Commemorative Groves
Towards the end of my time as National Development Officer I applied for a Churchill Travelling Fellowship. I had received literature about the work of the Save the Redwoods League in California and was keen to see how they raised funds.
A similar opportunity to visit the USA five years earlier when I was working for John Player in Nottingham had rekindled my interest in conservation. Players was one of several large local companies who, together with the local authorities, sponsored the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship. This enabled young people working in the area to visit North America for up to four months.
The application process made me think about my priorities. I had always been interested in nature, and in the early 1970s conservation was beginning to hit the headlines. President Nixon had warned of the consequences of environmental damage as early as 1970 in his “State of the Union” speech to congress. One hundred years before the USA had designated Yellowstone as the first National Park and I was keen to see more. A combination of work and personal interests enabled me to spend four months visiting parks and natural areas in the USA and Canada.
The idea of the scholarship was to reinforce the bond forged between the USA and the UK during WWII and provide a better understanding of each others surprisingly different cultures. The travelling allowance was small, ensuring that in order to survive on the budget scholars stayed with American families – it largely worked. I had contacts in the advertising business and started by visiting agency offices in Manhattan and Montreal. I crossed Canada by train to Hinton, in the foothills of the Rockies in Alberta and close to the Jasper National Park. After spending some time with my parents, who had emigrated in the late 1960s, it was time to visit the west coast of the USA where I first discovered the Redwoods. On the long Greyhound bus trip back to the east coast I read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and became increasingly convinced that I needed a change of direction.
The Churchill Fellowship, five years later, was a trip on a much shorter time scale as Woodland Trust affairs wouldn’t allow more time and had the specific purpose of visiting the Save the Redwoods League. In particular their “Memorial Groves” fundraising approach which raised substantial one-off donations to purchase remaining areas of forest which would then be managed by the Department of Forests. Large scale funding was less likely in the UK but I was able to apply what I learned to the Trust legacy work and later with the “Create a Wood” campaign”.