutely fine I'll carry on so they carried on working in the afternoon and he said again you can stop now, Bella. And she thought to herself, even though she was utterly exhausted, she said there was no way she was going to stop. And they worked until the end of the day

when they had felled 120 trees between them. Her record went up in the office and they were never questioned again. So they certainly proved themselves. I bet, let me tell you something, I bet those pre-war male lumberjacks were lazy ass bunch of pipe smoking fatties sitting around chatting all day can you imagine oh god i think i think the the standard was kind of higher for the women than it was for the men yeah well i'm telling you as a bloke that is certainly true

god you mentioned were they sleeping in forest camps? Were they billeted in communities? Forestry is obviously in some quite remote and strange parts of the country for lots of these women who might come from urban centres. Yeah, that's right. You know, it was very unusual for, you know, someone from London or from the big cities in the north to then suddenly find themselves in the middle of nowhere out in a kind of a stone body in Scotland. So they did often stay in very remote places. Some of them were lucky enough to stay in a purpose-built camp where they were a bit better provided for, had places to dry their clothes and bathrooms to wash their hair and stuff.

But often, my goodness, it was so primitive when they were living out in the wild. And my goodness, it was so primitive when they were living out in the wild. So some women said they knew the life of a cave woman where they have to go and wash in the stream. And they had a bucket and chucket arrangement for toilets. Then the other women that were traveling around, they were itinerant workers. So they would move from forest to forest. And each time they moved, they'd have to find new billets. to forest and each time they moved they'd have to find new billets and that proved to be very difficult to get people to either accept to have these kind of strange kind of jodhpur clad women coming and living in their homes who couldn't pay as much as the men they all said it was very hard

to find new billets so often they'd opt to stay where they were if they found a billet they would end up cycling further and further to the forest they were working in. So I know down in the New Forest, Diana Underwood said she was cycling 20 miles to her place of work in the morning, working all day and then cycling another 20 miles back again, which is just extraordinary, isn't it? That is extraordinary. I live in the New Forest. That would be a nightmare today. But with the roads in those conditions and bikes, let alone in the winter, that must have been really dangerous apart from anything else god that's extraordinary

what other tell me just tell me about some of these women and some of the stories that people have interviewed so one of the things that you're talking about something being dangerous well one of the things that they all had to do was the haulage work and that involved them working with horses and tractors. So they would drive these massive caterpillar tractors. And that was kind of dragging these big logs out of the woodlands to get them off to the lorries, off to the railway stations, off to the coal mines. And the demand for pit props was always urgent. This job involved a certain amount of weightlifting these pit props up onto the lorry and so the women said they got muscles where they never knew they had muscles and certainly the

photographs of the girls then they had huge biceps and they just looked really incredibly strong but once they'd loaded these lorries up common practice was for them to jump on top hang on for dear life while the drivers drove them down to the nearest railway station. And that was really dangerous. And they said they knew they shouldn't have done it, but they had no choice because those pickprops were urgent and there was no one else to unload them at the other end if they didn't go. And unfortunately, there were fatalities like that.

It was very dangerous. Aside from the other dangers of working in sawmills, one of the ladies, Mary, she lost her thumb, which was obviously a very kind of dangerous thing that could happen. And just felling trees is one of the most dangerous jobs that you can do. So some of the wonderful stories, I met this lady called Margaret, and she told me about how she was felling a tree in a North London oak forest. And it was the height of summer.

It was a really hot day and the trees were in full foliage. They were asked to fell the trees, the oak trees with a white dot on them. So she found this tree and she started working on it. It took her a couple of hours to clear away the understory and then work on the bottom of the tree where they do the diamond and then they cut the other side and it gets to that point where the tree is just about to go and it's teetering on its edge and there's this word that she shouted, timber! And the tree starts shifting away from the canopy above and all of a sudden she hears this strange pinging noise and she thinks what's that strange haven't heard that before

the tree comes crashing down it kind of shakes the earth beneath your feet then after that the job was to chop off all the branches and process it gets it ready for the sawmills so because it was a very hot day um they were quite worried about forest fires um starting and while they were processing chopping the branches off they noticed smoke rising from the bushes around them so they quickly ran over at which point a whole group of policemen jumped up from the bushes they'd been smoking um and they said you're under arrest for sabotage and they were like what have we done and they said well you've taken the phone lines down in the canopy above

and those phone lines went straight to churchill's war rooms so they got in a bit of trouble well i sincerely hope that sense prevailed and they did not in fact get prosecuted no they didn't after the war i mean we've I've talked to so many women who were thrown out of various branches of the services. Were these women allowed to continue? Did many of them want to continue? And were they allowed to continue? Women got married and had children, and that meant they left anyway.

But yes, certainly a lot of them did want to carry on, and they weren't allowed to. So in terms of felling trees, that was kind of, we didn't want to fell any more trees after the war because we had really exhausted our supplies. I mean, the forests were absolutely devastated after the Second World War. We had felt more wood and trees from our woodlands and forests than ever before in history. We produced 60% of our timber needs from forests in the UK, and we produced about 18 million tonnes of wood. So we didn't want to carry on doing that, but there were

jobs still needing to be done, like planting trees and other work. But often their jobs were given to prisoners of war, and they were encouraged back into domestic service. But unlike other services during wartime, they didn't get any recognition for what they did. They didn't get any grants or gratuities. They weren't allowed to keep their uniforms and they weren't allowed to take part in Remembrance Day parades because they were not part of the fighting forces. And so many of the women that I spoke to,

they said they felt really upset. They definitely felt like the forgotten army. They felt that they should have got some recognition or some acknowledgement. And yeah, they just, I could hear it in their voices. They just sounded so kind of upset about it. The fact that they'd worked so hard and sacrificed so much and, you know, really it was tough work not to get anything at the end of the war. It was only in 2008 when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister that they at last got a badge. But the women's timber core workers got a Weed Chief badge, the Women's Land Army badge.

So it wasn't quite right for them. But they did say better late than never. It seems so cruel, almost like it's malicious. Why the almost the brutality of just no recognition? I mean, it's just straightforward misogyny or patriarchy? Or was the authority somehow embarrassed? Yeah, well, I've often wondered the same thing. And I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head. I think it's both of those things. I think, you know, for a start, it's definitely sexism against the women and also a certain degree of disbelief that they didn't believe that the women could do this. There were so many jokes and like cartoons and newspapers

about the women at the beginning of the war, ridiculing them. So I think there could have been a certain degree of embarrassment about the fact that women did this job as well. they could have been in a certain degree of embarrassment about the fact that women did this job as well. But essentially, they were hugely successful. There was probably between 15,000 and 18,000 women working in the forest during World War II. Those measurers I told you about at the beginning, they had a bit of power because they were in charge of wages and figures and money, and they were promoted often to supervisors, foremen, and in some cases they were put in charge of whole forestry operations and even the men. Yeah, it's funny how threatening it is for men in charge,

the idea that women can be as good or better than them. It's a strange, and it continues. It continues to this day. It does. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and tell everyone what how we can learn more about this how we can get hold of your book yes of course i've got two books the first one is called lumberjills britain's forgotten army and this is a history book and it's written in the words of the 60 women that i met so it's all their lovely

stories their funny stories and the stories of hardship and and how they coped in the words of the 60 women that I met. So it's all their lovely stories, their funny stories and the stories of hardship and how they coped in the forest. So that's the history book. And then I've also written a novel called The Lumberjills Stronger Together. And that is fictionalizing the stories of some of the women that I met. And it's taking three main characters, one wealthy debutante, a girl that works in a factory and a more kind of bohemian character and it's following their journeys as they go into working in forestry. Well, brilliant. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Jo.

You're welcome. you