How I Found My Voice Through the Lumberjills.

Joanna Foat shares her story about discovering female role models, uncovering the Lumberjills, and rewriting women back into history.

Joanna Foat, age 5

When I was a little girl, I was very shy. But I loved being out in nature and having adventures. I fell in love with black and white movies featuring Tarzan, starring Johnny Weissmuller. I thought Tarzan was just shy like me—but that didn’t matter if he could swing through trees and wrestle alligators. I climbed trees, learnt to swim and went high-board diving. I found confidence not in my voice, but in my physical courage.

Joanna, age 10, is driving a mini chassis around a farm on holiday

As a kid, I used to cut the grass with a mechanical mower, work on cars with my Dad and help restore old furniture. At school, while boys played football, I was told girls should stick to netball. I asked for a football every Christmas but never got one. Still, I shone at athletics—long jump, sprints, high jump—these were proud moments of strength for me.

Joanna, age 15 (top right), on a school trip to Bodiam Castle for my history GCSE.

One day, in a history class, we learned about medieval English peasant girls, and I was fascinated. Who were these young women from the past, and what could I learn from them? What did they wear? What jobs did they do? Were they strong and adventurous like me? What struggles did they face that might echo in my own life?

It was the first time I’d learnt about girls in history, so I decided to write about them. But when Mr Roberts publicly shamed me over my mock exam results, my interest died. I thought writing about women in history was taboo. It invalidated everything I cared about. This early experience would later have a powerful connection to what would happen later in my career.

Joanna (third from right on the back row) in the Hull University Ladies Football Team

When I went to university, I finally bought myself a football, joined the women’s football team, became the top goal scorer, and even played matches in the men’s teams. Later, snowboarding and surfing gave me a huge boost in confidence. I was made an honorary female member of the all-male surf club. Why? Because I could surf the big waves just like them. I became the token girl in male-dominated clubs.

Joanna with her surfboard in Les Landes, France

But what did this mean? I felt isolated and alone. I was desperate for other female role models who were like me. Participating in these sports has made me the best, most confident version of myself. But as the years went by, my male peers, the male-dominated gyms, sports centres, and clubs, one by one, took away access to the sports I so loved. Undermined, underestimated, discouraged, and excluded.

Years later, at the Forestry Commission, I overheard a comment that changed everything—thousands of young women had worked in wartime forests felling trees. How had I never heard of the Lumberjills?

Lumberjills woking in the Forest of Dean in WW2

I remembered the day my father had rushed out to the shed with great excitement and returned with an axe, ‘Happy Christmas, Joanna,’ he said. It was the most surprising present I had ever received. But I loved that axe and chopping up wood for the fire. And I thought, had I been born just 50 years earlier, maybe I would have been a Lumberjill. 

Lumberjill felling a tree with an axe.

There was barely anything written about the Lumberjills in history books, a couple of webpages online, and no one, even female foresters I spoke to, had ever heard of them. So, I set off across the country, driven by an almost desperate need to meet these women face-to-face. I wanted to find out what it was like to have lived among women who worked in this job during the 1940s, an era of widespread prejudices.

Ester Carini

Esther Carini was told she was not tall or strong enough. So she walked over to a pile of logs, picked up the biggest one and put it on her shoulder. She was used to picking up large rolls of material when she worked as a machinist.

Harriet McKenzie said, “Sometimes you had a man on the other half of your crosscut saw. He was trying to prove that he could work harder than you, so he would chug at the saw. I just let him see; I can do what you can do.” 

Enid Lenton

In 2012, I met 94-year-old Enid Lenton. She was an incredible athlete, a near-Olympic swimmer and women’s fitness advocate in her youth. When Enid joined the Women’s Timber Corps, she was promoted and put in charge of training 40 women to fell trees with an axe and a crosscut saw every month.

These women were everything I had searched for—brave, skilled, physically strong. But also emotionally resilient, leading teams, breaking barriers. They weren’t just surviving in a man’s world—they were excelling. I had found the role models I’d always longed for as a girl. But women are still fighting the same prejudices today that they were 80 years ago.

Joyce Elizabeth Gaster driving a caterpillar crawler tractor

In a world where female firsts are still being named, women are still being told they’re not strong enough, not loud enough, not capable enough—the stories of the Lumberjills matter more than ever. Despite progress, gender discrimination persists. In 2021, just 1%* of skilled trades—like carpenters, bricklayers, and lorry drivers—were carried out by women.

Why had no one ever heard of these women before? It was not just a few outliers, but 15,000 women undertaking this physically demanding work. They helped supply millions of tonnes of timber to British coal mines as pit props, wood for Hurricane and Mosquito aircraft, for the floating Mulberry harbours, and the D-Day landing trackway. Many of these women were promoted and put in charge of whole forestry operations and even large groups of men. 

Lumberjills on the Isle of Wight

It broke my heart to learn that at the end of the war, the Lumberjills weren’t allowed to keep their uniforms or jobs. No money. No badge of honour. Just silence. No wonder so many of them carried a grief for decades. Not part of the fighting forces, the Lumberjills were forbidden from participating in Remembrance Day parades for more than 60 years.

I had decided. I wanted to give the Lumberjills a voice and make sure they were remembered. My passion for sharing their story and giving the Lumberjills a voice gave me a voice too. Almost immediately, I was asked to share their story; I was the person who knew the most about this subject. I was the authority, the expert on the Women’s Timber Corps. I trained to become a public speaker and an author. I have now given over 200 public talks on the Lumberjills and written four books about them, including two history books and two novels.

Joanna Foat, author and speaker

When I think of my younger self, I know she’d adore the Lumberjills just as much, if not more than Tarzan. One woman, Irene Snow, told me, ‘becoming a Lumberjill made me realise I could do anything I wanted to do.’ That’s the power of role models, too: they make the impossible feel possible.

By unearthing the forgotten stories of these brave, resilient women, I’ve come to realise just how powerful representation is. Their strength has become the foundation for my own. And I hope, through their story, it can be yours too.

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*Office for National Statistics