Samuel David Frith was baptised at Holy Trinity, Hull, on the 1st of March 1857, a son of John Henry Frith, a Grimsby-born bricklayer, and his wife Mary Ann, née Wood. His mother died in 1866, when he was nine, and his father married again; by the census of 1871 the boy of fourteen was boarding with a shopkeeper in Anne Street — his grandmother Wood lived two doors along — and earning his keep as a carrier at the cotton mills.
In March 1877, at St Mary's, Lowgate, he married Alice Houlton, a shoemaker's daughter of seventeen from the same lane; the register says he was twenty-one — a year more than the font-date allows, an overstatement that follows the family through the records — and both of them signed. They set up in Chapel Lane in the heart of the Old Town, first at Locke's Place and then at No. 14, between the Grapes Inn and a belting works, where the censuses and directories track his trade: fruiterer, fruit dealer, "fruiterer and green grocer" in Kelly's of 1893. Ten children were born over eighteen years; Charles and William Henry died as infants.
The fruit came over the docks, and it was there that Samuel made his other name. In September 1890 — a year after the new Dockers' Union reached Hull from London — the Mail reports "Frith, district president" chairing the Humber branch at the Hamburg Castle on the dock-side; and in December 1893, seven months after the great dock strike had ended in the union's defeat, it was Samuel Frith, president of the district, who presided at the annual dinner and told the town that "they were not knocked out". He carried the conviction onto the quays: in 1896, working the discharge of oranges from the S.S. Calypso, he demanded another man on the gang, scuffled with the foreman, and was bound over to keep the peace, the courtroom filled with trade unionists. The family kept a larger memory too, in his granddaughter Joan's words: that he was friendly with one of the Labour Party's founders, and "was asked to go to London to meet Keir Hardie".
The Old Town emptied around the shop; by 1901 he was a dock labourer and the fruit business was Alice's, "on her own account", and by 1911 — ten children born, six living — they were in Denmark Street, Samuel still a dockside labourer at fifty-four. The wars then took from him what the docks never had. His eldest son George had died in the Boer War; Samuel, the clerk of the Hull Commercials, was killed at Oppy Wood in 1917; and Walter, gassed in France, died in 1927, aged thirty-six. The old docker's notice for his namesake son — "Loved in life; not forgotten in death" — is on Samuel's page. He outlived it all at 65 New Bridge Road, and died in the autumn of 1929, aged seventy-two.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03