Sweepstake Winner To Help Cretans

Press, Volume C, Issue 29511, 12 May 1961, Page 12

Sweepstake Winner To Help Cretans

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, May 11. The Dunedin winner of a £50,000 sweepstake will be knocking on doors in the villages of Crete in a few weeks from now, looking for people who kept him from starving while he was a fugitive from the Germans in 1941. In those days Mr W. G. Davidson, a grocer, of Burnside, was a private in the Army Service Corps. In March he won first prize in an Irish Sweepstake and tonight he sailed for the United States in the Oriana on his way back to the Mediterranean island. “I can’t tell you the names of the Cretans who helped me during the four months I was free on the island,” he said. “But I know that if I see a house where I sheltered I will recognise it. “They were starving, but they gave me food and for nearly 20 years I have wanted to go back there and see what I could do to help. “By our standards,’ Mr Davidson said, “it will take very little to help them a lot. They have nothing.

His search will start in the villages of Galatos and Maleme where, with a fellow Dunedin man, Mr Roy Overton, he hid from the Germans for several weeks. In the end, hungry and unable to get in touch with any British agents who could get them off the island, they surrendered and ended up in Stalag 88, working in the mines. With him on his “pilgrimage” are his wife, his son Neville (aged 12), and his daughter. Kay (10). "We will stay there about two months,” Mr Davidson said. “What we can do to help we don’t know yet. In England I will try to find out what they need most.”