GONE FROGGING

‘My father Froggy, bless him; miss my dad so much.’
Image courtesy of Jean Chenard.

At school, we pinned the frog on the wooden board, cut it open, and, after poking around in its indecipherable guts, made its leg twitch with a 9v battery. Then I gave as little thought as to where the mess I’d made of it was going as to where it had come from in the first place. It was just another school rite-of-passage negotiated, along with incandescent potassium scooting round on water, and the lidded sinks we filled with gas, dropping in lighted spills through the finger holes to blow the covers off. But the frog, while less spectacular than some practicals, was memorable for that uncanny twitch. It touched me more intimately, perhaps because holding a frog in your hand is one of those early physical connections we have with a fellow vertebrate species from another biological family, or perhaps because I have a very twitchy spine—a grave well-trodden!

As I went to the Humphry Davy School in Penzance, it’s very likely the frog I dissected in came from the Red River, having passed through the hands and tin baths of a man who came to be known as Froggy Skewers—his real surname was Skewes. I was first alerted to him by Steve, from the Red River Rescuers, who, sensitive to their future destination, once liberated a batch of frogs in a dawn raid on Froggy’s field of covered baths at Brea Adit. Hew, from King Edwards Mine, then told me how he’d gathered hundreds of toads and kept them in a tin trunk to take to Mr Skewers only to discover that Froggy wasn’t Toady—he only dealt in frogs. This local export trade to schools and laboratories in the area, combined with my own memory of driving the lanes around Trencrom on my 50cc scooter at night in early spring and seeing the narrow roads streaming with rain and hopping frogs, made me see the Red River in a more fertile light. I could imagine its lanes and tracks alive with frogs and toads, the pools, ponds and old workings thick and lush with spawn and croaking struggle: the valley was not only the birthplace of industrial tin-mining, but also, more anciently, a valley of frogs.

A pond by the Red River between Brea and Tuckingmill

Intrigued by the facts of Froggy’s business, I asked about him on the Nostalgic Camborne Facebook group. What came back was a fragmentary series of glimpses of a man whose idiosyncratic requests for help with catching frogs—often made to children already in the water and mud with the frogs—had left a strong, everyday impression on the minds of those he met. Reading through them, he came to seem to me at once a local character, and a timeless archetype; a sort of Wordsworthian leach-gatherer, a man intimate with the marginal, uneconomic, un-farmed places of the landscape, where slime and wildness still shone through. His name seemed to point to the community’s sense of his ambiguity, both as a man transformed by his daily contact with frogs into a figure part-human and part-frog, and by the ultimate violence implied in his friendly transactions with those he commissioned to act on his behalf as frog-gatherers.

Here’s a small sample of the comments about Froggy Skewers from the Nostalgic Camborne Website:

‘I was paddling around in the mill pool between Rosewarne and Reskadinnick as a kid and Froggy Skewes asked me to get him some frogspawn which I duly did and he gave me some money—I was well chuffed.’

‘My uncle was talking about him the other day. He used to catch frogs down at Fourlanes and sell them to him.’

‘As a teenager we used to go lamping in the streams down at Rosewarne/Reskadinnick. Used to catch them and put them in a large tin and take them up to Froggy at Dudnance. He would pay us 6d. each for them. You could hear them croaking in the tin can.’

‘Can remember him very well driving around his Austin Maxi in first gear. I reckon he didn’t realise he had four more.’ ‘Froggy had a Haulage business with several lorries on the road. He kept them on the mine burrows just past Piece school. He had a clothes line put up behind where they were parked and in the evenings he'd be up there sliding a Hurricane lamp along the clothes line carrying out any repairs.’

‘Had an uncle who used to go frog hunting at Carfury quarry and sell them to Froggy Skewes. Used to take them in a hessian sack on his BSA Batam.’

‘He used to live around where Bradfords and recycling is; as a boy we used to sell frogs to him.’

‘He lived in the pub in Piece!’

‘When I was a child my family's home was 3 doors away on Dudnance Lane; yes I do remember Froggy Skewes.’

‘So nice to hear people still having interest in my father known as Froggy Skewers. My dad was a real gentleman, liked by everyone around.’

‘Ok, I remember that name as a kid of the '60s & '70s but don't actually know anything about him, so what was it with him and frogs? A few posts here mention selling them to him, but what did he do with them?’

‘He sold them for medical research.’

‘I haven't heard that name for years, then only once.’

‘My old work mate Fred Mankee told me one day in conversation that he and with his Brother when they were kids to used go out and catch frogs for this chap, but I can't remember how much they were paid.’

‘I remember in the fifties (1973/74?) when my Dad was on a three day week from Holman’s, he used to go frogging with Froggy Skewes. He made a box with a body strap and a spring lid to keep the frogs in. And I can remember a few times when they got out and were all over our kitchen, my Mum went mad.’

*

These voices and memories—the precise details of frogs in tins, of frogs carried in hessian sacks on motorbikes, of hurricane lamps behind curtains—have a vividness to them that illuminates both Froggy, the landscape, and those who remember him. The final comment included above, of a father supplementing his income during a shortened working week at Holman’s (a major international engineering firm based in the Camborne/Pool area that produced the first pneumatic hard-rock drills), provides an unforgettable image of the intersection between the two Red River valleys: the river of tin and the river of frogs. It names the activity as ‘frogging’, an act that normalises the strangeness of the harvesting, and hints at the world-view of a community that’s grown its own distinctive response to its environment. It also describes one of those times when a parent, absent because of working patterns, suddenly returns into the domestic world of the child and turns it, memorably, upside down.

One of the ponds at Rosewarne