Notes Frederick (Fred) was placed at Fairbridge Farm School, Pinjarra, Western Australia. He was one of a party of 22 orphaned boys aged under 12 sent to Australia under the auspices of the Child Emigration Society, organised by Rhodes scholars at Oxford (Source: NLA Trove Newspapers).
He served in WWII and was a POW:
HOLT FREDERICK HOWARD : Service Number - WX2207 : Date of birth - 29 Jan 1908 : Place of birth - S WALES ENGLAND : Place of enlistment - NORTHAM WA : Next of Kin – JOHNS
He died in 1965 aged 59 and was buried in Albany WA.
This Tribute was published by the Albany RSL in 1965:
FREDERICK HOWARD HOLT
Frederick Howard Holt of South Stirling, who died at the age of 59 and was buried in Albany this week, liked to say he was an ordinary man. He was wrong.
The death of this farmer, gold miner, old soldier and former prisoner of war, left his many friends believing they were lesser people in a lesser land because of his passing.
History may not place his name very high on the list of great Australians, his name was one for the warm hearts of men, not books.
He was a war service farmer, not landed gentry. He was a volunteer private in the 2/11th Battalion, AIF, not a general. And his capture in Crete and four years as a prisoner of the Germans was never dramatized in print or film.
AUSTRALIAN LEGEND
Physically, he was a small man, but in character he was part of the fabric of the Australian legend.
Fred – he rarely answered to “Frederick” – was born in England and shipped out to Western Australia as a seven-year-old Fairbridge Farm boy.
He grew to tough manhood working for tucker and keep around the Bruce Rock and Merredin farming areas, moving on in the 1930s to the goldfields.
They called him the “Coolgardie Pom”, but a wide grin, the yarns he told, his capacity for work, for beer and good humour, as well as a wonderful ability to make and keep friends, made him more of an Australian than any bush ballad hero.
PRISONER OF WAR
An early volunteer at the outbreak of war, Fred and other Goldfielders fought in Libya, Greece and finally Crete.
With them he was taken prisoner and sent to a camp in Germy, but neither he nor the Germans came to like the idea! With his close friends Clarrie Phillippson, who was a good footballer and lived to become this year’s vice-president of the Albany RSL, and George “Pasha” Prestige of Morley Park, Fred was an utter failure as a model prisoner.
Germany decided that his energies were better spent working 12 and 15 hour days as a forced labourer in a Polish coal mine.
...
Home again to become an underground shift boss at Coolgardie, Fred Holt married a slim young school teacher, eventually leaving the Goldfields to take up War Service land at South Stirlings.
He settled down – a small chunky man with a big brown face he once described as “like an old potato”, developing his farm and a family of eight children, the oldest of whom joined the regular army only last week.
Fred loved his children, his wife, his land and his friends – his last hours included an army reunion in Perth – and the measure of his love was reflected in the faces of his mourners last Tuesday.
Friends and neighbours at the graveside of Fred Holt included more than 100 ex-servicemen – the highest number ever to attend a funeral at Albany – and among them were old comrades Philippson and Prestige.
But it was no mere duty call...the tears in their eyes were very real.