This obituary originally produced for The Times on 12th November 2002 has been published here with the permission of Pippa Lamb, his daughter.
John Wyatt Smith was a pioneer of rainforest regeneration in South East Asia where he was an authority on timber trees.
John Wyatt-Smith was an early exponent of rainforest regeneration in South-East Asia where, after the Second World War, he spent almost 20 years working among the trees of Malaya, on which he also published prolifically. Then from 1963 he spent five years in Nigeria, before becoming Chief Forestry Adviser to the UK Overseas Development Administration, a post in which he had a roving brief.
He was born of British consular parents in Swatow, China, in 1917, but had his early schooling in Switzerland where his mother was being treated for tuberculosis. Thereafter he was educated at Brighton College, from where he went to Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in botany in 1939. While at Oxford he won his Blue for cross-country running.
At the outbreak of war, he sailed to the Far East to begin a career in the Malayan Forest Department. He served variously as district forest officer, forest botanist, ecologist and silviculturist, twice acting as chief research officer of the Forest Research Institute, Kepong.
These assignments were interrupted in December 1941 by the Japanese invasion of Malaya. When the Japanese advance approached Singapore Wyatt-Smith joined “Dalforce”, a body of Chinese irregulars led by Colonel John Dalley, which had already carried out harassing raids on Japanese lines of communication on the mainland. With Dalforce, Wyatt-Smith took part in the last desperate battles for Singapore, before resistance became impossible and the defending force surrendered.
Wyatt-Smith, however, evaded capture and with 15 others crossed the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra in a small coastal patrol craft. They traversed the island to its Indian Ocean coast, where they found a British freighter which took them to Java. There they joined the Wu Chang, a 3,200-tonne Yangtze steamer “armed” with a single dummy gun. Wu Chang almost immediately had a lucky escape when two Japanese torpedoes passed straight under the ship. However, she managed to make it to South Africa, from where Wyatt-Smith travelled on to West Africa. There the Colonial Office assigned him to the Nigerian Forest Department. Towards the end of the war he was assigned to a special force that was being assembled for an invasion of Japanese- occupied Malaya, which never took place.
After the Japanese surrender, Wyatt-Smith returned to Malaya to find the forestry situation in disarray. Squatters who had felled and cultivated forest reserve areas had to be persuaded to return to the towns. The forest industry had to be convinced that it was safe to resume operations in a climate that was quite soon to become uncertain again with the beginning of the Malayan Emergency in 1948.
Wyatt-Smith’s first postwar appointment was that of botanist and ecologist for the Malayan Forest Department. He was a botanist of unusually broad interest and perspective. He conducted an inspection of forest areas that had been cut down but left uncultivated, which revealed the possibilities for effective natural regeneration. In 1947, years ahead of his time, he published an appeal to “Save the Beluka”, as such forests were termed.
The lowland forest of the dipterocarp family of trees, the most complex forest on earth, captured his interest and led him to return to Oxford to develop techniques for its ecological analysis, research that gained him an MSc. His techniques for such analysis are still in use today.
On his return to Malaya, he conducted additional studies that established the basis for the “Malayan Uniform System” — still the world’s most successful silvicultural treatment for tropical rainforests. He persuaded the forest departments of the Malayan States to set aside virgin jungle reserves and undertook painstaking identification of the hundreds of tree species within them. By 1959, 36 such reserves had been established.
Wyatt-Smith’s Pocket Check List of Timber Trees of Malaya (1952) has proved so useful that a fourth edition was published in 1999. His contribution to the Manual of Malayan Forest Trees includes monographs on six major tree families and the mangroves.
In 1957, when Malaya received its independence, Wyatt-Smith continued at the Forest Research Institute where he refined and adapted the now widely accepted tropical practice known as diagnostic sampling.
When, in 1963, Sabah and Sarawak joined Malaya in the federation of Malaysia (as did Singapore, only to leave two years later), he did much to help the research staff of these states. He made an important contribution to the two-volume Manual of Malayan Silviculture (1963), a publication with no counterpart elsewhere in the Tropics.
Wyatt-Smith left Malaysia in 1963 and became the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s forestry project manager in Nigeria. At the same time he was Professor of Forestry at Ibadan University from 1963 to 1968.
Then for nine years, until 1977, he served as forestry adviser to the British Overseas Development Administration, a post in which he travelled widely throughout the world. In retirement he accepted another UN appointment as consultant to the Forest Research Institute of the Philippines and, when that ended, he carried out a two-year forestry assignment for the British Overseas Development Administration in Nepal.
In his sixties he was still paying seven-a-side rugby with young VSO workers and he continued to run with the Hash Hound Harriers, of which he had been an early member in Kuala Lumpur in 1939.
In 1981 he was appointed CBE for his services to forestry. In that year, too, he was awarded the Bernard Edward Fernow Award which recognises individuals for outstanding achievements in international forestry.
For the last 20 years, with his great zest for life , he was tireless in all his local Oxford village activities – CPRE, Warborough & Shillingford Society, the Parish Council, planting numerous trees and camping with the Boy’s Scouts until the age of 80 when it was suggested that he might be getting rather old for it!
Wyatt-Smith was a generous mentor to a generation of younger foresters and ecologists from many parts of the world who sought his knowledge and critical comment long after he retired and benefited from the warm hospitality, he and his wife provided at their Oxfordshire home. They recognised in him a perspective that remained informed and up to date rather than relying upon memories of a colonial and post-colonial era.
His sense of humour could be challenging even for his wife who, on urging him to weed the garden, would be told: “Fine — provided I can do it by species. Today it’s dandelions!”
He was a man of great patriotism, integrity, high principles and profound vision who was a champion of many causes.
He is survived by his wife Peggy, and by two daughters.
John Wyatt-Smith, CBE, forester, was born in China on January 29, 1917. He died on October 30, 2002, aged 85.
Below are some personal notes from the John’s family
John & Peggy bought The Loans in Wharf Road, Shillingford in the early 1960s in cash and received change, in cash. Whilst there they created a beautiful garden and restored the overgrown apple tree orchard. researching and naming all the trees.
John worked closely with George Belson on the Parish Council particularly on Village Planning issues and problems. He acted as the eyes for Thames water spotting the flood levels on Wharf Road. “How much more water can Shillingford take John to stop us flooding Caversham?”
Along with John Robinson was one of the first to commute to London in the 1970’s.
His last month’s were spent living in Upper Farmhouse, Hammer Lane, receiving visitors and village residents still being asked for his advice.
John and his wife Peggy both buried in St Laurence churchyard.