By Luke Voogt
After 100 years Fred Benham has outlasted two major companies and his first hometown, but still gets around without a walker, glasses or hearing aids.
People tell the Hamlyn Heights centenarian he looks not a day over 80, to which he replies:
“I think you need to get your eyes checked.”
Fred celebrated the century mark two days early at Cobradah Senior Citizens Club, Bell Post Hill, on Monday before family celebrations on Wednesday.
“You learn a lot if you live a long time … but you forget most of it,” he told the crowd to laughter.
“I’ve always said I’ve been part of the best club in Geelong.”
Fred was 11 days old when World War I ended, after his birth on 31 October 1918, and lived his first few years at Rocklyn near Daylesford.
“Which is no longer a town – it’s just a postcode now,” he said.
“My first memory was sitting underneath a table in Belmont crying.”
Later he discovered he was crying because his “destitute“ mother, the second-youngest in a family of 11, had put him up for adoption.
A Drysdale couple in their 70s raised Fred, from whom he took his surname.
The pensioner couple were receiving eight shillings a week per child to look after up to four other children, Fred said.
“They were getting nothing for me. All my brothers and sisters had different surnames.”
His foster parents found him a job at age 13, straight after he earned his merit certificate at primary school, he said.
“They had a job for me at two and sixpence picking potatoes at Curlewis.”
Fred spent most of his teenage years travelling for farm work, including a job packing fruit in Mildura, before returning to his foster parents.
“When I came back one of them had died,” he said.
He took a maths course and then enrolled at Gordon Institute of Technology to train as a fitter and turner.
About the same time he tracked down his mother, who he forgave “absolutely” after discovering her circumstances, which he wished to withhold from the record.
“I had contact with her until she died in 1968, I think,” he said.
After several years working at Geelong’s Ford factory, Fred got a job at International Harvester.
For decades Fred worked tirelessly, driving back and forth from work to management night school at RMIT, in pursuit of “security”.
Eventually he became works manager for International Harvesters’ factories at Port Melbourne Dandenong and North Shore.
“I’ve worn out about 20 motor cars driving between plants,” he said.
He left International Harvester before the company’s closure devastated Geelong in 1982, after a superior told him to “look the other way” from corruption, he said.
His questioning of an overpriced company contract led to the discovery, which he wished not to explain further on the record.
Fred said he had lived “quite healthily“ after retiring, especially after a heart attack in his 60s.
He suffered two more heart attacks, including one three years ago when doctors told him he had five hours to live.
But travelling the world with his partner Marie Phillips, who coincidentally turned 86 on Monday, had given him “peace of mind” in later life, he said.
“She’s my soulmate and she has been my salvation.“
