56 TIMBER SUPPLIES DURING THE WAR 



the British Army at the Front. We had dispatched 

 to the troops at the Front an enormous quantity 

 of English-grown timber. By reason of the enor- 

 mous demands made on shipping for the transport 

 of the necessary materials required for munitions 

 and other purposes, the available tonnage which 

 we had to bring in imported timber was necessarily 

 curtailed, and as a result further steps were taken 

 by the formation under the War Office control of 

 a Directorate of Timber Supplies that was in 

 February 1917 the intents and purposes of the 

 Director being more particularly to utilise our 

 own island resources of timber. At the end of 

 May this Directorate was taken over by the Board 

 of Trade, and the present Timber Control instituted. 

 It might interest them to know what the Depart- 

 ment had been doing. He had had the figures taken 

 out, and he found that the Timber Department, 

 as constituted since The Home-Grown Timber 

 Committee came into being, had purchased some- 

 thing like 75,000,000 cubic feet of timber of all 

 kinds. Some of it they had handed over to various 

 Colliery Associations, and, as they knew, collieries 

 were now under Government control, and they 

 were trying to help them to get wood to carry on 

 their work in the mines ; and other timber they 

 had handed over to merchants who had been in the 

 vicinity when the Department had been able to 

 offer it. He would emphasise the valuable assist- 

 ance and co-operation of the owners of these stand- 

 ing woods. Not only did they give facilities for 

 acquiring them, but in many cases they had been 

 good enough to place at the disposal of the Depart- 

 ment their own sawmills and also lend the assist- 

 ance of their expert foresters. That side of the 

 question was, in his judgment, a rather important 



