Froggatt Photo Gallery
Go to Froggatt individuals family names photo index homepage
There are very few Froggatt photographs available.
Thomas Street, Retford, Nottinghamshire, birthplace of Leslie K. (Woods) Froggatt
Leslie Froggatt (53) in c1939 (left) and in 1972
(Left) Jasmine Cottage, Greenaway Lane, Hackney, Darley Dale near Matlock,
Derbyshire and (right) Leslie with 2nd wife Lilian Jackson (23) at Jasmine
Cottage, in the late 1980s.
In making a detour from Woodhouse to Shireoaks, I passed through three of the most interesting and least known villages in South Yorkshire - Wales, Harthill, and Thorpe Salvin. But, as far as Wales, the most exasperating feature of this countryside consists of scattered collieries, with domestic colonies to match. Collected together with three appurtenances - grimy, red-brick, jerry-built terraces of cottages - and forced into one town with authorities at the head, all well and good from every point of view except the hygiene.
From Aston, you may take
the by-roads, and go farther and fare worse than if you kept to the
highways.
Plodding eastwards from Sheffield, for a goodly distance of the way to
Worksop, one no sooner seems to gain on a little rural ground sweet in its
primitive or cultivated state, where swallows, thrushes, and blue-tits make
their abode, than one comes to the most depressing lines of cottages
tenanted by collier families, the women often twice their bread-winner's
girth and weight - for pitmen are necessarily "slippy little fellows." In an
evening the children play about on the door-stones, and the portly dames
stand there in dishabille, with arms akimbo, to stare at anybody who happens
to go by, finding in gossip the very salt of their existence.
Waleswood is such a place
today, taking its inspiration from the Waleswood Colliery, not far away, and
there is still another separate settlement of the same stamp between bucolic
Aston and bucolic Wales. Thirty years ago old men who had neither garth nor
stray rights tended their cattle unmolested upon these roads and their ample
swards, the track itself being so green over that cart-traffic threatened to
become a circumstance of the past.
Waleswood appears to have taken its name from an ancient hall, from which
some respectable family may have driven away to quieter scenes; indeed, I am
not sure that the hall any longer exists, though the colliery flourishes, as
you may judge by the many inscribed railway trucks on the South Yorkshire
lines. At the cross-roads there appears to have been a toll-bar, but that
has been swept away too, and a somewhat villainous-looking hotel for
colliers substituted, one of its glaring announcements being billiards. A
long terrace stretches away from this house, and in front is a football
field, where I found the younger men "roughing it" at dusk.
True, these isolated settlements have pure air, fresh spring water, beautiful environment, and many other advantages that Barnsley colliers have not. Despite the fact that in wintertime they are much benighted, still they are not congested in their breathing area, they are not choked and blinded with smoke, or deafened with traffic. The laws of good friendship unite every member of the colony, and the misfortunes of one household effect the rest.
Now, I am strongly of opinion that the vast majority of these rural pitmen are confirmed native stock, sons, may be, of the old agricultural labourers, who discovered that coal-hewing commanded better wages than working the land. The credit due to them I will not withhold, for everywhere during the course of my peregrinations in this part I heard that a soberer, kinder-hearted lot of men never walked. Respect for their childish gentleness is compelled, and they have a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to condole with and help one another; deserving throughout their walk through life a generous allowance for the little foibles so incidental to character which has to be developed in great measure underground.
Go to Froggatt individuals family names photo index homepage