Howells began to go through the files of local papers, and, to his confusion, found in the Tenby and County News of 30 September 1896 the headline ‘GREAT STORM’. The story which followed gave details of the damage done. A shaken man, he started to assemble details of oral evidence.
And it was now that grappling irons began to tumble out of a tale which, like the flying machine, would otherwise have been blown away. A man showed him the field where his grandmother had said the flight had occurred. A very old baker, who had delivered bread to his family, showed him the tree where, as a boy of three, he had seen the wreckage. A schoolmate remembered what his father had said, that Frost, after his fall into the brambles, had spent a whole day pulling thorns out of his face. Men remembered the classroom scene when a teacher, telling the children that the Wright brothers had been the first to fly, had been confronted by Frost’s grand-daughter who told her very politely that no, it had been her grandfather, and, though small, would not be shaken.
It is the steady build-up of detail that is so remarkable, coupled with the fact that locally nobody doubted that Frost had flown, and this, you must remember, in a west Wales where debunking the pretensions of one’s neighbours, usually behind their backs, is a major leisure activity. The book is full of details, generously supplied by Howells, about who in Saundersfoot wore a truss, who stole coal, who had children out of marriage.
But it is now that the comedy really intrudes. The author’s research convinced him that Frost’s papers had existed, amongst them a letter from a St John Brodrick, Under-Secretary of State at the War Office, declining Frost’s offer of his plans. This had contained the remarkable sentence, ‘The nation does not intend to adopt aerial navigation as a means of warfare.’ But where were these papers ?
It is known that they had been in the possession of Frost’s son, the village scout-
master, only he had run off to Southend with a woman. When he died there in 1949 his niece went up to reclaim these papers for the family, only to be denied them when she refused to take the dead man’s budgies as well.
It was the budgies that did it for me. I mean no one can make up something like that. In the course of this book Frost acquires a grandeur, especially as when in old age he is quoted as saying, ‘I could ask no one for advice, I had no books to refer to … I walked alone.’ And, with the budgies, flew.
Byron Rogers’ The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas was recently awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
A Pembrokeshire Pioneer
by Roscoe Howells
Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, Ysgubor Plas, Llwyndrys, Pwelheli, Gwynedd,
Tel: 01785 750440, £6.85, (£1.50p+p)
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