SINGAPORE, Aug 23 — Hugh Harrison, the composer of three popular National Day songs, including Count on Me, Singapore, has been hospitalised after his right arm was maimed by a spinning propeller at his Canadian home last Tuesday (August 9), which is Singapore's National Day.
The accident happened in the morning while the 71-year-old Canadian was on his driveway starting up a paramotor — a type of motorised propeller that is worn on a person's back while parachuting — that he intended to use for powered paragliding later that day.
Harrison was in the spotlight last year after Indian musician Joseph Conrad Mendoza claimed that he had composed a variation of the song Count on Me, Singapore, which was first performed at Singapore’s National Day Parade in 1986. Mr Mendoza has since withdrawn his claims.
Harrison composed the country’s first three National Day theme songs: Stand Up for Singapore (1984 and 1985), Count on Me, Singapore (1986) and We are Singapore (1987 and 1988).
In a video interview with TODAY from the University of Alberta Hospital on Saturday, Harrison said that he had watched the National Day Parade live online prior to his own accident.
He saw a member of the Red Lions parachute team, Third Warrant Officer Jeffrey Heng, take a hard landing during the parade.
“I saw the unfortunate parachutist hit the ground hard. (Accidents) happen even to the most experienced,” he said wistfully. Little did he expect that he would be involved in his own accident several hours later.
The accident
Recounting how events unfolded, Harrison said the mishap occurred after he had finished assembling the 25kg paramotor for the first time on his driveway, as he planned to paraglide the morning after watching the National Day Parade.
The parade took place on August 8 Canada time.
When he started up the paramotor, he did not expect that the machinery would pitch forward with such force, causing his arm to be hit by the propeller as he could not jump out of the way.
The next thing he remembered was being drenched in blood on the driveway at his home in Fort McMurray, a small city in northeast Alberta.
Said Harrison: “There was meat and bones all over my driveway. I had to gather up bits of arm and turn the engine off.
“Blood was just gushing out like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” he added, referring to a fictional character in the 1975 British comedy film.
He made his way back into his house and his 20-year-old son, Charlie, tried to call the emergency services but kept getting the address wrong. His son has autism and was the only one in the house at the time.
Thankfully, Harrison said his neighbours came into the house and found him standing in the hallway trying to stem the blood with paper towels. They called an ambulance and helped to apply pressure on his wounds until the paramedics arrived.
He was taken to the small Northern Lights Regional Health Centre in downtown Fort McMurray to stabilise his condition, and then flown around 400km south to the University of Alberta Hospital in the city of Edmonton.
Doctors had initially expected to amputate his arm, but Harrison said he had just been told that reconstructive surgery was possible, meaning he would hopefully regain control of his fingers and arm. The first of these surgeries has been scheduled for Thursday.
His surgeon intends to take part of the fibula bone on his calf to replace his shattered ulna, one of the two bones on his forearm, he added.
“At the moment, there’s no muscle and bone here,” he said, referring to his right forearm.
“So they’re going to try and rebuild it which is a lot better than amputation.”
He has since undergone surgeries to rebuild the broken bone in his forearm with metal plates and screws, which Harrison joked was like “becoming Inspector Gadget”.
Harrison also sustained some minor injuries to his abdomen but besides the injuries on his dominant right arm, he was in good shape, he said.
As for his present condition, he said he is now on a long period of antibiotic treatment and has his arm washed several times a day to keep it from drying out in the cast.
Harrison said that his 49-year-old wife, Loy, his 23-year-old daughter, and son Charlie are still living in Fort McMurray.
Speaking to TODAY, Mrs Harrison said her husband appears to be coping well with his injury and that their hopes are on a successful reconstructive surgery.
“The difficulties that lie ahead — emotional, physical, financial — are very real, but I am confident that together as a family, we can rise above these challenges,” said Mrs Harrison.
She also spoke of how calm Harrison was at the time of the accident, much to their son’s amazement.
“Charlie said he was flustered and giving wrong directions to the emergency services, but his father was able to correct him and provide the right information,” she added.
Asked about his experience with paramotors, Harrison said he has been paragliding since 1997 and has flown them in many countries while he was travelling the world.
He last flew a paraglider in 2003 in Uganda, where he said he narrowly escaped harm while flying dangerously low over crocodile-infested dangers, while he was demonstrating the paraglider to a photographer who wanted to buy it from him.
While he had some experience using them, Harrison said the paramotors he used in the past were smaller, and came with weaker engines.
‘Life and adventures’
Before Harrison returned to Canada, he had been travelling the world and lived in Australia and Indonesia before moving to Singapore.
He eventually ran out of money and decided to find work in Singapore, where he joined advertising firm McCann Erickson. It was there where he composed Stand Up for Singapore and submitted it in a government tender for a theme song for the National Day Parade.
He left Singapore in 1991 and continued travelling the world, including in Thailand where he worked as a creative director.
In 2012, he moved back to Canada with his Thai wife and two children and has stayed there since.
For the past nine years in Canada, he has been taking on various creative jobs that he finds pleasure in: raising fish, painting, sculpting, pottery, as well as composing music.
He has occasionally also taken on jobs operating on excavators and dozers in the mines.
His wife, meanwhile, works at a local hotel in Fort McMurray.
Harrison said that his injury may have been a blessing in disguise.
“I’m always going in many directions. Painting, sculpting, making music, with both hands I could do all of that. But sometimes nothing gets completed.”
Now, Harrison hopes that the limited control over his arm will force him to focus on completing his latest project that has been on the back-burner for a long time — an autobiographical novel about “life and adventures”.
“I can focus on my writing to support my family. I can still dictate and use my left hand,” he said.
“With this limitation I can focus on the one thing that would be the book and getting healed, which I guess could take at least a year to get better.” ― TODAY
