You'll Enjoy This Story On British Lumber Conditions

From "Timber News" Of London

At the moment when the hardwood trade sorely needs business and every one of the wood consuming industries faces the prospect of lowered output and short time unless the raw material shortage can be relieved, it may seem a little uncharitable to mention the dangers that attend the importation of woods of dubious ldentity and unascertained properties. From some quarters the cry may come-"Any wood is better than no wood" and perhaps the small minority, which cares little for the future of wood, will be willing enough to leave the worrying to the ,consumer, who unfortunately is only too glad to put his hands on any kind of material just now.

The majority of the trade, however, will face the issues squarely and will admit that very real dangers exist. Many of the tropical hardwoods now on ofier to this country, even where their botanical identity has been established, are still an unknown quantity as regards their physical characteristics and usefulness. Others may have come here in trifling quantities before the war and have escaped any systematic 'check-up on their attributes or suitability for a given use. Yet others, already known perhaps in this market as products from one area, may now arrive from another, camouflaged behind a new and outlandish name. All of them, whatever their special merits or disadvantages, will find eager buyers among the manufacturers, and with the best intentions in the world some bad mistakes will certainly be made. While it is true that few woods from the tropical forests are worthless-using "worthless" as a relative term to express our present inability to exploit their possibilities, many of them possess inherent peculiarities which militate against their use for specified purposes -for furniture, flooring, tool handles or whatever final product is needed. If there is no such thing as a general utility wood in the forests of the temperate zone, how much more absurd it would be to suppose that any dozen species among the thousands that abound in the forests of Soutl-r America or Africa could qualify for that designation !

The hardwood trade is not afraid of new woods. Historically, it owes its growth, from the original foundation of native 'ivoods to the great and complicated structure of the thirties, to the introduction of more and more of the exotic timbers. The expansion started with the first cargoes brought home by the merchant adventurers and has gone on steadily ever since. But it is as well to remember that most of the hardwoods which came to these shores in 1939 had established tl-remselves only after long periods of trial and error. Substitute woods, if they were to secure a footing, had to prove their worth. In four centuries there rvas at no time a sellers' market to compare with the present one and the importer who took the risk of bringing in a new rvood had from sheer economic necessity to study its qualities and see that it really met his customer's requirements.

Between the wars, the introduction of fresh species received a tremendous impetus, first from the encouragement given to Empire trade, second from the establishment, in the most important forest areas of the Empire, of Crown conservancies charged with the tasks of cruising, protecting and developing the usefulness of the forests. Scores of unfamiliar woods were shipped here as logs or lumber, some of them replacing timbers from the older forest regions which'had suffered depletion. Even in this period there was a certain amount of impropcr utilisation and unsoundmarketing.Woods bearing a superficial resemblance to traditional timbers were marketed as mahoganies, walnuts, oaks and teaks. Many woods of real worth were misapplied or sold under conditions which brought discredit upon them, so that it r.vas much more difficult to sell them when an appropriate outlet had been found. Ilowever, as long as tl-re introduction of new species was regulated by the critical attitude of the manufacturer, very little "blind" importing took place. In the same period the Forest Products Research Laboratory, r'rrorking in conjunction with the forest authorities in the countries of export, was able to cope with the intake of new species and ,could provide solid information which helped eliminate many cases of misapplication.

The situation today is entirely difierent. Literally any