John Dower Biography

David Wilkinson, Fight for it Now: John Dower and the Struggle for National Parks in Britain (Signal, 2019)

In the late 1930s and 1940s, John Dower played a pivotal role in what Wilkinson describes as the ‘struggle’ for national parks in Britain.  Dower was from an upper middle class family in Yorkshire.  His father was a businessman, but had studied at Cambridge, where he had been a contemporary and friend of George Macauley Trevelyan.  This relationship was to prove pivotal to John Dower’s life as he would later marry Trevelyan’s niece (daughter of the Liberal/Labour politician Charles).  Interestingly they met at a famous annual ‘man hunt’ event organised by the Trevelyan’s where instead of hunting real hares, some of the participants would pretend to be hares and would be hunted by the others.  John Dower studied history at Cambridge, but also took courses in architecture and went on to be a professional architect in London.  Partly through his relationship with the Trevelyan family he got involved with the left-wing political and economic planning (PEP) think tank, which seems to have been his main intellectual home throughout his life.  This background in architecture and planning is important for his work on national parks. 

During the 1930s Dower became increasingly interested in the idea of national parks, in part through the work of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which had been founded by Addison in 1926 and set up a standing committee on national parks.  In 1929, Ramsay MacDonald had set up a government committee to consider the case for national parks, but the timing at the beginning of the Great Depression was not good. 

Early in the war, Dower had volunteered for armed service (despite being in his late 30s).  However, before leaving the country he developed severe lung problems (probably TB) and was invalided out of the army.  This gave him an opportunity to work in the government’s post-war planning department, initially under Lord Reith, which brought him back to National Parks.  He worked to survey potential national parks and produced his famous 1945 report calling for the creation of a national park system and a commission to oversee this.  He was ill through much of this work, and he died two years later.  The book points out that he would have been very disappointed by much of the 1949 National Park and Access to the Countryside Act that created national parks.  It is a very useful book and worth coming back to, but slightly frustrating that it has no bibliography and no list of archives.