Obituary: John Dickson

John Abernethy Dickson, civil servant, conservator of forestry: born Udny, Aberdeenshire 19 September 1915; Director-General and Deputy Chairman, Forestry Commission 1968-76; CB 1970; Director, Economic Forestry (Scotland) 1977-84; director, Forest Thinnings Ltd 1979-86, chairman 1981-86; married 1942 Helen Jardine (two daughters); died Edinburgh 20 March 1994.

OVER THE PAST year widespread dismay, across the political spectrum, and not least in great land-owning circles, has forced the Government to put on ice any proposals to privatise or dismantle the Forestry Commission. That the Forestry Commission has achieved untouchable status, bordering on the institutionally sacred, is largely due to a previous generation of dedicated, professional Tree Men, who devoted their working lives to the commission. Prominent among them was John Dickson, Director-General in the crucial years from 1968 to 1976, when a friendly Labour government was succeeded by a Conservative government asking legitimate questions about a nationalised industry.

Under the energetic chairmanship of John Parker, MP for Dagenham and father of the House of Commons, the forestry group of MPs went on a number of visits to the forests of Britain. Dickson would accompany us himself as guide and forest scholar as well as host. As, perforce, a connoisseur of briefers of politicians, I would put Dickson in the First Class Honours division. There was little, if anything, either about trees or about the rather different subjects of timber production and the timber market, that he did not know intimately. Dickson could answer all questions in his precise, authoritative, Buchan-based twang. A handsome man with a twinkle in his eye, he was a superb presenter of fact, an ambassador for forestry.

Dickson was born in Udny, Aberdeenshire, and spent his childhood among the trees of the Dee and the Don with their matchless colours in spring and autumn. He told me that he decided to become a tree man at the advanced age of six. After primary school in Old Meldrum, and secondary school at the rigorous Robert Gordon's College, he went to the local university. Fortunately, Aberdeen at that time was not only a serious science-providing university but also one of the few which offered a postgraduate degree in forestry. Even more fortunate was the fact that Aberdeen benefited from the inspirational presence of Sir John Boyd Orr (later Lord Boyd Orr), and those who surrounded him at the Rowett Research Institute. Three decades later Dickson was to repay his educational debts to Aberdeenshire by giving, as Director General of the Forestry Commission, strong support, justifiably, to the MacAuley Institute of Soil Research. Winning the much-coveted Sutherland Gold Medal in 1938, Dickson joined the Forestry Commission.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, he was ordered to join the Ministry of Supply home-grown timber production department rather than to go into the forces. He told me that he had been embarrassed by this as a fit young man but was told that it was in the British interest to meet wartime needs by providing as much timber as possible from British forests. During his time in the Ministry of Supply he learnt many of the skills which enabled him to deal so effectively with governments when he reached senior position later in life.

In 1946 he left the Civil Service to rejoin the Forestry Commission. Ten years later he was promoted as Conservator of Forests in the north of Scotland, based in Inverness, a position he occupied for seven years. If you travel past Beauly in directions north you will see all around you the mature monuments to Dickson's extraordinary energy in getting planting done 40 years ago. In 1963 he was again promoted to Director of Forestry for Scotland. He took infinite trouble to show me and interest me, a new MP, in the work that he and his colleagues were undertaking to plant huge acreages of trees on seemingly infertile and useless land. I suppose it is a criticism that in those years he was a protagonist of maximum production, which meant the serried rows of conifers. On the other hand he was extremely keen that, where planting took place near industrial communities and run-down mining villages, the people of the villages should regard the plantations as their own and develop a protective attitude towards them. I shall always remember him meeting the representatives of the communities of Fauldhouse and Stoneyburn in my constituency when coalmines were closing, to persuade them of the potential importance of woodland and forest for their young people planted on marshland.

In 1968 he was promoted to succeed the late Sir Henry Beresford Peirse as Director-General after a successful tenure of the new post of Forestry Commissioner with responsibility for timber harvesting and marketing. Dickson displayed a passionate belief in the promotion of the interests of British forestry in general and the efficiency and cost- effectiveness of the Forestry Commission in particular. His colleagues tell me that it was Dickson above all others who transformed a rather do-good organisation into one of the best and financially one of the most tightly managed agencies of government.

He also made it his business, in Scotland and in London, to develop good professional and personal relations with forestry-owning landlords. He co-operated with them in an effort to modernise the somewhat antique British saw-milling industry. He persuaded the commission to change the largely manual methods of wood harvesting into sophisticated mechanisation processes. By doing this he was one of the founders of the prosperous industry which we know today.

Those of us who have been interested in the rain forests have reason to be grateful for Dickson's work as chairman of the Commonwealth Forestry Association. He led the British delegation to the World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires in 1972 and presided over the Oxford Conference on Forestry in 1974. Between 1968 and 1976, he was chairman of the Standing Committee on Commonwealth Forestry and became Vice-President of the Commonwealth Forestry Association in 1975. His particular contribution stemmed from his expertise in forest thinnings and his realisation that it not only mattered how much rare tropical timber was extracted from a forest, but how much damage was done in the process of that extraction by heavy machinery.

I vividly remember him arguing that, in many parts of South-East Asia and Burma, the best possible machine for timber extraction which had been developed by man was the Asian elephant. Today those with foresight would take the same view. Twenty years ago it was an opinion that was almost derided but then those who heard Dickson state a case knew better than to deride anything that he said on his home ground; he was indeed a world expert.

(Photograph omitted)