56 TIMBER SUPPLIES AND FAMINE PRICES 



continues a timber famine in this country may be 

 expected. We do not know what this may mean. 

 We have never experienced such a thing. It is doubt- 

 ful whether the world has ever seen a famine of this 

 nature. On what is the assertion based and what are 

 the steps which should be taken to avert such a 

 calamity? Prices, we all know, are preposterously 

 high. What can be done to bring them down to a 

 more normal level ? 



Before the outbreak of war there had been a con- 

 siderable stringency in the timber market, and at the 

 beginning of August 1914 the prospects of the market 

 in this country were most gloomy. For two or three 

 years antecedent to this date difficulty had been 

 experienced in obtaining loans, and as a consequence 

 the house building trade was in a depressed state. 



Then came the war and with it a quite novel demand 

 for timber niaterials from an unexpected quarter, viz. 

 the Admiralty and War Office. Hutting accommoda- 

 tion, timber and props for trench construction, railway 

 sleepers, barbed wire entanglements, waggons, entrench- 

 ing tools, and so on were all required on a large scale and 

 at short notice. Within a very short time it was dis- 

 covered that the stocks of timber in this country were 

 quite inadequate to supply the demands. Our chief 

 source of supply, our Ally Russia, who sent us before 

 the war about half of our imported European timber 

 materials, to a great extent failed us at a very early 

 stage, since the exports from Petrograd, Riga, and the 

 Finnish ports were closed. As is well known, this 

 closure, with the stoppage of f elUngs in the French pit- 

 wood areas, at once reacted on the pitwood supplies in 



