The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
This film is part of Free
Frogman of Piece
Cornishman John Skewes turns his passion for frogs into a cottage industry
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Overview
Cornishman John Skewes is born in 1910 and works as a bus driver but becomes better known for his hobby of frog collecting. He spawns a large collection that he runs from his lodgings at the Countryman Pub in Piece near Redruth. He stores the amphibians in tanks at the haulier's yard and finds a lucrative market providing the reptilians to hospitals and universities for use in medical research. A notice on his gate reads England's largest frog dealer. Skewes the Froggeries!
John advertises frogs at 2 shilling 6d or pence a dozen. In 1949 John agrees to sell a motorbike to his neighbour Albert Shortman for a frog princely sum of 2500 frogs equivalent to twenty five pounds in today. The affair went to court and John’s estranged wife stated that only 1000 frogs had been delivered. Judge Scobell Armstrong ordered Albert to pay the remaining 1500 frogs stating that no more inconvenient currency could have been found, since it is a form with great mobility and is apt to disappear with even greater rapidity than pound notes.
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