JOHN PHILLIPS - Obituary
Farmer, biologist, country
sportsman, moorland manager and founder of The Heather Trust
John Phillips, who died on 2nd 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 3rd 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
2nd 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 215t
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.
