My Account
They say luck has a peculiar habit of favouring those who don’t depend on it and in Harry Cammish’s case, this would appear to be the case. Although he credits luck for much of the good fortune in his life, it seems more likely that Harry’s 84 years have been shaped by his courage, generosity and good humour. When Harry and his late wife Betty moved to Orewa in 1971, they were strangers in “a town with little baches and big open drains”. Thirty-six years later, there is a Cammish Lane named in recognition of the couple’s community service and this month, Harry received the Masonic Lodge’s highest award, the Golden Trowel. Here he shares some of his life’s experiences ….
Betty and I, and our two kids Linda and David, arrived in NZ from England in 1956 under a Government assisted passage. We’d chosen to live at Putaruru, in the Waikato, because I thought it was close to Tauranga where I had an acquaintance. Of course I didn’t realise that the Kaimai Ranges were in between! It was a bit of a shock to find ourselves in a little farming and forestry town where the pub closed at 6pm and there was only one bus to Hamilton once a day. We missed the sociability of life Scarborough, but I really liked that there was no class distinction. I remember not long after we’d arrived, we were sitting down for dinner when there was a knock at the door. It was the bank manager. He had come to tell me that the money I’d been waiting for had arrived from England and then invited me to join the Golf Club. I was so impressed, I had to write a letter home about it – you’d be lucky to see the first accountant, let alone the bank manager, at any bank back home.
I was born in Scarborough, one of Yorkshire’s most popular coastal resorts, where Dad, who was a Passchendaele veteran, ran a confectionary shop. It was a fantastic because there was always so much going on. I left school at 14 to become a carpenter’s apprentice but two years later, the war started so instead of building houses, we mainly worked on blackout screens and shutters. Scarborough felt the heat of the German bombing raids and was hit by a lot of incendiary bombs. Trawlers and small fishing boats were often the target for machine gun fire. Repair work kept us pretty busy.
When I was 17 I joined the Local Defence Force and was issued with a rifle, 40 rounds of ammunition and a bayonet, and sent out to patrol the beaches and protect essential services such as the gas and electricity works. A year later, I volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a flight engineer on Lancaster bombers. They were beautiful planes – the queen of the skies. The crews were a mixture of French, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. I liked the Kiwis – they were a bit quieter than the rest of them. I did 16 runs over Germany until, without warning, we were jumped by a German fighter in February 1944. The whole plane shuddered and went into a dive that we couldn’t bring her out of. There was no choice but to bail out. Seven us jumped – five were captured by the Germans, the navigator died and I was eventually picked up by the French Resistance. It was night, it was winter and I was only wearing battledress and it was freezing. It was the first time I’d ever parachuted so I was lucky to come down just this side of the German border and in about two foot of snow. I walked for ages before being picked up by members of the Resistance who put me through the third degree to establish that I was in fact an Englishman. Their caution was understandable because there were Germans posing as Englishmen who were turning in Resistance fighters and uncovering their safe houses.
With the help of the Resistance, I was moved slowly across France towards the Spanish border. It was nerve-wracking at times. On the day we were due to cross the Pyrenees, we were woken by machine gun fire and dogs barking, and saw people being made to assemble with their hands in the air. I don’t know what came over me, but an inner voice said to me ‘you’ve come too far to be stopped now’, so I took off for the forest and just kept running. I was wearing a railway porter’s uniform and a pair of thin shoes, but for two nights and three days I walked without food and with only the snow to quench my thirst, doing my best to avoid the German patrols. How I wasn’t caught, I’ll never know. When I finally made it into Spain, I was a mess – my mouth was swollen and I was suffering from frostbite, and although I was starving, I couldn’t swallow a thing.
I finally came under the protection of the British Embassy and flew to Britain, from Gibraltar, on the day the D-Day troops were flying out, 13 weeks after I’d taken off on the mission to Germany. My mother, of course, was already coming to terms with the fact that I was missing in action so it was a pretty traumatic homecoming and everywhere I went, I would be greeted by ‘I thought you were dead!’
After the war, a society was formed of men who had been saved by the Resistance. We raised money to help the families of the Resistance fighters, many of whom had put their lives on the line and been killed. I still have the Dutch, French and Belgium money that all airmen were given as part of their Escape Kit. Although I had offered it to many people on many occasions throughout that 13-week period, none would accept it. The ‘rank and file’ really are the salt of the Earth.
When I was fit to work again, they re-trained me as a flying control officer, based just out of Bath. That’s where I met Betty and knew, almost immediately, that I’d found the right one. We met in April, got engaged in June and were married in Bath Abbey on Boxing Day 1945. The war was over at last, I was demobbed and we set-up house in Scarborough. In 1987, Betty and I went back to England to visit places like Scotland and Wales, but I never got to France again. I wish I had.
If you’re going to be a businessman and make money in a community, then I believe that you have a responsibility to give something back to that community. I joined the RSA in Putaruru in 1957, the Lions in 1961 and the Masonic Lodge in 1965. A lot of those organisations came out of the mateship that we experienced during the war. I think it’s a shame that we’re losing that – young people today don’t get involved in their community the way we did and aren’t prepared to give something freely without a thought for their own reward. I know people are busy, but you can always make time if you really want to. You read in novels where someone says ‘I stared death in the face’. Well, I can honestly say that I have and that I consider myself very lucky to be alive. A lot of other blokes I knew aren’t. My life has taught me the value of patience and tolerance, and that there is a lot of pleasure to be had in helping others.
