My friend Neville Fay, who has died aged 78, set up the reforestation charity Tree Aid in 1987 and then went on to reshape understanding of ancient trees and the soil.
During the Dutch elm disease epidemic in the 1970s, Neville bought an old Transit van and chainsaw, felled dead trees and sold firewood door to door. This eventually evolved into Treework Services, expanding into milling timber, tree surgery, landscaping, hardwood flooring and kitchen manufacturing; by 1982 it had become a co-operative of more than 30 people.
The images of famine in Ethiopia that prompted Live Aid in 1985 proved a turning point. Believing emergency food aid could never be a credible long-term response, Neville gathered friends in his local pub the Somerset village of Chew Stoke, founded the charity Tree Aid in 1986 and started fundraising. Rather than using money raised to develop new projects in Africa, funds were directed to existing community-led initiatives in the semi-arid Sahel region, south of the Sahara, helping to accelerate ecosystem restoration.
With the charity successfully running, in 1992 Neville stepped away from the organisation, with Tree Aid continuing to thrive. To date it has planted almost 50m trees across Africa.
Neville was born in Durban, South Africa, to Jewish parents – Dolly (nee Goodman), a school teacher, and Raymond Fay, a dentist – whose own parents had fled persecution in eastern Europe. Opposed to apartheid, in 1956 they left South Africa for Liverpool. Neville attended Merchant Taylors’ school in Crosby and the Jewish youth club at Harold House, where he discovered the communal ethos that would anchor his politics. Dropping out of Aberdeen University to form a local tenants’ union and summer camp for disadvantaged children, he later finished his sociology degree having embraced communal living.
In 1975, Neville and his wife, Kate – whom he had met at Aberdeen and married in 1970 – moved to Bristol with their two children and ran a halfway house for ex-offenders. The following year, with a group of friends, they squatted in an abandoned rectory in Chew Stoke, forming the Lodge Co-operative Housing Association in the building, which has continued to provide affordable homes for many families, and disabled and elderly people.
The couple went on to have two more children once settled at the rectory, and Neville remained living there with Kate until the end of his life. Treework Services had, meanwhile, evolved into an arboricultural consultancy, Treework Environmental Practice, run by Neville’s elder son, Luke, with his daughter Rachael also at the company.
Studying ancient woodlands in the UK and Europe, Neville published widely, developed the Veteran Tree Survey for English Nature and co-authored Veteran Trees: A Guide to Risk and Responsibility (2000), Tree Surveys: A Guide to Good Practice (2005) and Trees - A Lifespan Approach (2016).
He was pivotal to the Ancient Tree Forum and the establishment and achievements of the National Tree Safety Group, and his “innovations in arboriculture” seminars popularised the principles of conservation arboriculture. In 2009 he received the Arboricultural Association’s award for services to arboriculture. With his daughter Ellen he founded the Sustainable Soils Alliance in 2017.
A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Linnean Society and the Royal Society of Arts, Neville also cared devotedly for Kate through many years of illness and never formally retired.
He is survived by Kate, their children, Luke, Ellen, Gabriel and Rachael, and six grandchildren.
