Route editor Ian Daley takes a walk around Fryston with David Waddington.
David Waddington was born and raised in the coal-mining village of Fryston in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He went on to have a distinguished academic career. Inspired by the Ken Loach TV series called Days of Hope, David had a burning desire to use the skills he had developed in his academic life to document the history of his village and people. In 1988 he compiled an oral history of Fryston which he published in a book called One Road In, One Road Out. Simultaneously, he made a documentary film about the village called Fryston: Its Life and Times.
In more recent times he has published a trilogy of books about the village for Route. In 2013 he published Coal, Goals and Ashes: Fryston Colliery's Pursuit of the West Riding County FA Challenge Cup to mark the 50th anniversary of a great triumph by the colliery’s football team, captained at the time by his father, Pete Waddington.
More recently, he has published a comprehensive two-volume history of the village, Pit-folk and Peers: The Remarkable History of the People of Fryston.
The first volume, ‘Echoes of Fryston Hall (1809-1908)’, tells the astonishing story of the long-lost Fryston Hall and its aristocratic occupants, the Monckton-Milnes family. Fryston Hall was the most important hub of Victorian society outside of London, attracting the most eminent poets, writers, politicians, adventurers and other celebrities of the era.
The second volume, ‘Diamonds and Rust (1909-2023)’, traces the life and times of the coal mining village that David grew up in, as well as continuing to follow the descendants of the Monckton-Milnes family line and the role they played in shaping 20th century history.
In the main, David resisted any temptation to record his own personal story in the three books. But here, as he walks around the spots of his childhood, stories from of his own, personal life emerge.
