Newsletter
November 2004 (updated May 2005)
Obituary
- Keith Frogson (1942 - 2004)
It is with the
deepest regret that we report the savage murder of victimised Notts
miner Keith Frogson. 'Froggy', who was 62, was one of the most popular
and respected members of Notts NUM. He was found dead outside his
house with massive head injuries. On May 24th 2005 a neighbour, Robert
Boyer, 43, was found guilty of his murder and arson, Keith's house
having been set on fire a week after his death. We offer our deepest
sympathy to Keith's family. Froggy was truly a giant of the movement.
During the trial
the judge and a police officer called for a review of weapons laws
after Boyer was able to purchase the weapons used in the murder from
a mail order company – a crossbow and two Japanese ninja swords.
Boyer, who not
only planned the attack but built a hideout in Sherwood forest stocked
with food to hide in afterwards, was ordered to be detained indefinitely
under the Mental Health Act. Boyer was only apprehended by a 600 strong
police search party after several weeks in his den.
He had admitted
manslaughter after slashing to death Keith Frogson while in the grip
of delusions. The court heard that Boyer had bought the weapons legally
by answering magazine advertisements and spent hours watching violent
films to learn how to use them.
Mr. Justice Bean
told Nottingham crown court: "I must record my concern that it
is possible for a crossbow and ninja sword to be bought by mail order
without any licence being required and without a proper record of
them being bought. I respectfully suggest that this is a matter which
the Home Secretary may wish to consider if legislation is to be introduced
concerning knives and offensive weapons."
His call was backed
by Detective Chief Constable Russ Foster of Nottinghamshire police,
who led the investigation in July 2004 at the former pit village of
Annelsey Woodhouse.
The murderer and
his victim were on opposite sides of the picket lines during the strike,
with Boyer scabbing from the very beginning, and also joining the
scab union the UDM. Keith, however, remained loyal to the NUM throughout
the year-long dispute, an immensely respected and well liked member
of his community.
Keith Frogson's
funeral in August 2004 was attended by 1,200 mourners, and we reproduce
two reports published in the Guardian newspaper .
Bitter miners'
strike remembered at funeral of unrepentant stalwart
Martin
Wainwright
Saturday August 28, 2004
The Guardian
A tearful, old-fashioned
miners' wake stopped the streets of a former coalfield village yesterday,
as four black-draped horses led hundreds of strike veterans behind
the hearse of a murdered colleague.
.....The coffin of 62-year-old Keith
Frogson, who was killed last month allegedly following a bitter argument
over the 1984-5 dispute, was wrapped in a National Union of Mineworkers'
banner with his pit nickname 'Froggy' spelt out in flowers.
.....Mounted on a carriage, it was hauled
gently from the street of terraced pitmen's houses in the Nottinghamshire
village of Annesley Woodhouse, where Mr Frogson's body was found yards
from his doorstep. A huge pile of flowers and teddy bears wearing
miners' helmets and Coal not Dole badges spilled over from the spot
to the corner of the street.
.....The strike's leader Arthur Scargill
arrived unexpectedly as the cavalcade wound its way to St John the
Evangelist's church, after earlier sending word that he was ill and
unable to come. His former deputy, Henry Richardson, another major
figure during a ferocious struggle which split families and villages
throughout Nottinghamshire, led the long file of mourners.
.....Mr Scargill, whose leadership was
undermined by Nottinghamshire's breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers,
said that Mr Frogson had been the staunchest of colleagues in the
county. He said: "The union and I have lost a great comrade and
a great friend.
....."He was one of the first to
draw to the attention of the new Labour government when it was elected
in 1997 that they should honour their undertaking that all miners
who were sacked should be reinstated. That is why there are so many
people here today to pay tribute to a tremendous trade unionist."
.....Mr Frogson was known widely as an
unrepentant believer in the strike and its aims, who was still in
the habit of shouting 'scab' at men who had joined the UDM or crossed
picket lines.
.....Among well over 1,000 mourners,
who filled St John's and stood outside during the funeral service,
was a group with a red and yellow banner saying Annesley Strikers,
a band to which the murdered man was proud to belong.
.....Echoes of the ill-fated defiance
of the outmanoeuvred NUM were shot through the service, with a re-singing
of the Strawbs' 'strike anthem' Part of the Union and a passage
from the French fable writer Jean de la Bruyère. Mr Frogson's
youngest daughter Rachel, 32, who survived an arson attack on his
home shortly after the murder, struggled with tears before reading:
....."There exist some evils so
terrible and some evils so horrible that we dare not think of them.
But if they happen to befall us, we find ourselves stronger than we
imagined, we grapple with our luck, and we behave better than we expected
we should."
Fragile lives
– The
funeral of former miner Keith Frogson reminded a community of its
bitter past
Mark
Seddon
Monday August 30, 2004
The Guardian
Sometimes the
past briefly becomes the present: raw and angry, still demanding answers,
it rudely interrupts a world that has moved on. And so it did this
weekend in the former Nottinghamshire mining village of Annesley,
nestling on the edge of Sherwood Forest, where striking pitman turned
local odd-job man Keith Frogson was finally laid to rest. Keith, or
"Froggy" as we all knew him, had been found murdered yards
from his home late in July. Robert Boyer, a former neighbour, has
been charged with his murder.
.....It is 20 years since the end of
the miners' strike, almost as many since the wheels stopped turning
at the now derelict Annesley Bentinck colliery, where Froggy once
worked. Until that is, he was sacked for taking the blame for a bit
of a rumble on a picket line that was one of his mate's doing. Twenty
years may have passed, but in these ravaged communities the strike
never really ended.
.....Miners who supported the strike
call still don't speak to "scabs"; they avoid the clubs
and pubs that they frequent. Policemen are still regarded with suspicion
- those charged with stewarding the funeral procession for the most
part avoided eye contact with ex-miners and their families. Some of
Froggy's old mates were furious to discover that a former working
miner owned the bus they had travelled in. "Had we known, we
would have walked it," said former Bevercotes miner Taff King.
.....Well over a thousand mourners from
across the coalfields turned out for Froggy, with their union banners
and strike badges worn as old campaign medals, waiting for the black-plumed
horse-drawn hearse to wend its way. A note found near the former miner's
home had read simply "Froggy, a legend killed by cowards".
Whoever wrote it would have known something of this very ordinary
man's tragedy and what his courage in adversity meant to others who,
like Froggy, found themselves without jobs, without wives and without
homes at the end of the strike in 1985.
.....This had been Froggy's lot. He never
regained his job, but devoted himself to the Justice for Mineworkers
campaign and became a familiar sight at Labour and TUC conferences.
The campaign's banner was placed reverentially on his coffin.
.....A tattered poster, hung from a nearby
chapel, read poignantly "Life is fragile - handle with care".
Nearby, a van driver craned his neck to see what was going on. "I've
just seen Arthur Scargill in that shop," he said. "Mind
you, I was on the other side back then. I often saw Froggy walking
his dogs, but he never would speak to me."
.....Wistfully, the driver leant back.
"Sometimes I wish it had all been different. I drive all over
Nottinghamshire now, the villages are half-derelict and all we have
to show for it are some half-empty industrial parks. No proper jobs
you see."
.....It is apposite that Froggy spent
his life in an area that bears the proud legend "Robin Hood Country".
When I used to bump into him 20 years ago, he always had a rabbit
or a pheasant he had "happened by". These were invariably
handed over to families that needed them more than he did. "He
had walked this area and the forest all his life," said a family
member. "Froggy believed that if you knew and loved a place that
well, it became yours. So in the end, he owned more land than the
local squire."
.....Two old boys, one leaning on a stick,
stood outside the Annesley working men's club, remembering good times
and bad, how the villages had changed, how drugs and crime had become
all-pervasive. What cheered them was news of Sir Mark Thatcher's arrest.
"He was the only one she ever did anything for," said one.
.....A gentle breeze tugged at the Maltby
NUM banner as the procession moved off slowly towards the church.
"Froggy always said he wanted 'I'd rather be a picket than a
scab' played at his funeral," an old workmate chortled. He wouldn't
have been disappointed: as the church came into view, so the strains
of the Strawbs singing "You don't get me, I'm part of the union"
drifted across. As the crowd marshalled again behind the banners for
the short walk to the cemetery, John Lennon's Imagine was played.
.....And then it was over. Froggy's friends
and family headed back to the club, to talk of him, of good times,
bad times - and the ex-miner's sunny optimism and good nature. The
past had come back to divided Annesley 20 years on. But what of the
future? What now as the North Sea gas runs out, as oil prices soar,
now the pits have gone and Froggy's friends have dispersed? The old
boys outside the club told me: "We always knew this would happen;
that some day they would need us and coal. But now it's too late for
all that."
– Mark Seddon
is a member of Labour's national executive committee