When we think about the women who helped keep Britain going during the Second World War, we often picture Land Girls working on farms, nurses caring for the wounded or women filling the factories left behind by men who had gone to war. But thousands of young women were sent somewhere very different. They went into Britain’s forests, where they learned to fell trees, handle enormous saws, operate heavy machinery and carry out work that many people had previously believed women simply could not do.
Today I want to discover more about the women of the Women’s Timber Corps, remembered today as the Lumberjills, because theirs is one of those wartime stories that deserves far more attention. Their work was physically demanding, sometimes dangerous and absolutely necessary, but when the war was over many of them returned home with little recognition for what they had done.
When war broke out in September 1939, Britain faced a serious timber problem. Huge quantities of wood were needed for railway sleepers, pit props for the coal mines, construction, crates, aircraft production and many other parts of the war effort. At the same time, many of the men who would normally have worked in forestry were leaving to join the armed forces. Britain needed more home-grown timber and it needed people who could produce it.
The Women’s Timber Corps was officially established in 1942 as part of the Women’s Land Army. Young women from across the country joined, many of them only in their late teens or early twenties. For some, it was the first time they had ever lived away from home. Some had experience of country life, while others came from towns and cities knowing very little about forestry and suddenly found themselves learning skills they would probably never have imagined needing before the war.
Their jobs varied enormously. Some became fellers, working with axes and long crosscut saws to bring trees down. Others measured timber, worked in sawmills, planted trees, loaded timber, drove tractors and other vehicles or helped move the enormous quantities of wood being taken from Britain’s forests. It was skilled work as well as physical work, and the women had to learn quickly.
The conditions could be extremely tough. Forestry did not stop because it was raining, freezing cold or muddy, and the women could spend long days outside doing exhausting physical labour. Accommodation was not always comfortable either, particularly for women who were moved from one forestry job to another and had to find somewhere to live close to wherever they had been posted.
There was another difficulty too. These women were entering a world which had traditionally been dominated by men, and not everybody believed they belonged there. Some faced prejudice and scepticism from the people around them. But as the war continued, the Lumberjills proved that they were perfectly capable of doing work that had once been dismissed as a man’s job. They developed strength, skill and confidence, and many formed close friendships with the women working beside them.
I think it must have been an extraordinary experience for some of these young women. Imagine being seventeen, eighteen or nineteen, leaving your family behind and suddenly finding yourself in a forest miles from home, learning to use equipment you may never even have seen before. Wartime necessity gave many women opportunities and responsibilities that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years earlier.
Their work continued even after the fighting had ended. The Women’s Timber Corps was finally disbanded in 1946, and many of its members simply returned to ordinary civilian life. The timber they had produced had helped Britain through the war, but the women themselves largely disappeared from the national story.
Decades passed before the contribution of the Women’s Timber Corps began to receive the wider acknowledgement it deserved.
Memorials now stand in their honour, including one in Scotland dedicated to the women who worked in woodlands throughout the country during the Second World War, but many former Lumberjills had already spent most of their lives with relatively little public recognition.
That is perhaps what I find most striking about their story. These were young women who stepped into a difficult and physically demanding world because their country needed them. They proved that many of the assumptions about what women were capable of were simply wrong.
So when we remember the women who helped Britain through the Second World War, perhaps we should remember those working among the trees as well as those on the farms and factory floors. The Lumberjills may not always appear in the most familiar wartime stories, but without their strength, skill and determination, Britain’s forests could never have supplied the timber the country so desperately needed.
Had you heard of the Lumberjills before, or did anyone in your family work in forestry during the Second World War?
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