A NEW DEMAND FOR CHARCOAL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 48, 27 February 1939, Page 10

A NEW DEMAND FOR CHARCOAL

The Craftsmen of To-Day

RESEARCH WORKERS, especially at Princes Risboro’, are making discoveries that should help to restore the value of Britain's woodlands, and, incidentally, revive a picturesque and historical craft. The charcoal burner, following the craftsmen in “Norfolk thatch,” may be on the eve of a revival, writes Sir William Beach Thomas. He has just clung to life in this generation; some of us have seen his primitive turf and timber huts in the oak woods along the SurreySussex border and in the New Forest. Fewer of us have watched his furnace in active work. Only the man of inherited skill can so turf in his fire of wood that, whatever wind may blow, it burns awai 9nly parts of the wood, those tars ana gases, that are undesired in the final pioduct. He generally built his hut at the edge of the forest and the furnace as near the centre of the supply as possible. There used to be a particular ring ol beech trees in the New Forest that made a romantic temple of the craft. Some of these charcoal burners traced back to the days of Rufus. Their ancestors found his body, and were given the privilege of collecting what wood they could convey “by hook or by crook,” that is, without cutting live timber, and converting it into charcoal, which, apart from its specialistic uses iu industry, is the lightest of all fu.els, and one of the best for some purposes. The industrial uses of charcoal have been increasing ever since the war, when certain discoveries were made. Particulai' value has been found, for example, in charcoal from the shells of nuts. The new demand has been in good measure supplied from Sweden, where the forests are very scientifically handled and the woodmen highly expert. Incidentally, it was these Swedish woodmen who killed prohibition in Sweden within twelve months, by their jncanny promptitude and skill in extracting wood alcohol. Now we waste enough good wood in England to swamp the industries, whatever their demands. They cannot, of course be supplied by the old charcoal burner, of the type of

tnuse who lived in luu kuis iaunguiue the adder hunters and salve-makers in the New Forest. Even when charcoal was in demand lor black powder—which is an almost extinct product—most of it was made in special iron retorts heated i>y fire.' fed from the expelled gases. The product had to be of high and particular virtues, as soft as silk and as crisp as metal.” Modern industrials want an even more nighty finished pruauct, il that is possible, than that of the old powder makers. There is charcoal ana charcoal, dependent both on the method ol production and the nature of the timber. There is a likelihood, as recently reported in some detail in The Times, that we may become self-sufficient again in the production of charcoal. Nothing in the new prospect is more interesting than the chance of uniting the factory methods with the craft 0! the old solitary patient and watchful woodland craftsman. The new idea is in essence the old one, to have the fire where the wood is. The difference is that the apparatus ol the factory will be conveyed 10 the wood. The new charcoal buxner, springing from the ashes of the old, will not build his own furnace but will be equipped with a wheeled and travelling retort or oven of moderate dimensions, which shall produce charcoal of the standard qualities desired by the various industries on whose Dehalf our research workers are and have been working. The process of research is not yet complete; out we may nurse a double hope, that the charcoal burner whose home is the wood will, after all, not varnish, and that a real stimulus will be given to the campaign of “conservation of natural resources.” Wood was always too valuable a material to be wasted, and new virtues are being discovered. The research workers at Princes Risboro’, for example, Ha’<? invented a process which altogether prevents warping in elm panels; and we waste even the best wood as well as that which can be secured by hook or