Danarm Machinery are very sad to report the passing of Heinz Schmidtke, known throughout the garden machinery industry during the past 50 years as Henry Smith.


Henry Smith

Henry was employed in the 1950s by the company, J. Clubley- Armstrong promoting sales and demonstrating chainsaws, manufactured in Stroud, Gloucestershire by T.H. Daniels Limited.
In 1960 the J. Clubley-Armsrong chainsaw business was taken over by T.H. & J. Daniels and the DANARM Ltd. company was formed as a wholly owned subsidiary of Daniels.

Henry was employed as Sales Manager for the South and East of England and for the next 30 years devoted his working life to promoting the Danarm name by visits, organising and attending shows and carrying out extremely popular chainsaw workshops in many areas. Henry was always willing to offer technical help when needed, as his ability and knowledge of chainsaws was very much appreciated within the trade.

During this period Henry made several overseas trips. One of which was notably to Brazil in the 1970s, when he instructed chainsaw operators before they embarked on trips into the rainforest area to clear land for the building of the Amazonian highway.

In 1991, the then owners of Danarm Ltd. decided to close the company and Henry, who had just reached retirement, agreed to join Roger Blanch in the set up and promotion of the range of Kaaz manufactured garden machinery under the name Danarm Machinery Services, later to become Danarm Machinery Limited.

The company has been managed in recent years by Karen Blanch and during this time Henry has continued to help and advise Karen.

During the last couple of years Henry has limited his involvement to visits to SALTEX in September, but his interest in Danarm never wained.

Henry was a very strong man in both physical and moral terms, liked and respected wherever life took him. He will be greatly missed by his daughters, grandchildren and all who knew him.