John Henry Frith was baptised at St James', Great Grimsby, on the 25th of March 1834, the fifth of the eight children of David Frith, a stone mason, and his wife Jane, née Swaine. His father died in 1847, when John Henry was thirteen, and his widowed mother did a remarkable thing: she took the family across the Humber to Hull, and by 1851 was keeping an inn at 21 Salthouse Lane — a servant in the house and lodgers under her roof — while John, at seventeen, had his trade: bricklayer, as his father had worked in stone.
In June 1854, at Holy Trinity, he married Mary Ann Wood, a truckman's daughter of seventeen from the same street — Finkle Street — as himself; the certificate the family holds shows him signing his name in full and Mary Ann making her mark. They settled in Anne Street and five children came in eleven years, Samuel David the second of them. Then, in July 1866, Mary Ann died at home of phthisis — consumption — a month's illness, thirty years old. The certificate carries the plainest line on this page: the informant was "J H Frith, present at the death". Samuel was nine.
A year on he married again at St Mary's, Lowgate: Mary Elizabeth Kirby, twenty-four, of Duke Street. Janet's research recovered what the parish knew and the family did not say: in the census of 1861 Mary Elizabeth appears at nineteen, unmarried, a three-year-old daughter Martha beside her, and in the occupation column the one bleak word the age reserved for such women — "Unfortunate". John Henry married her, signed the register while she made her mark, and by the next census Martha is entered simply as his daughter. The record keeps his rough edges too — the Hull Packet of New Year's Day 1869 has him fined a shilling for being drunk and disorderly on a Sunday morning — and then its second grief: Mary Elizabeth died in November 1879, aged thirty-six, of bronchitis, her daughter Martha the informant, and was buried at Hedon Road under the stone of the Smiter family Martha had married into.
Twice widowed at forty-five, he slips towards the record's edge: possibly the Henry Frith lodging in Weal Street in 1891; certainly the John Henry Frith who died on the 5th of July 1892, aged fifty-eight, in the Hull workhouse on Anlaby Road — whose infirmary, by the 1890s, was where the town's poor were nursed at the last. His name did not end there. His son Samuel — the fruiterer who led the dockers' union — called his own firstborn George Henry, and his grandson Samuel fell at Oppy; the bricklayer's line runs straight down this family to its present.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03