My Account
Harry Cammish doesn’t want a fuss made of his 100th birthday this week.
He counts himself pretty lucky to reach his age, attributing his longevity in part to “modern medicine” and the fact he’s managed to avoid “nasty ailments”.
“Healthwise I’ve done pretty well.”
Sitting in the house he built, overlooking the Ōrewa lane that carries his name, Harry, in his broad Yorkshire accent, shares some memories of a full life, revealing a sharp mind and lively sense of humour.
It’s quite a story. Shot down in 1944 over Nazi-occupied France, the young flight engineer – alone of his Lancaster bomber crew mates – managed to evade capture and was sheltered by the French resistance, before making a mid-winter solo crossing of the Pyrenees into nominally neutral Spain. For 13 weeks, his family didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
Although barely into his 20s, the downing of the Lancaster and perilous mountain crossing weren’t the first times Harry had – in his words – “stared death in the face”.
The previous year, a crash shortly after take-off from his RAF base in Lincolnshire left his plane, laden with 1600 gallons of fuel and 12,000 pounds of high-explosive bombs, in pieces on the ground. He remembers running headlong from the crash site to a nearby village, babbling about bombs about to explode and causing a commotion. His six crewmates were receiving medical attention but no-one could find the engineer, until village police notified the base.
After his adventures in France and Spain, Harry was flown back to Britain, but as someone now aware of identities of resistance figures in France, he was prohibited from flying operations over Europe again. Instead he served as a flight control officer, near Bath, where he met Betty. They were married in Bath Cathedral shortly after the war ended. After being demobbed Harry resumed work as a builder in his North Yorkshire hometown of Scarborough, and in 1956 they moved to NZ with their children – Lynda aged seven, David aged five – making their first NZ home in Putaruru in the Waikato.
Early memories of their new country include being stunned at how down-to-earth people were. Needing to buy items including a fridge, he was startled to be told by a hardware store salesman in Waikato, “take what you want and pay when you’ve been working here for a bit”.
Then there was the night the bank manager turned up at his house, toting an umbrella in the pouring rain, to tell him money had arrived for him from the UK. Before leaving, the manager asked if Harry played golf, and invited him to come along to the club to learn.
“I wrote home that evening to tell them the bank manager called on me personally. In England there’s no bloody way you’d get past the first counter – you’d never get to see the manager.”
Harry can’t remember why he specifically decided to come to Ōrewa in the 1970s, although he “always wanted to finish up by the seaside”.
He became deeply involved in the community and is a life member of the Ōrewa Lions Club and the Masonic Lodge.
Betty played a key role in getting meals-on-wheels underway in the area. She’d do the rounds of the local food shops, scrounging for ingredients for meals that were then prepared by her and fellow volunteers.
Several years after Betty died, the former Rodney District Council voted, in 2006, to name a new road in Ōrewa, linking Moenui and Tamariki avenues, Cammish Lane, in recognition of the couple’s contributions to the community.
Gazing over the lane from his new chair in the window, Harry says he doesn’t mind living alone, not really.
“When you’re thrown into the forces at 19 you’ve got to be independent, because there’s a nasty bloke with a couple of stripes on his arm who keeps telling you what he thinks about you,” he laughs. “It makes a man out of you in a very few weeks.”
