Jack Henry (industrialist)
Jack Euan Henry (1917 – 9 June 2003) was a New Zealand industrialist and company director, and a member of the well-known Henry Family.
Jack Henry was born in Rotorua New Zealand in June 1917 to John and Edith Henry. John Henry was a forester and sawmiller and several of his other children would go on to play significant roles in their respective fields in New Zealand - Jack’s older brothers, the Hon. Sir Trevor Henry and Clive Henry, would go on to distinguished legal careers.
The road to success, however, was not to be made easy for the family. Similarly to many established New Zealand families of the day, Jack Henry’s childhood would be a difficult one as the country faced the economic challenges of the aftermath of the First World War and the onset of the 1930s Great Depression.
In 1931, at the age of 14, he left school to work in farming in Northland and then entered the New Zealand State Forest Service in 1938. The State Forest Service was a government organization charged with the planting and maintenance of the New Zealand Crown Estate forests.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Henry joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force and saw action in the Pacific theatre. Upon returning to New Zealand, he was appointed as a member of the New Zealand-American Fiordland Expedition which undertook surveying in the remote Fiordland region of Southern New Zealand and attended the University of Otago, where he completed his BSc in Botany.
In October 1949, he would make the most important step of his career in joining New Zealand Forest Products Ltd (NZFP), New Zealand’s largest industrial company, as a Forest Administrator of the company’s then 176,000 acres (710 km2) of plantations. At this time NZFP faced a crisis following the devastating Taupo forest fires of 1946 and a further 50% of its forest estate had been killed by the deadly Sirex disease. Henry’s solution was to implement pioneering silviculture methods that would see the NZFP forestry estate grow to some 500,000 acres (2,000 km2) within a decade.
Following his successes with the forestry estate, Henry was appointed General Manager of the Forests Division in 1963 by Sir David Henry KBE and would go on to sit as a Director of the Company from 1976 to 1986 (serving from 1978 as the Resident Director of the Kinleith milling complex and supervising the Company’s nationwide forestry interests).
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