Early Life
John Frost's father, also John, kept the "Royal Oak Inn", in Thomas Street, Newport (a blue plaque honouring Frost's birthplace is located on the side of the old Post Office in the High Street, marking the approximate street location). John was mainly brought up as an orphan by his grandfather, a bootmaker, He was apprenticed to a woollen draper in Bristol and was later a shopman in London. Frost's political affiliations were greatly influenced by Thomas Paine and William Cobbett. John and Sarah Frost worshipped at Hope Baptist Chapel, situated behind the present day Commercial Street and Skinner Street and their eight children were all baptized there.
Frost's mother Sarah died early in his childhood and he was brought up by his grandparents. He was apprenticed as a bootmaker to his grandfather and left home at the age of sixteen to become a draper's apprentice and tailor, first in Cardiff, then Bristol and later London. He returned to Newport in 1806 to start his own business, which became prosperous. He married a widow Mary Geach in 1812 and over the course of eleven years they had eight children. He was held in great esteem and affection for his appealing character, sense of justice, selflessness, consistency, principles and democratism.
Read more about this topic: John Frost (Chartist)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There’s something tragic in the fate of almost every person—it’s just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)