A NEW book by social historian Mairi Stewart tells the stories of the men and women who shaped, and whose lives were shaped by, the biggest transformation of the Scottish countryside in the 20th century. Before there were bestsellers about how to chop Norwegian wood, Scotland had the lumberjills. This extract from Voices of the Forest shows what their job entailed.

THE Women’s Timber Corps (WTC), affectionately known as the “lumberjills”, was a section of the better known Women’s Land Army set up in April 1942. The young women who joined – many from the city and unused to manual labour – were involved in every aspect of timber production, including measuring, felling with axe and saw, snedding, dragging out the logs with horses and working in sawmills. Most received a basic training in forestry skills at Shandford Lodge near Brechin and Park House near Banchory and were then sent out to work in the forests of Scotland.

A new recruit to the timber industry was Chris Renton. Brought up in Milnathort, she was just 19 when she joined the WTC in 1941. Sitting in her Kinross home some 70 years later, she explains why: “My mother was speaking to somebody whose daughter had been with the Forestry Commission and I thought, oh well, that would be nice ... My mother had said that this lady told her she just plants out little seedlings, and I’d thought, this will do for me! ... At that time it wasn’t lumberjills; it was still the Land Army. So, lo and behold, I went to the Forestry.”

She still laughs at the memory of her journey from Milnathort to Tannadice near Dundee, where they were picked up and driven by lorry to Shandford Lodge: “We got to Tannadice and ... one of the girls came with a silver fox fur on her coat – and heels like this! And a Veronica Lake hairstyle – and I thought, ‘Oh God, that’s a lovely coat! I would love that!’ But my mother would never have allowed me to wear it!’” However, the poor girl wearing the fur and heels soon discovered that her glamorous attire was not quite the ticket for a newly appointed lumberjill. “It was an old broken-down lorry wi’ a corrugated iron shelter on the back! So this girl who had the high heels on had an awful job getting in – because she’d a tight skirt on underneath!”

Forestry work suited Chris fine as she was a country girl and used to hard work, unlike so many of the “townies”. But her vision of planting out seedlings was soon shattered. On her first morning at Shandford Lodge, “We’d to be up at seven and we’d to walk to the wood and I was under the impression that I was going to be planting out little seedlings and measuring trees. But the first thing that happened was this man put an axe in my hand! And I said, ‘Oh! What am I going to do with this?’ And he said, ‘You’ll soon find out!’”

They were soon taught how to handle an axe, to sned trees, and then to fell them. After four weeks, she was sent with six other girls to Haddington, where, unlike many others, they were lucky to be billeted in private digs. “We were just told where to go. We were working for Cruden, Cruden of Musselburgh – a private sawmill.”

Chris and her fellow lumberjills worked all over East Lothian on big estates such as Lennoxlove, Saltoun, Drem, Aberlady, Eaglescairnie and Humbie. Most of them “had drives, big long drives and that’s where a lot of the big timber was – the hardwood – oak and beech – and that was very hard work. The woodmen that we met, the first two or three – they weren’t very sure about us at first. They thought ‘these lassies will never fell trees!’, but we did. It was a different life entirely because we’d never done this before.”

Cruden’s timber operation specialised in construction timber, and although her job was mainly out in East Lothian felling trees, she was interested to learn about what became of the big oaks, beeches and sycamores that she was felling: “If it was a wet day, they took us to the sawmill and they showed us there what happened to the wood. It was sliced into pieces for making furniture and ... for making doors and windows for houses. There was a lot of houses needed and it was done for that ... and it was also used for coffins. They sliced it – they could slice it thin as that – they took all the bark off first – and then they put it in the sawmill and then we watched as the saw went round and sliced it. Made it into planks. It was really quite interesting for me – I quite enjoyed it.”

She was sorry to see the big broadleaved trees being felled, but it had to be done. “It was all the war effort – you had to do it. And I have to say, I enjoyed every minute of it ... It was a great adventure, and it was a hard job – but there was satisfaction.’ All this time later, she can easily recall all the different trees that they felled and their uses – larch for telegraph poles, oak and beech for construction and coffins, birch for reels for the well-known thread-making firm J. & P. Coats of Paisley.

If one is privileged enough to spend time with a lumberjill today, some 70 years after their experience of war work in Scottish forests and timber yards, you are likely to hear similar sentiments from all of them. Perhaps time has faded the memory of just how hard the work was and how difficult the conditions could be, but the sheer delight in the way these memories are recounted is testament to how happy that period was in the life of these girls. Hilda Laing, looking back on how it affected them, comments, “At 18 we were just girls. It certainly made you grow up fast.” Mary MacDonald, a frail lady with a sparkle in her eyes sums it up. “It made me. I wish they would take me back.”

An edited extract from Voices of the Forest by Mairi Stewart (John Donald, £20) www.birlinn.co.uk

