John Phillips Obituary

JOHN PHILLIPS - Obituary

Farmer, biologist, country sportsman, moorland manager and founder of The Heather Trust

John Phillips, who died on 2^nd December, aged 82, was a countryman born and bred, who sought to reconcile the various uses to which uplands were put. He was prompted to do this because in the late 1960s and 1970s, the long-held concept of integrated land use was breaking down. Decisions on land potential and use were being made on an "either/or" basis fuelled by high levels of agricultural and forestry grants and subsidies. This was having a disastrous effect on biodiversity, landscape and sport-shooting; he devoted the next 40 years to doing something about it.

John Douglas Parnham Phillips was born at Largs in Ayrshire on 3^rd May 1934, the fourth child and only son of Douglas Phillips, shipbuilder and Sheila Wilkinson, his second wife. Home was on his half-sisters' estate, which was a well-established sheep-walk, where such game as there was, had to be worked for with diligence and field-craft. By the time the war ended in 1945, his school holidays were dominated by country sports and were also associated with "helping" the tenant farmer to carry out seasonal farm work.

He was educated at Harrow, where he spent almost all his recreational time on the school farm. He did a gap year as a "mud student" on the Cally Estate in Galloway before reading an ordinary degree in Agriculture at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Spells as a cattleman and hill shepherd, and then as a farm manager in Perthshire followed, before he bought a small sandy farm in Fife with the inheritance he received when his father died in 1958. Under-capitalised from the start, that came to an end in 1964 and, at the first Scottish Game Fair (held at Blair Drummond in July that year), he was head-hunted by the Eley Game Advisory Station (EGAS) at Fordingbridge to train as their field advisor in Scotland — a post he took up in 1968.

EGAS was the undisputed expert body on matters to do with low-ground game. In 1957, the Scottish Landowners' Federation had instigated a grouse research programme with Aberdeen University, which was located in Glenesk in Angus and later at Banchory where the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) took it on and funded a specialist upland unit. In the early 1970s, moor owners in parts of Scotland, notably the Spey and Findhorn valleys and central Perthshire, were experiencing catastrophic declines in grouse caused allegedly by sheep ticks. With initial funding coming from Slater Walker Securities (the firm led by the late Jim Slater had bought Tulchan Estate from the Seafield Estates in 1972) and many other landowners, sufficient money was forthcoming to initiate research into the problem. This led to a fruitful link between a now self-employed Phillips, the ITE grouse unit and the Moredun Veterinary Research Institute in Edinburgh. It resulted in the publication of two definitive scientific papers on tick-borne disease in 1978.

Research into grazing effects on heather attracted further support, notably in 1989 from The Joseph Nickerson Heather Improvement Foundation. This led to the formation of The Heather Trust in 1994 and to substantial contracts with public and private bodies during the subsequent decade.

The prime motivation of the Trust was always to encourage traditional best practice and it became the brand leader in the provision, innovation, application and demonstration of sound field advice on heather conservation. It always saw itself as providing a link between the many and varied parties that had an interest in the way the heather moors of the British Isles were managed.

Under his direction, the Trust won the Exhibitors' Prize (out of 303) at the Gosford Game Fair in 1993 — the last CLA Scottish Game Fair - and joint 2^nd place in the Laurent Perrier Conservation Award in 1996. On his farm in Perthshire in 2004, he won the Alastair Lilburn of Coull's forestry award for best farm woodland in Scotland in the "below 150 acres category" - administered by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.

In 2012, 101 years after Lovat's "The Grouse in Health and in Disease" was published, Phillips's "Moorland Management —for Agriculture, Conservation and Field Sports" came out, verifying many points of management current a century before but in danger of being forgotten in the 21^5t century.

A keen fisher, useful shot, competent gardener and enthusiast of English setters, flatcoats and Lakeland terriers, he married first Diana Stratton (divorced 1981) — with whom he had two sons. He married second —Jennifer Braasch (neé Knight) who died in 2008. He is survived by his companion, Claire Rackham.