Sir Martin Doughty (Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology 1971, Civil and Environmental Engineering MSc 1973)

Obituary written by Dr Helen Phillips originally published in The Independent on Friday 13 March 2009. Obituary written by Roy Hattersley originally published in The Guardian on Monday 9 March 2009.

Obituary written by Dr Helen Phillips.  Originally published in The Independent on Friday 13 March 2009.

Sir Martin Doughty: Pioneer of the modern approach to environmental conservation

Throughout the changing landscape of the environmental movement in this country over the last half-century, the one constant has been Sir Martin Doughty. His lifelong passion for the natural environment, and for increasing and improving people's access to it, leaves a powerful legacy. From the creation of the local nature reserve and Millennium walkway outside his front door in New Mills in the Peak District, through the opening up of a million hectares of England's wildest places, to his vision of access to the entire coastline for the nation, Doughty was a passionate and determined advocate for the rights of people to enjoy England's natural heritage.

His life followed the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act with remarkable precision. He was fond of telling people that he was conceived at the time of the First Reading in Parliament and delivered during the Third Reading in October 1949. His death, just ahead of the 60-year celebration of the Act this summer, in many ways concludes an era in England's conservation history, but leaves the strongest of foundations for the next chapter.

His father, Harold, was a 15-year old observer at the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, a forbidden moor near Edale in Derbyshire's Peak District, when five ramblers were jailed. Harold was one of the legendary Manchester Ramblers who left New Mills one April Sunday, undeterred by "the wooden liars" (the infamous "trespassers will be prosecuted" signs) and the strong-arm tactics of the newly recruited army of gamekeepers.

It was apt, therefore, that Harold's son would chair the Peak District National Park Authority, the first to be created under the 1949 Act. In 2007, Doughty co-wrote the Trespass Trail, a booklet which outlined a 14-mile walk celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Kinder Trespass.

His passion and clarity of purpose were apparent in his conviction that everyone should have the right to enjoy the natural world. He always said that if it wasn't for the bravery and direct action of the Manchester Ramblers, people would not now enjoy the network of national parks provided by the 1949 Act, nor the right to roam that followed in 2000.

However, he always maintained that, for all its epoch-making achievements, the 1949 National Parks Act was flawed in that it artificially separated the walkers and others who wanted to enjoy the countryside from the scientific conservation movement. As he always said, "when you go into the natural environment, you don't have two sides of your brain: one marked landscape and the other marked wildlife". He was a member of an informal group of 16 walkers who always travelled to the Peak District using bus and train services. In February each year, the group would cross Bleaklow to see the mountain hares in their white coats. He believed that nature and landscape are both part of the same experience.

Doughty had a long and distinguished record of public service as a lecturer in environmental management at Sheffield Hallam University and over a decade as leader of Derbyshire County Council. He was also a board member of the Countryside Agency, Chair of English Nature and, right up to his death, Chair of Natural England.

When he was leader of Derbyshire CC in the 1980s, Doughty became the only elected councillor ever to have closed a principal road. When the trans-Pennine A625 fell down Mam Tor, known as the shivering mountain, the Derbyshire County Surveyor said that he could rebuild it for £2m, while the local District Council demanded a bypass. As chair of Transport at Derbyshire CC, Doughty said that the best decision was to do nothing, thus creating a lorry-free oasis of calm in that part of the High Peak.

The scale of Doughty's achievements were the result of an extraordinary range of personal characteristics. Behind an outwardly shy exterior, albeit armed always with a dry, and sometimes wicked sense of humour, he was a man with a ferocious tenacity to get things done. His judgement of and subsequent focus on the things that really mattered was unequalled, while the things that didn't really matter were treated always with courteous good humour. His constant aura of cheerful and self-deprecating calm extended to everyone he met and, especially, to the many board meetings that he chaired with consummate skill and grace.

He always used his authority to cut through the bureaucracy and the flannel, which he abhorred, and to deliver real results on the ground, which he loved. When something was really important, he would pull his mobile phone out of his pocket and quietly and calmly speak to Ministers directly until the problem was fixed. Lastly, although he was a man of unshakeable integrity and a committed Labour supporter throughout his life, he managed to chair his agencies with a non-political clarity which meant that they always delivered with a constantly wide spectrum of political support.

He was a keen walker, and talked passionately about the times that he and his fellow group of walkers enjoyed the upland flora and white hares that brought the landscape of the Peak District alive. He was never happier than when he was out in the hills, but that happiness did not come from one thing alone, it came from the sum of the parts. So he understood and relished the landscape, he spotted and enjoyed the birds and the hares, he delighted in the exercise and fresh air, and he revelled in the quiet but deep friendships of communal walking. And as he understood that his personal experience was the sum of all of these things, so he also understood that the environmental conservation movement needed to integrate if it were to deliver real benefit to society.

His personal crusade to link people to the environment crossed the old rural and urban divides; he cared as much about local parks as national ones and always drove Natural England to "embrace people as well as wildlife". Most recently, he was an enthusiastic and eloquent proponent of the "new" conservation agenda (though it wasn't that new to him) that explicitly links the true value of a healthy natural environment to all the services that it provides society – clean water, food, flood defence, carbon storage, and places for people to enjoy – and thereby provides a compelling economic rationale for its conservation, in addition to the moral imperative.

Ultimately, his final role as the founding chair of Natural England gave him the opportunity to finally reunite the two sides created by the National Parks Act in the year of his birth. In the last 15 years he democratised conservation by inviting the public to the board meetings of public agencies, he drove the agenda on the conservation of the country's best wildlife sites, he changed the world of public access to the countryside and, above all, he integrated all the different aspects of conservation into a single, wonderful story – understood by politicians and the public alike.

Perhaps his only regret would be that he didn't live to see the culmination of the 1949 Act with the designation of the final National Park on the target list laid down in the 1940s, or the founding of an All England coastal trail, for which he was the driving force, and which might fittingly in the future be called "Doughty's Way".

Dr Helen Phillips, Chief Executive of Natural England

Graham Martin Doughty, conservationist: born 11 October 1949; lecturer, Sheffield Polytechnic (later Sheffield Hallam University) 1973-90, senior lecturer, 1990-95; council leader, Derbyshire County Council, 1992-2001; chairman, Peak District National Park Authority, 1993-2002; chairman, Association of National Park Authorities, 1997-2001; Kt 2001; chair, English Nature, 2001-2006; chair, Natural England, 2006-2009; married 1974 Eleanor Lamont (died 1988, two daughters), 1996 Gilli an Gostick; died 4 March 2009.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Obituary written by Roy Hattersley. Originally published in The Guardian on Monday 9 March 2009.

Sir Martin Doughty Head of Natural England devoted to the conservation of the countryside.

Martin Doughty, who has died of cancer aged 59, believed in England. He had little time for flag-waving patriotism or proclamations of love and loyalty, but he devoted much of his life to protecting and promoting what he knew to be the best of this green and pleasant land.

His years leading English Nature (2001-06), and continuing after it became Natural England - the amalgamation of the three rural agencies - were notable for his personal devotion to the causes of the countryside as well for his exacting professionalism. It was not easy for civil servants to argue about conservation with a man who spent winter weekends walking on the aptly named Bleaklow Moor in search of the white-coated winter hares and had somehow attracted into his garden birds that are rarely seen in north-west Derbyshire.

Doughty was, by temperament, an enthusiast, but his enthusiasm for wild life and the landscape which it inhabited was built on more than sentimentality. No one who knew him during the years in which he led Derbyshire county council (1992-2001) could doubt that steel was hidden beneath his affable exterior.

The majority Labour group on Derbyshire council is normally and naturally dominated by members from the mining towns and villages in the south and west of the county. So the election of a leader from New Mills, on the Lancashire border, was both an extraordinary event and a tribute to the esteem in which Doughty was held. First elected in 1981, he had made his name as chair of the transport committee (1983-86) by deciding - after the A625 collapsed down Mam Tor, "the shivering mountain", in the late 1970s - that it was better to leave that part of the High Peak undisturbed rather than spend £2m on building a motorway.

The minor sensation which his decision caused produced only one of the many headlines which featured Derbyshire in the 1980s. Some of the county council's services were judged by the government to be badly run. Its policies were often ridiculed. Doughty changed all that. Political gestures were abandoned in favour of public service. Under his leadership, Derbyshire won accolades for efficiency and appeared high on the league tables of council tax well spent. Sir Martin, as he became in 2004, was knighted for services to local government.

He was born in New Mills: his father was a railwayman who, as a boy of 15, had taken part in the Kinder Scout Trespass - the march across the previously private Cavendish land which, as well as resulting in jail sentences for four of the marchers, lays claim to being the first shot in the "right to roam" battle and a catalyst for the creation of the National Parks. Although Doughty was a sickly youth - he was a patient in the domed and turreted Buxton hospital that had once been the Devonshires' 18th-century riding school - he, like his father, became a determined all-weather walker. During remissions in his eventually fatal illness he always returned to the hills.

His three years at Imperial College London, where he read engineering, marked a brief separation from his natural habitat. But in 1973 he came home to lecture at Sheffield Polytechnic, which by the time of his departure in 1995 had become Sheffield Hallam University. From 1993 to 2002, Doughty was chair of the Peak District National Parks Authority - a job he saw as balancing the protection of the environment with a duty to safeguard the livelihood of the men and women who live there. That did not mean that he was sympathetic to the farmers who ploughed up previously uncultivated land in the hope of escaping the obligation to respect the right to roam. But he knew that jobs are important, even in Arcadia.

It was wilful and gratuitous destruction that offended him. He insisted on perusing the investigation into the suspected killing of two hen harriers on the Queen's estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, in 2007. And he was bewildered by the bad science, as well as infuriated by the savagery, of the campaign to combat bovine tuberculosis by slaughtering badgers. Controversy never troubled him. He carried on doing and saying what he believed to be right with an enviable, if slightly stubborn, serenity.

Serene he remained right to the end. After he was diagnosed with liver cancer six years ago, he accepted the risks of pioneering treatment and, seemed to recover. He then suffered a series of debilitating relapses and bore the slow deterioration bravely, working until a couple of months before his death. He chose to stay at home in New Mills, and it was there that he died.

By his first wife, Eleanor Lang, who died in 1988, he had two daughters, Tessa and Beth. They and his devoted second wife Gill, whom he married in 1996, were by his side.

• Graham Martin Doughty, politician and environmentalist, born 11 October 1949; died 4 March 2009