Harold Madderson was born in 1919 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England.  He was the second youngest of a family of eight.  He attended St Mary’s school in Hitchin and left, as was normal in those days, at the age of 14.

He was apprenticed at Letchworth Garden City Press as a bookbinder.  He cycled from Hitchin to Letchworth daily.

When war broke out in Sept 1939, he was called up and was in the 135 Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery.  The men did training in the British Isles and finally left from Scotland in October 1941.  They were bound for the Middle East.  This was not their final destination as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the USA entered the war.  Harold and his regiment, together with other regiments, were re-routed from Cape Town via Mombasa to Singapore.  He was only there for about two weeks when Singapore fell to the Japanese – the men were captured and were taken prisoner.  This began more than 3 years of hell.  He was sent to work on the Thai/Burmese railway with all those horrors – he survived and was then sent on a hellship, the Rakuyo Maru, to Japan.  The ship was torpedoed by the US navy and sank.  Further horrors or floating around in the sea, picked up by the Japanese and rerouted to Japan.  He spent the rest of the war working in a Japanese prison camp near Nagasaki and saw the cloud from the atomic bomb.  August 15 1945 saw the end of the war.  Harold eventually returned to England via the United States and Canada.  He arrived back in November 1945.

All this happened to Harold by the time he was 26 – all his years of youth taken away.  He could not settle in England and left for Kenya in November 1947 to work as a farm manager on a farm in Molo, Kenya. He was there during the Mau Mau.  He bought his own farm in 1953 with the help of a loan from the British Settlement Scheme (Kenya was a British Colony and Britain was giving loans). He called his farm Highover, which was where he lived in Hitchin. He raised his family of 3 children.   They had a period in England and in the United States where Harold worked for a pig syndigate.

He finally sold his farm (due to independence in Kenya) in 1968 and bought a farm in Knysna in South Africa (also called it Highover) where he stayed until just before his death in 1991, dying of leukemia at the age of 72.

He was a self made man.  He came from humble beginnings.