‘Where is the Forest of Dean? It’s still back there. It’s a sort of mythic Forest of Dean … a strange and beautiful place … a heart-shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England …’

Dennis Potter

‘… women replaced men in every branch of (timber) production. They drove tractors and lorries, they worked on sawbenches, they felled, they measured, they even sharpened saws. They became forewomen and acquisition officers. They became in fact an integral part of the great production machine. Without them the targets could not have been achieved.’

Russell Meiggs, Home Timber Production, 1939–1945 (published 1949)