Part of the girl squad working with FC Forest Research at Kilmun, Dunoon circa 1951
This photograph is courtesy of Joyce Holt (Joyce Lockhart) of Edinburgh who initially contacted Forestry Memories in 2008 and submitted a 1945 news paper cutting of school children working in the Forestry Commission Uig forest nursery at Benmore near Dunoon. That image can be seen on Photograph No 290 on this website which includes names of the children (Joyce included) and her eloquent and vivid account of working in the nursery during the wartime period.
Above is a lovely image of three young university students on summer work with the Forestry Commission Forest Research section paused in their tasks on the hill above Strone Point. Behind the group is a view of Loch Long. The group are looking down the Firth of Clyde. They are named by Joyce from the left as:
“Myself, Joyce Lockhart from Dunoon.
Mary Nimmo, girl from Dunoon, who collected me in the mornings, then we cycled to the home of Doreen Selby.
Catherine Campbell from Tarbert, Loch Fyne, (also Dunoon Grammar School) who worked with the team for about a week. You can distinguish her by the pale fawn dungarees she is wearing while the rest of us wore navy
Photographer was Sheila Thomson, from Sandbank, who was a lovely blonde girl who sent me that photo not long before she died.
Doreen Selby lived just opposite the old Convalescent Homes in Dunoon. She was absent on the day the photograph was taken”.
Joyce’s descriptive comments below are a compilation from several emails she sent explaining the work that she and her colleagues were involved in over a number of summer holiday periods. This inspiring account is a glimpse into the lives of girls born and brought up in a rural and small town community in the west of Scotland during the 1940s and early 1950s. Included are their steps into the world of work traditionally carried out by men and then moving through university and college qualifications into very notable academic careers some of which were conventional male bastions. These were all serious steps on the long march to equality. It is indeed an honour for Forestry Memories to be able to tell a little about these events and we are deeply indebted to Joyce for sharing some of her recollections.
Joyce continues:
“The photograph of the research section is taken from just above Strone Point, but looking over to Blairmore. It was probably taken by Sheila Thomson since she does not appear. Sheila herself sent me a copy many years later when I happened to write to her asking for memories.
The Squad names of the four girls who normally worked together were:
Sheila Thomson from Sandbank
Doreen Selby from Dunoon
Mary Nimmo from Dunoon
Joyce Lockhart from Dunoon
The route to work took the team on to the High Road to Sandbank, where we picked up Sheila Thomson at Travancore on the High Road going down into Sandbank. Then the team of 4 cycled on to Benmore Nursery, or if required to the Kilmun Church or to Thomson's house, roughly Kilmun, where we could leave our bikes and be transported by van to Glenbranter or the hill above Strone Point.
Sheila Thomson lived in Inveraray latterly and wrote a history of Inveraray, a copy of which I occasionally see on the shelves of the Library in the National Records Section on the edge of Princes Street. Both she and Doreen Selby became graduates of Art Schools - Sheila the Glasgow Art School and Doreen from a London one. Doreen had a real skill in capturing the faces of her friends - she could sketch the whole class in a few strokes of her pencil. Mary Nimmo was the sporty one, usually the school champion at various events, went to Jordanhill Teachers Training College and taught in Cowal. I have at least 7 Universities in USA and Australia (more if you count our years in the European Union) on my CV, for I had an academic career in Chemistry, never fated to get back to Cowal or even Scotland except in the vacations. My late husband was a Prof of Electronics at Newcastle, and very well known. We used separate names to avoid confusion, thus I am still l known as Joyce Lockhart.
The important locations to me were Glasgow University, my alma mater, London University for my next degree and about 5 years on the staff of Royal Holloway College, then Columbia Uinversity in New York, back to London, then Newcastle University for my permanent position. Alas I was normally the only woman on the teaching strength of the Inorganic Chemistry Department - that at least has changed over the years and now there are women professors, then unheard of!
For what it's worth, I can give you more detail of the work I did in my summers in Forestry.
I began my forestry summers when the war on Japan had not yet finished, 1945, but after VE Day I was still at school till 1950 (Dunoon Grammar). There were always a substantial number of teenagers from Dunoon and Sandbank who went to the Forestry at Benmore every summer. How lucky we were. I remember persuading fellow students to get a job in Forestry for the summer - that backfired and the boyfriend went to Inverliever instead. I remember some very senior Dunoon Grammar School pupils there from 1945, the year I left Primary School for the Secondary. I think 1949 was the first forestry year I worked for Mr Thomson in the Research Section, and we formed that squad of 4 - Sheila Thomson from Sandbank, Doreen Selbie, Mary Nimmo and myself, Joyce Lockhart, from Dunoon. I no longer remember Thomson's initials for of course it was a formal relationship. Mr Thomson lived close to where John Jackson the Head Forester lived, in Forestry cottages on the Kilmun side of the road around Holy Loch. We girls worked on experimental plots and added nitrochalk etc to certain sections to assess its effect. We were just the slaves - never learned what it was all for till I learned the name nitrochalk and as a chemist could verify its composition. We still just weeded! We gradually were trusted to do more.
One facet of the weeding I remember well - the old Sitka Rash. Some people got horrible arms from that and the amazing Cowal Midges: the most fearsome creature in Cowal in the early morning and late at dusk. Perhaps the most important thing was How to Conquer the Midge! We swore by 'burning the hessian bags' – don’t know why we had so many bags, but the end use could be burning to fight the wee beasties away. We four girls, as the squad of 4, entered the Forest Garden leaving our bikes close to the top of the Kilmun graveyard and the Argyll Mausoleum and found our way to the tree plots we were working on, just brashing or taking a hyuck to the bracken where it was needed, for the most part.
Swathed in midge cream. The stillest days, full of sun in my memory. We then learned many names of trees (for it was a most unusual and now a very famous development, with trees from all round the world, to find out which would thrive in those conditions). We loved the Nobilis Firs. On my last visit, there were better paths for visitors, but the same silence enveloped the whole side of the Kilmun Hill, now that the Polaris subs and their ship the Hunley have gone from that lovely loch. There was a patch on the same hill, above Strone, where we sometimes worked. It looked over to the Blairmore side. There was a wee research nursery right on the 'nose' of Strone Hill, just beyond the Holy Loch - That had an incredible view of the whole Firth - which we took for granted, as our birthright! From there the squad of 4 watched the very noisy trials of the old steamer the Jeanie Deans I think (may have been the Lucy Ashton), which had some specialist machinery added to replace her old paddle mechanism. The Strone Hill no longer has that experimental plot, but its outline can still be seen due to the change in the vegetation on the site. I mark it from any passing steamer or ferry I catch.
The best thing about the Forestry work was that you got to see such lovely places including Glenbranter Forest, the estate Harry Lauder bought for his son, who was killed in France in the war. Sir Harry then gave it over to the Forestry Commission I think. I knew of the Harry Lauder connection for there is a memorial to his son and his wife there. The son was lost at the Battle of the Somme. His mother, by then Lady Lauder, died not long after. One of my aunts was asked to sing at her funeral in Dunoon. Harry Lauder had left Glenbranter by then and had a house in the Bullwood, called Lauder Ha' and he was still a local figure when I was a tot.
I remember how steep the hillsides were at Glenbranter as we struggled to measure quarter girths for every nth tree in a set, on incredibly steep hills. The four of us were slimmer then than we ever were before or since! I often wish I could reproduce the effect but only youth and health would enable that. Mr Thomson was lucky to pick the four of us for, as well as being capable, and strong, we could be trusted to work in forests as a team of 4, brashing, and measuring and whatever was needed. He would hand us a tape measure and indicate what to do, and off he would go, maybe returning as we clocked off. He could trust us with the measurements. But we had to leave our bikes at his office and he drove us back there to collect our bikes, and then we cycled back to Dunoon.
My whole forestry career toppled one evening, when I was a second year student at Glasgow University and on my summer break, still working with the Forestry, and cycling home across the head of the Holy Loch and down to the Sandbank terminus, where I came a cropper. My coat belt in my handlebar basket came loose and got into the front forks of my bike, and I sailed over the handlebars. Bruising was extensive! I had to push the bike all the way home (about 3 miles up and over Sandbank Hill back home). The site of the Lochan on the hill side of the Sandbank Road was where my mother's family (the real locals) lived in the distant past, Dunloskin, above the Lily Loch or Loch Loskin. No bike, no transport. End of job.
I have recently visited the Memorial to John Jackson in the Forest Garden (as it was called in the days when our little squad worked there, not Arboretum). Until as recently as five years ago I read a copy of the Dunoon Observer and Argyllshire Standard every week. John Jackson often wrote letters to the paper in his retirement, and he lived to a very great age. I took the paper until the paper was sold and no longer had what I called the real news! My father was the local journalist in the distant past. My son drove me over for the day and we visited Glenbranter, Benmore Gardens, pointed out where the sawmills used to be on the right side of the road going north where Mr Potts used to work the forestry horse, a huge gentle beast which could draw the logs downhill to the sawmill. We then headed for Kilmun, the Forest Garden, then on to Dunoon”.
Below this text is the PDF which includes again Joyce’s description on work as a Lumberkid as shown in an earlier website entry No 290.
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Groups: Forest Research, Forestry Areas, Groups of people