Harry Spencer on his Suzuki step-through motorbike that has a special attachment for his golf clubs.

Life’s still wild about Harry

Back in the mid-1930s, a teenage Harry Spencer joined the Mounted Rifles - ‘not to be a brave soldier, but to be presented with a rifle so that we could do deer stalking and pig hunting’. The rest, as they say, is history. JO BAILEY chats with Harry in the first of RSA Review’s Our People profiles.

He may be 93, but World War 2 veteran Harry Spencer is still flat out packing fun and adventure into his colourful life.

The good-humoured Hastings man is one of life’s genuine characters. He enjoys a round of golf and managed to squeeze this interview in around a four-day veteran’s tournament. He is looking forward to the national RSA golf tournament to be hosted by the Hastings RSA in November.

A member of the Hastings RSA since the early 1960s, Harry still goes to Photography Trust meetings at the club every Wednesday and is “mixed up” with the golf section.

“They made me patron but wouldn’t let me sit on the committee for the national tournament because they reckon I’m too bloody old. I’m going to play in it again though. I have done for many years, and I always enjoy it.”

He started playing golf around 50 years ago and now plays off a 40 handicap. These days he gets around the course on a Suzuki step-through motorbike that has a special attachment for his clubs.

“I usually leave the motorbike at the golf course now that I have lost my road licence. I can’t get it because of my eyesight, although I reckon I’d fly through the test.”

Harry lives at Masonic Village in Hastings where he has all the mod cons, including Sky TV and a computer. He has an active social life – an 86-year-old woman who lives next door and a couple of friends usually pop over for ‘lolly night’ to watch All Blacks games, and he has regular visitors at 5pm ‘medicine time’ when he has his daily tipple of whisky.

“Whisky is my only medicine. I don’t take any pills. I know a lot of doctors and tell them that all they learned at medical school was how to dish out pills and bills.”

Five or six years ago he learned to use a computer and wrote a memoir that included many colourful and harrowing tales from his experiences during the war. Harry served with the Divisional Cavalry Regiment C Squadron in Europe, the Middle East and the North African and Italian campaigns - starting as a troop mechanic, and progressing through the ranks to acting sergeant for a short time.

He says he will never forget serving under General Freyberg for three months during the North African campaign, a period that included the Battle of El Alamein.

“He was a fantastic chap to be with. Every now and again when it was quiet, we’d sit out with him in the desert and have a bit of a yarn. He always called me by my Christian name and would ask me to do something rather than ordering me to do it. He was a pretty game bloke, but he used to sleep between the gunner and me. We reckoned he would rather we stopped a piece of stray shrapnel than for it to hit him.”

Harry Spencer was brought up in Blenheim and was about 18 when he decided to join the Mounted Rifles - “not to be a brave soldier, but to be presented with a rifle so that we could do deer stalking and pig hunting”.

He worked on the South Island main trunk line railway and the day war was declared, he and 15 other young Blenheim men decided to enlist. Harry failed the medical examination but was still determined to take part.

“After Christmas 1939 the Second Echelon went into camp and, as I had been in the Mounted Rifles, I was posted to the Divisional Cavalry and sent to Papakura Military Camp.”

On May 1, 1940 he sailed on the Aquitania in a convoy of ships bound for Great Britain. After a few months in camp in England, his regiment was on the move to Egypt – one of 17 countries he visited during the war.

Just a few days after arriving in Cairo, his regiment was moved to Athens where its task was to escort British engineers into Yugoslavia to do demolition work. It would prove a dangerous and eventful mission. Several were killed or wounded under German attack while still in Greece. One battle left a gunner, Shorty Ward, badly injured and in need of hospital treatment. Harry managed to get him on a truck, and it was decided he would accompany him to a hospital in Argos.

When they arrived, they were met by the hospital’s sole doctor, who couldn’t speak English but who immediately enlisted Harry as his “theatre sister” to help him perform three amputations on wounded soldiers without anaesthetic.

“We couldn’t talk, but he showed me what to do. I was fortunate I’d done a bit of work with cattle, but it wasn’t a funny thing.”

The doctor later lost his nerve and locked himself in his house. “Here I was, left with a hospital to run with no medical knowledge apart from how to fix a broken leg,” says Harry. He muddled through with the help of an old midwife, some young girls and a 17-year-old local boy.

While at the hospital Harry was visited by three war correspondents, including globe-trotting reporter Robert St John, who mentioned their meeting in his 1942 book, Land of the Silent People. “I didn’t know about the book until last year when journalist Paul London got me a copy from the United States. Everybody in the country should have a read of it.”

A couple of days after Harry arrived in Argos, two ambulances arrived to pick up most of the “walking wounded” from the hospital. With the Germans advancing, Harry had no intention of becoming a prisoner-of-war, so he headed for the wharf and managed to talk his way onto the Calcutta, an anti-aircraft destroyer being loaded for its journey to Crete.

Soon after arriving in Crete, he was summonsed to a tent hospital: “Imagine my surprise when I was taken to see Shorty. His arm had been removed, but he had been cleaned up. The doctor asked me if I had put the dressings on Shorty in Argos and I told him we had had nothing to change them with. He said Shorty had been lucky as maggots had kept his wounds clean.”

Harry also fought in Syria, Tripoli and Medinine where his regiment helped repulse Rommel’s attack, in which he lost 52 tanks. “This battle was the end of Rommel’s career in the desert and he flew home never to return”. More than 30 years later, Harry and his wife, Madge, visited Germany where they met Rommel’s wife and son who were “very nice people”. One person Harry couldn’t tell about this meeting was his friend, Charles Upham. “If he’d known, he would never have spoken to me again.”

Harry remembers the last time he and ‘Charlie’ got together. “He said, ‘You know Harry, we made a mistake at the end of the war. Instead of making something of our lives, we should have taken a country over.’ We used to have a few funnies.”

In 1944 Harry was serving in Italy when he was called over to a Staghound armoured car and told Colonel Bonnifant wanted to talk to him.

“The talk was all in code and Bonny indicated I had to be ready to go home to New Zealand at six o’clock the next morning. I told him to forget it. His answer was, ‘You will do as you are bloody well told, Spencer,’ and that wasn’t in code.”

Bonnifant ended the war a brigadier, and he and Harry kept in contact. “We had survived a few skirmishes together and were great friends. He was a terrific fellow.”

After four years of war service, Harry returned to Blenheim. His father had died in 1941 while Harry was in the desert. Incredibly, Harry suffered only a minor wound to his ear during his long campaign.

“I could duck fast, but I was also very lucky.”

It wasn’t until he got home that Harry realised his nerves were “completely shot”. “The Air Force was flying Harvards over Blenheim at night and I couldn’t stand the noise. I needed to be somewhere quiet.”

He moved to Hastings where he started work as a cabinetmaker at Duncan’s Furniture Factory. He met Madge in Hastings, and they married in 1947.

“My wife and I didn’t have a family, but we had a great life together until she passed away eight years ago. We travelled all over the world and saw many great things.”

He went farming and continued to have a close involvement with the Hastings RSA, particularly in the Heritage section that looked after the welfare of families of soldiers killed in the war.

“I’m still involved with Heritage although we don’t have any customers these days. Quite a few of us used to act more or less as fathers to some of these children to keep them on the straight and narrow until they were 17.”

He is also involved in a small trust that has put together a “marvellous collection” of photographs and memorabilia from the Boer War, World War 1 and World War 2. “Unfortunately the chap who started the collection has died, but I’m working on another couple of chaps to get them involved. Some of these pictures are probably the only ones in existence. I’d like to see the collection taken around New Zealand and displayed.”

In 2006, Harry went on the Battle of Crete veterans’ pilgrimage to Greece and Crete to mark the 65th anniversary of the battle. In April this year, he was in Sydney for the Anzac commemorations. He is planning another trip to Crete for the 70th anniversary in two years’ time.

Now that the 70th anniversary of the declaration of World War 2 has passed, what does Harry think of the current state of world affairs?

“I don’t like the way the world is going now. I lost some very good friends killed in the war and I sometimes think, ‘What the heck for?’ What I’ve learned through my life is that the world has a great love for money, and it’s this that causes most of its problems.”