A tearful, old-fashioned miners' wake stopped the streets of a former coalfield village yesterday, as four black-draped horses led hundreds of strike veterans behind the hearse of a murdered colleague.
The coffin of 62-year-old Keith Frogson, who was killed last month allegedly following a bitter argument over the 1984-5 dispute, was wrapped in a National Union of Mineworkers' banner with his pit nickname 'Froggy' spelt out in flowers.
Mounted on a carriage, it was hauled gently from the street of terraced pitmen's houses in the Nottinghamshire village of Annesley Woodhouse, where Mr Frogson's body was found yards from his doorstep. A huge pile of flowers and teddy bears wearing miners' helmets and Coal not Dole badges spilled over from the spot to the corner of the street.
The strike's leader Arthur Scargill arrived unexpectedly as the cavalcade wound its way to St John the Evangelist's church, after earlier sending word that he was ill and unable to come. His former deputy, Henry Richardson, another major figure during a ferocious struggle which split families and villages throughout Nottinghamshire, led the long file of mourners.
Mr Scargill, whose leadership was undermined by Nottinghamshire's breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers, said that Mr Frogson had been the staunchest of colleagues in the county. He said: "The union and I have lost a great comrade and a great friend.
"He was one of the first to draw to the attention of the new Labour government when it was elected in 1997 that they should honour their undertaking that all miners who were sacked should be reinstated. That is why there are so many people here today to pay tribute to a tremendous trade unionist."
Mr Frogson was known widely as an unrepentant believer in the strike and its aims, who was still in the habit of shouting 'scab' at men who had joined the UDM or crossed picket lines.
Among well over 1,000 mourners, who filled St John's and stood outside during the funeral service, was a group with a red and yellow banner saying Annesley Strikers, a band to which the murdered man was proud to belong.
Echoes of the ill-fated defiance of the outmanoeuvred NUM were shot through the service, with a resinging of the Strawbs' 'strike anthem' Part of the Union and a passage from the French fable writer Jean de la Bruyère. Mr Frogson's youngest daughter Rachel, 32, who survived an arson attack on his home shortly after the murder, struggled with tears before reading:
"There exist some evils so terrible and some evils so horrible that we dare not think of them. But if they happen to befall us, we find ourselves stronger than we imagined, we grapple with our luck, and we behave better than we expected we should."
· Robert Boyer, 42, a former miner of Annesley Woodhouse, has been charged with the murder of Mr Frogson and with arson with intent to endanger life and will appear before Nottingham crown court in November.
