‘The only thing Derbyshire doesn’t have is a coastline.’ That was the firmly-held view often expressed to me by Martin Doughty, the New Mills man who became one of Britain’s leading environmentalists.
And he devoted much of his tragically short life to protecting and promoting the best of our green and pleasant land.
Doughty’s years of leading English Nature between 2001 and 2006, continuing after it became Natural England, were as notable for his personal devotion to the causes of the countryside as for his consummate professionalism.
As his friend and fellow Derbyshire resident Lord Roy Hattersley remarked: ‘It was not easy for civil servants to argue about conservation with a man who spent winter weekends walking on the aptly-named Bleaklow in search of the white-coated winter hares, and who had somehow attracted into his garden birds rarely seen in north-west Derbyshire.’
Doughty entered local politics at the tender age of 27 as the youngest-ever town councillor at New Mills.
He was elected a Labour member of Derbyshire County Council in 1981 and became chairman of the Highways and Transport Committee between 1983 and 1986.
There he earned a reputation as the only elected councillor to close a principal road, after the trans-Pennine A625 road under the ‘Shivering Mountain’ – Mam Tor above Castleton – collapsed in what had become a regular occurrence, making it the most expensive road in the county at the time.
The county surveyor suggested it could be rebuilt for £2m, and the local district council lobbied for a bypass, but Doughty, ever open to a radical solution, decided the best thing to do was close it and divert traffic through The Winnats Pass.
Thus, he created a popular traffic-free area in that part of the Peak District, today much appreciated by geomorphology students, often to be seen inspecting the massive, earthquake-like landslip.
As Lord Hattersley remarked: ‘Controversy never troubled him. He carried on doing and saying what he believed to be right with an enviable, if slightly stubborn, serenity.’
Almost inevitably, Doughty became leader of the county council between 1992 and 2001. The majority Labour group on the council had previously been dominated by members from the coal mining towns and villages in the south and east of the county. So, the election of a leader from the mill town of New Mills was an extraordinary tribute to the regard in which Doughty was held.
At that time, the county council’s services had been judged by the government to be badly run and its policies were often condemned.
Doughty changed all that, and political gestures were abandoned in favour of the over-riding priority of providing an efficient public service.
Under his leadership, Derbyshire County Council won accolades for its efficiency, and appeared high on the league tables of council tax well spent. Doughty was knighted for services to local government by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2004.
Doughty was born in New Mills in 1949 where his father Harold was a railwayman who, as a boy of 15, had witnessed the infamous Kinder Scout Trespass in April 1932. The march of about 400 ramblers across the previously common but since the Enclosure Acts private land which, as well as resulting in jail sentences for four of the participants, is widely considered to being the first shot in the on-going ‘right to roam’ battle.
Doughty later became a keen supporter and speaker at the annual celebrations of the Kinder Trespass, which I organised for over 20 years, and which have taken place at various venues around the Peak District.
The Doughty family had a long connection with the land, originally as farm labourers from Lincolnshire. Martin’s great-grandfather James Doughty and four of his siblings had been brought up in the workhouse at Peterborough.
Although Doughty was a sickly youth – he was often a patient under the dome of Buxton’s Royal Hospital – like his father he became a determined all-weather walker.
During remissions in his eventually fatal illness he always returned to the hills. He was a member of an informal group who regularly walked in the Peak District, always travelling there by bus or train. Every February the group would cross Bleaklow to see the mountain hares in their white coats.
After attending New Mills Grammar School, Doughty spent three years at Imperial College London, where he read engineering. After graduation, he worked briefly as a chemical engineer before deciding on an academic career, lecturing in environmental management at Sheffield Polytechnic (later Sheffield Hallam University) for over 20 years.
From 1993 to 2002, Doughty was chair of the Peak District National Park Authority – a job he saw as providing a balance between the protection of the environment and a duty to safeguard the livelihood of the people who live there.
He was proud to have been born just as the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, which created our British system of national parks, was passed.
He was always a keen supporter of the use of public transport to ease the ever-increasing traffic pressure on narrow Peak District roads, and he used it whenever he could.
When the Peak District hosted the annual conference of National Park authorities at Buxton in 1994, Doughty initiated a scheme whereby delegates would receive a discount on their conference fees if they arranged to arrive by public transport. Disappointingly, only five per cent did.
In 2001 Doughty was appointed leader of the Government’s conservation agency English Nature. In the same year Tony Blair’s government recommended the merger of English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service, and Doughty was selected to lead this new body, named Natural England.
Always passionate about conservation, he displayed great tenacity in getting things done, and had no time for petty bureaucracy.
At Natural England Doughty played a leading role in the campaign to extend public access to Britain’s coastline through the Marine and Coastal Access Bill. The English Coast Path, now renamed the King Charles III England Coast Path, is now nearing completion.
But Doughty always continued to live in and keep in contact with his birthplace and, in 2000, he was instrumental in the idea and building of the spectacular £500,000, 175-yard Millennium Walkway bridge, suspended on a sheer masonry wall 20 feet above the rushing waters of the River Sett.
Shortly after it opened, the Millennium Bridge featured on a 44p postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail, and it won the small projects award in the British Construction Industries Awards in the same year.
After Doughty was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2003, he underwent many courses of debilitating treatment. He suffered a series of relapses but always bore his slow deterioration bravely and was still working until a couple of months before his death.
He chose to stay in his home in Hyde Bank Road, New Mills, and it was there he died in March 2009 at the tragically young age of 59.
He had two daughters, Tessa and Beth, by his first wife Eleanor Lang, who died in 1988. They and his devoted second wife and talented artist Gillian (Gilly), whom he married in 1996, were by his side. Sadly, Gilly also died of cancer in 2022.
