The Weald of Kent, Surrey and Sussex
The biography of Frederick Joseph Harman, son of Walter (Bob) Harman and Ellen Sophia Harman [Groombridge]
Compiled by Fred Harman's research

The Harman children - Doris (centre), Robert (behind), Sidney (left), Herbert and twin Bernard, and Frederick (on lap) - c 1921Frederick Joseph Harman was born on 28th September 1919. His earliest recollections as a young child are of his father drawing beautiful clear water from the well, which was sixty feet deep. His mother cooking the meals on a two-burner valor stove and doing the washing in the copper with rainwater collected from the huge wooden butts outside the backdoor. Another is of his father trying to shave by the light of a flickering candle with a cut-throat razor which was waved threateningly at the boys as they rushed in and out of the door making the candle flicker. Most of their lives were spent at Shernfold Meadow cottages. Known then by the old name of Workhouse cottages. A game that the children used to play was called 'fox hunting' which was usually played during what was often an extended lunch hour at Frant school. The chosen two 'foxes' would be given a five-minute start into Eridge Park. Of course, they all got so involved that time was forgotten and they were in big trouble when they finally arrived back at school.

He reckons that Jack and he would have been branded as vandals because of some of the escapades they got up to. They would scrump apples from the Shernfold orchard and, quite often, if the pears were not ripe, would push them into the side of a huge new haystack that occupied a corner of the field near the barn. One day when they were ten and twelve respectively. They borrowed some home-made 'nutbrown' cigarettes of their father's and decided to light up in the shelter of the hay stack. Unfortunately, one of them dropped a lighted match and the stack burnt to the ground. The general opinion was that the stack was too close to the road and a spark from a steamroller had fired it. The children belonged to the church choir and attended practice on a thursday and on sundays attended morning and evening services. For these attendances they were paid three pence for a practice and sixpence for a service. When he was thirteen and a half in 1933, jobs were difficult to obtain. He applied to Sainsbury to serve an apprenticeship of five years as a grocery assistant. He went up to London for an interview with Paul Sainsbury who told him that he had a job if he could start immediately. Mr Bob Woods, the schoolmaster, was aware of the situation and allowed him to leave school and so he started at the Guildford store where he worked himself up from egg boy.

He joined the Royal Air Force in 1935 and trained at Ruislip. He was posted to Cardington on a nine-month balloon course. As he finished the course, war was declared and he was posted to Glasgow and Edinburgh and later to Scapa Flow. During the raids on shipping in the English Channel he was posted to Portsmouth and Cowes. He was selected as one of the group of R.A.F. Personnel to go on the Dieppe raid as crew on the tank landing craft in the 5th flotilla. Shortly after this he was sent to North Africa and Italy.

While he was engaged in serving overseas, both his father and mother died. When the war was over he obtained a job firstly as a brickie's labourer and then a painter's labourer. Finally he got a job as a private hire taxi driver in Groombridge for Maurice's garage. In 1947, after many years of encouragement from brothers Sid and Jack, he immigrated to New Zealand where he met and married his wife, Betty Mcintyre. They have two children - Roger Douglas who was born on 10th October 1952 and Elizabeth a daughter who was born on 2nd October 1960. Roger married Gillian Hayward in 1957 and lives in Australia. They have no children. Elizabeth married Grant Southam on 15th March 1981 and they live with their two children in Auckland. The eldest child, Paul Grant was born on 16th July 1985 and Matthew Roger on 19th October 1986.

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