(written by Harry Frost, 1978)

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Contact Rog Frost

Knowledge goes back no further than James, my grandfather, born 21 September 1851 and his wife Ruth (Clarke) born 15 April 1854 so I call them the first generation. The 2nd generation - my father, aunts and uncles - had a tradition that some of the Frosts had come to Sussex from Wales but there wore no details and no reason why a poor family should have made a migration which would have been very difficult early in the 19th century. My grandmother told me towards the end of her life that her mother, whose maiden name I do not know, came to mid-Sussex from Belle Yew Green in Kent which she reported as a substantial move yet it can hardly be above 20 miles.

I owe most of my information to my father, Obed but he was almost the youngest of the 2nd generation and youngest children never know as much as eldest children about earlier generations. He was describing events from his childhood more than 60 years earlier and could not guarantee accuracy. He had a hazy recollection that there ware grandparents but could say nothing about them. They must have been born around 1825 and would have been aged when he was a child.

My mother, Ethel, was the chief letter writer in the family and through this I know something about the 2nd and 3rd generations - even members whom we seldom met. Of the 2nd generation only Mary in Australia is still alive in 1978. I have no memory of her but some of my older cousins have. Some of the 3rd generation (my own) have died and since my mother's death, in 1972, contacts have weakened but I think I still know something of all still alive.

I am less Informed about the 4th generation especially in branches where correspondents were lax so that even my mother failed to keep track. There is a substantial 5th generation of which I know little apart from my own grandchildren. There are at least two children of the 6th generation down the obvious oldest line, via Mercy (Edwards) oldest son, Ernest II who was born 30 May 1904 and is now a great grandfather.

Most of the family would be classified by sociologists as 'working class' fairly intelligent and responsible but with low incomes and humble occupations - more humble I think than many would have achieved with today's better opportunities. A few born after 1918 from the 3rd and later generations have achieved what would be called 'middle class' status. There have been no saints and no major sinners, few matrimonial problems or irresponsible difficulties. Most have lived their three-score-and-ten years or seem likely to do so.

Practically everything described here occurred in an area not more than 30 miles across and young readers will wonder why there was so little communication. There simply was no transport. The family was too poor to own horses. My father recalled an uncle with a 'penny farthing' bicycle but they were not around until towards 1880 and were very expensive In Frost terms. There was a railway station at Buxted In 1868 and one at Heathfield in 1880 (closed l965) but these N - S lines can hardly have helped family contacts so, during the childhood of the 2nd generation, contacts were limited to the distance they could walk on Sundays with attendance at Chapel having priority. No doubt occasional letters passed between the 1st generation but letters mean little to children who do not know the writers.

Even in my childhood when buses had filled in a lot of the transport gaps, money was too tight for much travel. At some time or other I probably met all accessible members of the 2nd and 3rd generations but until I left school in 1937 my world was 30 miles across from these visits plus 2 isolated visits to London (60 miles) and 3 school excursions to Canterbury, Windsor and Southampton (70 miles). All members of the 3rd generation report much the same. I must have been among the earliest to own a car and that was not until 1957.

The area where the 1st generation lived and the 2nd generation were children was part of the High Weald of mid-Sussex in the 7 miles between Buxted and Heathfield. There was (& is) little industry except farming and the poor sands and heavy clays of the High Weald do not make for prosperous farming. It is only 35 miles from London and land was relatively cheap so during the 19th century, it became peppered with 'baronial' mansions to suit the aristocratic aspirations of successful commercial types. They took over land that had formerly supported small peasant farms but provided domestic employment, especially for women. Girls entered domestic service at age 12 or thereabouts; all the 2nd generation girls and future wives of the boys seem to have done so.

The 1st generation Frosts seem to have been small holders or farm workers or a mixture. James Frost was a hop-drier which counted as the most highly skilled of the seasonal crafts. (Hops disappeared from the area after 1914). He and his wife Ruth were literate which was far from universal in the 1850s before State schools and compulsory education. Presumably one of the Church educational societies operated in the area.

The Frosts were Baptist Chapel people. Small Baptist and similar Chapels sprang up in the area in the early years of the century, often disagreeing with one another over small points of doctrine. James was a lay-preacher. No doubt he, like his wife Ruth in my memory, knew his Bible almost by heart.

The Clarkes were more fiercely sectarian than the Frosts. Uncle Asher was said to walk 7 miles each way on Sundays to attend a Chapel with the right shade of doctrine. Some of the Clarkes are buried at the elegant Chapel on the Battle to Heathfield turnpike, B2096, between Punnets Town and Cade Street. They may also have been a little more prosperous: one Uncle kept a grocer's shop in Framfield Road, Uckfield - which is still there. Another Uncle had a water mill - Coggins Mill, near Mayfield.

The 1st generation as recalled by my father (Obed) in 1963 are as follows. He could not guarantee that the list is complete or even in the right order.

Frosts.

Eli the oldest; lived at Cross-in-Hand; had daughters Mary and Bessie who went to Australia

James - grand father, one of the oldest, lived in the Buxted/Blackboys area

Samuel lived at Ridgeweed

Benjamin went to London (Leytonstone)

Frederick Hempstead Mills; son Fred lived at little Common, killed in 1st war

Mary Cross-in-Hand

Amelia Mayfield

John Hadlow Kent

George ?

David the youngest, lived at Cross-in-Hand

Clarkes

Asher kept a grocer's shop in Framfield Road, Uckfield.

Hepzibah - her husband had Coggins Mill.

Ruth - grandmother .

George

James

I met Uncle Ben on a couple of occasions when he visited Bexhill; he may have done a bit better for himself than those who stayed at home. I remember him as less old than grandmother, Ruth. He was still alive in 1939 but we never heard afterwards. I also met Mary and Bessie (2nd cousins) who lived at Eastbourne in the 1920s. I suspect that there should be another girl in the Clarke list because I can remember a visit from a younger sister of Ruth who lived in Northampton. Ruth's Birthday Book (now held by Hilda Wilson) refers to Annie Frost but none of us know who she was.

Presumably James Frost met Ruth Clarke through common membership of some Chapel congregation. I do not know when they married. All their children, listed below, ware given Biblical names. There is some doubt whether Obed was born in 1889 or 1890; his mother wrote down different dates in different places. For legal purposes he used 1890 and the pension authorities were happy to accept that.

Hepzibah was epileptic and lived at home until she died suddenly in the snow on a footpath leading to Uckfield. She was the first-born and her death seems to have hit her mother hard for she never used that path again. Naomi died of TB in Brighton where she and her sister Ruth were living at that time. She is recalled as a particularly sweet person by all who knew her.

James, their father, was crippled with arthritis before the turn of the century. Obed could barely remember him working. Eventually he was confined to a chair (now possessed by my daughter, Paula Monk)with his hands and legs permanently bent so that he was buried in a deep coffin with his knees up. Evening and morning he was carted up and down stairs in the chair. He was in permanent pain and sometimes wished to die, eventually succumbing through weakness to a respiratory infection.

Generations of Frosts

This is the best information I have in 1978. I do not pretend that my information about the Pope family is complete or correct. Probably some of the missing items from England can be filled in from further enquiries.

With several of her children still at home when James Frost became crippled, Ruth Frost was hard pressed financially. Among other things she took in lodgers: my oldest cousin Ern Edwards recalls from visits in his childhood, a game-keeper lodger with a clever retrieving dog. The 2nd generation remembered their mother as a very strict parent (though I remember a gentle grandmother: I do not know whether age or freedom from responsibility brought about the change).. The 2nd generation all referred to Mother and Father; they never used affectionate diminutives but perhaps this was Chapel custom at the time.

Dispersal of the 2nd generation (over 30 miles only) came from work. Mercy was in domestic service at Colgate Rectory (where my son Robin later lived for a time with his wife's parents). Ernest Edwards(I) was gardener; they married and lived for the rest of their lives in Crawley nearby. James joined the police and landed up in Brighton for the rest of his life. Sam stayed in the area, living successively at Hadlow Down, Five Ashes and Mayfield - all within 5 miles. He was a milk recorder for the East Sussex Milk Records Society when I knew him.

Joseph (Uncle Joe), the oldest boy, obtained work with Warburtons, the Uckfield corn chandlers. They opened a branch in Bexhill which was being opened up as a seaside resort around 1900 and moved him there. This move eventually made Bexhill the family focus. Joe played the cornet in the Salvation Army band and there met his wife, Cecilia Baker. When, after the death in 1913 of James senior, the family home was broken up, Joe's home became the family focus. His mother moved to Bexhill, so did Ruth II, Mary and Obed, who lodged for a time with Joe. My mother, Ethel Stevens, who had met my father while in domestic service at Saxon Court, Buxted, then obtained a job in Bexhill. I believe that Walter Pope must similarly have followed Mary. All the men of the family served in world war 1 and all returned safely, though I have sometimes wondered whether Ruth II lost a lover for she only married in middle age in Australia. I was born after Obed returned and my own recollections start from about 1924.

My parents, Obed and Ethel, married in St. Stephens Church, Bexhill on 29 January 1916. At that time he was a postman - a much desired steady job in those days. He soon had to join the Royal Garrison Artillery and go to the front in France. I now recognise how keenly they felt the separation and realise that I, conceived after my father came home from the war and born 28.9.1919, reaped the benefit of their happiness at being together again. Evidently I was a bright curly-haired baby and I can now appreciate that I must have meant a lot to them.

They had little else to be pleased about: jobs were hard to find and he became a shoe repairer. He explained later that he had picked up the craft when he and other lads of the village had resorted to the cobblers shop because he, like so many of his kind, was a bit of a philosopher and conversationalist. While talking, Dad had watched and lent a hand so he had half a trade at his disposal later on. He seems to have used it when he first went to Bexhill. After the war he went back to it for life. I always thought he was proud of his craft: certainly he enjoyed doing 'impossible' repairs when shoes were hard to get during the 2nd war; but he dropped it completely and apparently with relief when he retired.

In his Bexhill job he suffered financially under a pernicious but legal system of payment. The employer gave all the quick and easy jobs to a man paid by the week who could have earned a much better wage on piece work, and all the slow and difficult jobs to my father on piece work who could have made a reasonable living if he could have taken the rough with the smooth. Dad used to mend shoes for neighbours at home to make a bit extra and, especially when I became an expensive item at the grammar school, Mum took in washing and went out to work. The only good thing financially was that Dad was never out of work during the depression even while Bexhill was an official 'depressed area'

My sister Dora was born on 8.10.24. Among my earliest memories are being taken for a walk the previous day by Dolly Hall, our neighbour's daughter, and of my cot being moved to the kitchen for the night; in the morning, with no foreknowledge on my part, Nurse Moore had brought this baby in her bag and kept coming in for ages to deal with a flannel binder round the baby's middle. The gap of just over 4 years in age was probably too large for Dora and I to be close companions and I think she suffered under the prevalent doctrine that boys had to be helped forward as future bread-winners whereas girls needed only household skills.

Then the Grammar School split me, like most working class boys, between incompatible cultures and the pseudo-public school academic culture of the school went with the even more difficult wealth of companions who were mainly sons of prosperous shopkeepers. I am sure I appeared priggish at home and I was not wholly at ease until after world war 2 when we could all meet on equal terms as adults.

The Battle of Britain in 1940 practically emptied Bexhill and the old shoe-repairing business collapsed. Dad immediately took a job as a sort of foreman with a fly-by-night employer who had acquired contracts for mending army boots. My last visit to the old home was for my 21st birthday. I was working for EMI at Hayes and managed to get home through a badly disrupted train service. My 'party' consisted of a game of cards with my parents and an unmarried Irishman who worked with my father. Uncle Joe looked in. Conditions worsened and all who could were pressed to leave the town. The entire cobbling business moved to Old Heathfield, working in the former butcher's shop and living in the adjoining timber-framed house with the old slaughter house at the bottom of the garden as a sort of store. On my visits home I loved the place but my parents never enjoyed the semi-communal life nor the irresponsible business methods of the proprietor so Dad found a similar job in Horsham. They lived in a couple of rooms in Clarence Road.

Just before I got married, by which time I was living at Leigh, Kent and working for the Distiller's Co., I saw a local advertisement for a one-man repairing business In Tunbridge Wells. I pressed Dad to buy it and so, in 1944, he became self-employed and kept his shop in Rock Villa Road until he retired. Shoes were rationed at the time although materials were short so they were more comfortable than in my childhood.

In 1955 they were told that the shop was to be demolished so Dad decided to retire a bit early. (The premises were still standing the last time I passed in 1976). They took 2 rooms in Bexhill until they obtained an old people's bungalow - probably the best home they ever had. They lived there for the rest of their lives.

In my childhood my grandmother, Ruth 1, had a room in Cambridge Road about 150 metres from us in Alexandra Road. She always entered her downstairs room through a window at the back and, by not going through the house, retained a feeling of independence. Entering through a window seemed natural enough to me at the time. I had tea with her most Thursday afternoons and she loved taking me on country walks. I must have picked up a lot of country knowledge from her. I can now see that she must have been very poor. By that time old age pensions existed but she had only 10 shillings a week (50p). My father, not well paid himself, earned about 55 shillings. Until she was 75 she did a bit of housework for a family named Pugh. She only just approved of the Baptist Chapel in Bexhill - a typical mock-gothic red brick building, put up at the end of the century when Bexhill was expanding. Granny found a bus fare to go to a more primitive chapel at Ninfield where the surroundings and the congregation must have been more like her early experience. I was sometimes taken along and have kindly memories of the people I met.

I think her name was down for a place at the Brighton home of the Aged Pilgrims Friend Society before I was born. She got a place in 1929. I went with her and my mother to buy some suitable chairs and she moved on 9 September. It was an admirable institution, far ahead of its time in its arrangements. She was happy there and eventually gained the satisfaction of out-living everybody else there. In 1936 she had a heart attack and was never quite as vigorous again but when I saw her for the last time in August 1945 with my first wife and our little daughter Paula, she walked us energetically around Brighton and crossed busy streets with a confidence that alarmed me. During world war 2 she was for a time evacuated from the coast to her daughter Mercy's home in Crawley.

She died accidentally in 1946 in a gas-filled room. Apparently she had put cabbage on the gas to cook and then lay on her bed. The cabbage boiled over and put the gas out. At 91 with a weak heart she probably succumbed quickly. I have a letter she wrote to my mother the previous day which shows no more signs of age than for some years past.

Living In Bexhill, Uncle Joe's family played quite a part in my life. After the war he worked for an oil and hardware shop and I often accompanied him on some of his rounds. We visited them regularly. To me they always seemed more prosperous, doubtless because by the time I remember my cousins were working. Unlike us they had a (clockwork) gramophone and their radio - in a single cabinet with a good bass response which particularly impressed me - was far better than our 2-valve set with a separate moving-iron speaker. When I was very young Uncle Joe played 1st cornet in Bexhill Town Band to which he had migrated from the Salvation Army. He was a keen and good amateur gardener, running the equivalent of 3 or 4 ordinary plots.

Aunt Ruth (II) was another influence. She was cook in one of Bexhill's many private schools. We usually saw her on her half day or at week ends. She attended adult education classes and went to one Workers Educational Association summer school at the University of Oxford. Bexhill WEA once put on a play and I had to help her learn her part. (I must have been old enough to read.) I can still hear her saying, in her room and in the eventual performance in the Victoria Hall, in response to noises off, 'Sakes alive, it sounds like fighting'. Towards the end of her life I used to tell her about the WEA of which I was then a district officer. She wrote to regret that her contact with the WEA had come too late to help her much.

She left for Australia in (I think) 1930. I remember the last sight of her as she limped down the road with her gammy leg. She sailed on a ship called the Moreton Bay and wrote us letters about the voyage from intermediate ports.

I am told that I met Mary, her husband Walter Pope and their infant son Reg when they lived in Cambridge Road in a house which faced ours but as they sailed for Australia on 11 March 1921 when I was 18 months old I have no memory. As a child I knew from letters about Reg and the next child, Eileen, but I could never get a clear picture of other cousins I had never seen. Granny (Ruth 1) and my mother seemed to keep tabs on the rest.

The rest of the family lived 20 - 30 miles away and we saw them at fairly long intervals. We rarely visited Uncle Sam because he lived too far from a station for one-day visits when we children would have had to walk and I do not remember his family as a whole visiting us. Uncle Sam occasionally stayed the night when he had to record early morning milking at a farm near Bexhill. In my teens I cycled to the house at Five Ashes and my father and I cycled to the Mayfield house in 1941 when we were living at Heathfield about 7 miles away. Sam's wife, Nell (Unstead) was then bent up with arthritis much as James Frost had been I suppose. She died sometime during the next couple of years.

We visited Uncle Jim (James II) in Balfour Road. Brighton at long intervals. I remember his daughter Muriel playing on the piano, 'When the red red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along': no doubt an expert on popular songs could date that visit. His eldest son, Victor, became a policeman in Eastbourne and we used to see him on point duty outside Eastbourne station. His wife, Emily Mitchell, whom I only just remember, died in 1945 or thereabouts. I have no recollection of the younger son, Leonard, whom I never saw more than twice, over 40 years ago. I saw quite a lot of Victor who used to visit my mother after my father died, cycling the 12 miles from Eastbourne to Bexhill.

We had rather more contact with Aunt Mercy's family because her grown up children used to visit Bexhill for a visit to the seaside. Cousin Hilda visited us with her husband-to-be, with her husband just married and later with her infant son David. Ruth and her husband Bert came: I remember going with Bert to a play by the repertory company at the old Pavilion: I can even remember that it was called 'Symphony in Two Flats' but not much else. John cycled down a couple of times and stayed with Uncle Joe. George and his wife came down similarly but rather more after I had left home. We also saw a good deal of this branch of the family during my parents time in Horsham, (near Crawley) and again when I came to live in Crawley in 1949. By that time Aunt Mercy's husband, Ern 1. was going blind but he was always cheerful. We went to their Golden Wedding party.

By that time the 2nd generation had begun to depart. Of those I had known, Uncle Joe went first having contracted the occupational disease of people who work with oil - carcinoma of the bladder. His second son, Leslie, who also spent his working life transporting petrol and paraffin, has since died similarly. Joe died in 1952 and his wife, Cissie, survived him by 6 years. Aunt Mercy died suddenly in 1956 from a lung Infection. Her husband lived for another year or so. I never knew much about Uncle Jim's death (James II): I do not think my parents had any reason to expect it but he was a poor correspondent so they might not have heard anything: I believe it was fairly sudden. Uncle Sam died suddenly near his home in Mayfield from a blocked coronary artery. He was being looked after by his widowed daughter Edna who has since died herself.

Aunt Ruth's death in Australia brought my father the first 'legacy' he had ever received. She left a paid up life insurance policy, premium a penny a week, when she left for Australia. She had taken it out in Buxted: It seems that Uncle Sam had held an agency in the Pearl, company; my parents had similar policies issued through him. It fell to my father to collect this windfall and I drove him to the company's office in Hastings. I forget the sum. It covered the cost of the petrol and Dad was amused. It makes a comment on changing values; a penny a week was money in 1913.

My father was the last of the 2nd generation in England: he died in 1966. I did not see him for the last few weeks of his life because my wife was so ill (she died 6.3.67). His funeral was the penultimate family gathering and most branches were represented. For as long as my mother lived contacts were maintained. She died on 6 June 1972. I realised that her funeral would be positively the last occasion: (she was also the last of her generation on her side of the family) so I invited everybody to a lunch at a Hotel in St. Leonards. It seems strange to say that those two funerals were enjoyable occasions but they were: my cousin Ern Edwards said much the same as we drove back to Horsham.

I have had contact with all branches of the family In the past 9 months and expect I shall keep some contact with those of the 3rd generation who can be reached by phone, and, rather more easily with those in the Crawley area. I do not think that any of us want to overdo it: we had the same grandparents and some common experiences when we were young but we all have our interests and our own children or grandchildren. I do not expect to mean much to descendants who never knew me and I do not suppose that James and Ruth Frost will mean a great deal either. (We shall have a Ruth Frost around for a few more years in my 5 year old youngest daughter. Ruth).

Harry Frost

August 1978