GOODWOOD’S BEECHES

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1058, 23 August 1930, Page 26

GOODWOOD’S BEECHES

HEAVY TAXATION FORCES DUKE TO SELL TIMBER HISTORIC TREES FELLED Many hundreds of acres of the famous beeches which surround Goodwood have been sold by the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, and are now falling to the axes of the lumbermen, writes lan Coster, a former member of The Sun staff, in the London “Evening Standard.” A dusty path, clawed with the prints j of a caterpillar tractor, leads down j to Open Winkeus now, down from the I heaps of beech logs piled high by the ; roadside. Following the dusty roadway, one | comes into a brown-floored valley, a i [cathedral of the woods. Its columns j are the tall, dark boles of trees and [ its stained windows the apple-green, i the jade, the chrysolite of tree-tops j in the July sunlight. The brown floor j is dappled with light, the wind I whispers above, a, single bird cries. ! One of the great columns lias been j desecrated. A sharp axe lias planed away moss and bark and the yellow • wood stands out stark. Higher up the j tree has a mark on it in the form of j a double cross—indicating that it is 1 to be felled. Many of these fall trees. I towering up to 80ft and waving their I green banners triumphantly are so I marked with the double cross of doom. Just out of the valley the doom has i already fallen. Grey and mottled, the I great boles lie where they have j crashed, their banners sere and brown. Slim oaks are here beside J stout beeches, in the clearing, flung ! from their waving triumph to lie among the brambles. A startled baby rabbit, a few weeks old. scuttles from beside a hoary, ! smitten giant which has lived through j 200 yeai's of English history. Two sun-browned young Australians j are in charge of the haulage work. ! They drive a snortiug tractor, a tank j of the lumber industry, which goes careering down the dusty path, hauling its great caterpillar trailer behind ( it. It smashes through the undergrowth, rides over the fallen trees. Two or three great boles are levered into position on the trailer, 14 or 15 tons at. a time, and the tractor begins i the grinding, heaving, roaring climb back to the road. It is just another load of timber, to be piled up with a crane on the other logs for carriage to the sawmill. They work like demons, these Australians—l 4 hours a day, 96 hours a week. The First Duke And when these beeches were seedlings Australia was a myth. Forty years were to run forward with their South Sea Bubbles (and their schemes for making butter out of beech trees!) their wars, their Conquest of Quebec, before Captain Cook was to set sail on his first voyage and map out a portion of an island-continent down i under the Southern Cross, j That great old fellow who once '■ waved his leaves 80, 90 feet above the i forest, floor may have been planted by I - Charles, the first Duke of Richmond. I Master of Horse to Charles I. He ! | built in 1720 a hunting-box in a park of 200 acres on the land which appears as “Godinwood” in the Domesday Book, the same hunting-box which j is "onv the centre part of Goodwood ■ House. They were great hunters and J fighters and planters of trees, the ' j Dukes of Richmond. Death Warrant j T'] aL tree '"' as a sapling when the i thud Duke, hack front the wars, bought, his six-mile by four-mile estate, planted his thousand cedar trees, and made the beginnings of Good\vood racecourse. The fourth Duke came to the lands, and his Duchess gave her famous ball on the eve of Quatre Bras, and the tiny beech was growing hopefully, untouched, in his still corner of Open Winkens, by the ambitions of a Bonaparte. The fifth of the line (he, too, had been at Waterloo) succeeded his father, who died far overseas, in Canada, from the bite of a tame fox Then came the sixth, the politician the builder of model cottages', another tree-planter. He re-established the blue-uniformed Goodwood Hunt, and j the tr ee lived on, gaining height and ; majesty. The seventh Duke came just after the South African War. and then the ! eighth, who served in the Great War ' was forced to sign the death war- l rant. So the old beech crashed to earth i find lay still, and the young Australians grappled with it and drew its great, reluctant length out of Open i Winkens. We watched the Australians at ■ work, an old retainer of the estate and myself. “Ah, there’s been strange doings in them woods,” he said. “There’ve been ~ smugglings and highwaymen and death deeds done under them trees They do say that the Golden Calf] you’ve heard tell of, is buried round here, in the Sussex Downs, smuggled in, I suppose.” But I was thinking of the old beech and how commerce would bend it and shape it to a myriad of clothes pegs and tool handles and strange articles of the market place in which its cen-tury-toiigued fibres would do long service. They would even convert it into bobbins to be placed on the machines Which have made great cities in the Midlands s —cities and machines not thought of when this tree was young. —~ j