 He became a district officer first at Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire and then at Kielder Forest in Northumberland.In the 1960s he reacted strongly against the then-current view of forestry, driven by economics and based on the rigid application of "net discounted revenue" assessments of timber value; he regarded this as short-sighted, and in association with the landscape architect Dame Sylvia Crowe he fought to broaden the Commission's approach to take account of conservation and landscape.He was saluted for his work on the committee which drafted the 1963 Deer Act, and in 1964 he was appointed the Commission's first conservation officer.