The reason can be that bushcrafting is quite young, and practiced by relatively few, in UK.
Before Ray Mears not many did it, correct?
In Scandinavia it has been national past times and hobby for well over 100-140 years.
Janne, don’t forget that while the young men of Sweden may have spent the last 100-140 years sitting around campfires, admiring each other’s feather-sticks, their counterparts in Britain spent much of that time building and running an Empire and at the sharp end of just about every military conflict that occurred.
The definition of “bushcraft” is open to interpretation (and is certainly not as Scandicentric as many of the posts on this forum would suggest), but I’d hazard a guess that at least a few of the British explorers, soldiers, sailors, surveyors, traders, engineers, builders, hunters, trappers, farmers, clerics, medics etc. etc. who lived, worked, fought and died in some of the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, jungliest and generally most inhospitable corners of the largest Empire the world has seen would have been familiar with skills which would look a lot like those in books written by RM, MK, LW etc.
Many of the tools and skills that are currently regarded as “bushcrafty” were just part of rural life in the UK, as in most countries - up until the agricultural sector became mechanised after WW2.
The large number of small tool makers around Sheffield and West Midlands making axes, billhooks, machetes etc.(FWIW while machetes/parangs on some Caribbean islands may be called cutlasses, on others, they are called Gilpins after the company that made them), were not supplying a British bushcraft movement but a domestic and Empire agricultural market. This was not artisan manufacturing, just mass production (albeit on a small scale) of functional tools. With the decline of the overseas market and mechanisation of agriculture in the UK, after WW2, the sector contracted and eventually as the chart Broch posted shows, most companies were subsumed into S&J.
There are plenty of decent quality old British made axes (Brades, Parkes, Gilpin, Whitehouse, Elwell etc.), knocking around at carboots and in barns and sheds and I’d far rather see people taking a bit of effort to find and restore these as part of their ‘“bushcraft” kit rather than just buying the obligatory GB SFA because that’s what Ray uses.
If you think that bushcrafting in the UK, started with RM, the activities of Kibbo Kift and the Woodcraft Folk which started in the 1920s as an alternative to the Scouting movement, might come as a surprise - though I suggest that you sit down and take something for your blood pressure before g00gling them, I’m not sure their politics would be to your taste!
Sweden may have given the world the Billy bookcase made from sawdust in third world sweatshops but I prefer the works and philosophy of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement!
Personally I find all this obsession with kit a bit depressing, IMHO bushcraft (whatever it is) should be about doing things not about kit. Decent, functional kit (where ever it comes from), should be a means of doing something and (unless you are making it yourself), not an aim itself. For me, the finest artisan made knife only become a “bushcraft” knife when someone uses it to cut something useful (the hairs on your arm do not count!
) and a kid using a knife borrowed from his mum’s kitchen to carve a tent peg is more of a bushcrafter than a guy with a drawer full of fancy knives which will never be used.
Just my 2d.
