Papers of Christopher Swabey

Travel diaries, correspondence, drafts for a history of the Colonial Forestry Service, memoranda etc. relating to work in the Colonial Forestry Service, and as director of the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau, in Trinidad, British Guiana, Canada, Sudan, Australia, Jamaica, America, Fiji, Solomon Islands, North Borneo and the West Indies, with two memoirs on colonial service, 1928-1971.

Christopher Swabey (1906-1972), forestry adviser and conservator, took the post of Assistant Conservator of Forests, Trinidad, 1928. He then became Conservator of Forests, Jamaica, 1937, Conservator of Forests, British Guiana, 1946, Chief Conservator of Forests, Uganda, 1951, Forestry Advisor, Colonial Office, 1957-1964 and to the Ministry of Overseas Development, 1964-1965. From 1965 to 1970 he was Director of the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau. In 1947 he married Gabrielle Patricia Markham, with whom he had one daughter.

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Collection level description created by Paul Davidson, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House.

Listed as no. 621 in Manuscript Collections in Rhodes House Library Oxford, Accessions 1978-1994 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1996).

No reproduction or publication of personal papers without permission. Contact the library in the first instance.

The papers, collected by Swabey as research for a planned book on the Colonial Forestry Service, were initially held on loan pending any decision regarding the book's possible publication after his death in Ethiopia in 1972. The papers were sent from Ethiopia to his widow, who donated them to the library. They were only accessioned after October 1981, when a final decision not to proceed with publication was reached. Consequently they were not accessioned until 1981. On 13th March 2002, four files were withdrawn by Mrs. G.P. Swabey.