I REMEMBER my first meeting with Peter Frost, whose weekly “ramblings” delighted Morning Star readers every Friday from 2012 to 2023.

Features editor Ros Sitwell and I — then her deputy — had been told to look out for a little orange car. “Frosty” and his wife Ann were coming to William Rust House on Hackney Wick’s Fish Island to take us to lunch.

A couple of weeks earlier he had written pitching a new column, and he was keen to discuss the idea in person. You might expect the newspaper to take a prospective writer out to lunch, but things sometimes happen the other way round at the perennially broke Morning Star.

We were excited. The Star is an essential source of socialist news and analysis, but in a world dominated by imperialism and war it can take on a relentlessly gloomy aspect at times. Peter Frost, a lifelong reader, had identified a gap when it came to a nature column.

Yet the list of suggested topics he’d sent over showed this would be a nature column with a difference — why does canal privatisation threaten the water vole? Can [Tory environment secretary] Owen Paterson be trusted with our ash trees? What’s the link between public schools and illegal fox hunting?

For Frosty was always a political animal, as Ann, whose own adventures often featured in his writing, stresses.

Nor would the column be confined to nature or wildlife, though these were enduring concerns.

He made clear from the beginning it would roam far and wide. The hundreds of columns he wrote for the Morning Star included inspiring tales of past struggles (the Kinder Scout trespass, the Headscarf Heroes of Hull); the surprisingly radical politics of celebrities from Marilyn Monroe to Vidal Sassoon; nuggets of working-class history and folklore.

It was fitting that our acquaintance began with lunch, since food itself was a repeated theme — the histories of working-class classics like eel pie and mash or fish and chips, how to do your bit to save native river species by eating invasive crayfish.

Seafood was a favourite. I don’t know whether it was at that lunch or a later one that he regaled us with his performance of the innuendo-heavy Winkle Song, but it spoke to his love of food and his sense of humour — and you can see him singing it still, on the dedicated website frostysramblings.wordpress.com.

It was over that lunch that Ann coined the name Frosty’s Ramblings because he needed an expansive remit, but he never rambled in prose.

Frosty was a natural raconteur, able to hold an audience as he told and retold the stories that enrich and define our movement (major events like the Durham Miners’ Gala or Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival would prompt annual pieces introducing their traditions to new readers and refreshing the memories of old ones).

He was also a prolific and efficient journalist. Maintaining a weekly column is a lot of work, but from the beginning he would ensure that we had columns to spare — sending articles across in batches, phoning regularly to discuss proposed dates for specific ones tied to breaking news or the calendar while ensuring we had a reserve stock to be used whenever convenient so we were never anxiously awaiting an email as the deadline loomed.

Naturally chatty, his calls were appreciated by a succession of features desk staff as well as those on reception or elsewhere in the team who picked up.

“Frosty was a dream to work with,” says assistant editor Ros Sitwell, his principal liaison at the Star. “I’d look forward to his, often weekly, phone calls in which he’d cheerily recount his ideas- always compelling, sometimes surprising — for future columns.

“His inspiration sprang from many sources — radio shows he’d listened to, canal boat or seaside trips he’d taken, or anniversaries of historical events that had captured his imagination. Every week Frosty rustled up from his apparently inexhaustible memory a steady stream of “I-never-knew-that!” stories in which the reader always learned something new. And in among the tales of wrens, and turtles, and wildflowers, and woodlands, his beloved wife Ann and granddaughter Lizzie were often given walk-on parts.

“Friendly, generous with his time and expertise, fun to work with and a damn good journalist, Frosty will be dearly missed by his friends at the Star and by his many fans.”

The columns themselves were widely loved, and could prove a relaxing escape from the rigours of left politics. Often when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader — sometimes amid crises like an MPs’ vote of no confidence or the challenge to his leadership by Owen Smith — I’d receive messages from Corbyn on how much he’d enjoyed the latest Ramblings, and the Islington North MP recorded a personal message to Frosty earlier this year he sent via Ann and the Morning Star when he heard he was ill.

Writing was always his passion. Ann first met him when they volunteered for the Communist Party during the 1964 general election.

He’d joined the Young Communist League at school, but hadn’t been especially active, concentrating on athletics — he was a high jumper for his school and the county. But that year he’d had a tumble and hurt his leg, and he volunteered for something else to occupy his time, she recalls.

“We were campaigning for the candidate Les Burt and were working under Tom Durkin,” she says. “I met him stuffing envelopes... He would argue like mad with Tom. Peter would say, if you can’t get your message across in 500 words, forget it...” His athleticism in the past, his work both professionally and politically would focus on writing from then on.

“I’d be the one marching to Aldermaston and he’d be there to clap me on the finish line,” she remembers.

But he never stopped writing — for the YCL magazine Challenge, for Soviet Weekly, or producing his own pamphlets when drumming up support for striking miners or when campaigning to save Durrants School in Croxley Green in the 1980s, when he produced a monthly newspaper specifically for the campaign, Durrants News. The school was saved.

He became director of communications at the half-a-million-strong Camping & Caravanning Club and would later become chair of the Caravan Writers’ Guild. Even that was political — “the magazine had three editors before Peter and two of them were communists,” Ann says. “And he was put on to that job by Ron Harding, then English editor of Soviet Weekly where he’d been working.”

There was, as Frosty often detailed, a long-established connection between camping and caravanning and radical politics, because of the historically contested issue of public access to privately owned land.

Frosty’s own love of camping she traces back to Coppice Camp, an Essex campsite founded by left-leaning Dr Carl Cullen in the 1930s, which by the 1950s was a hub of communist activity, a common location for YCL political schools held at weekends or in the holidays.

Frosty’s website includes a seven-part history of the radical camp, which played a part in the political education of generations of communists.

Ann remembers the buzzing atmosphere of the camp in the 1960s — “our main task was supposed to be building a toilet block... needless to say that never got built. The Czech communist youth had donated us these state-of-the-art tents with sewn-in ground sheets,” a novelty at the time.

Stories that the government had dug a secret bunker as one if the Cabinet’s boltholes in the event of nuclear war were dismissed by the more sober-minded campers as wild rumour. But decades later it was shown to be true (the Kelvedon Hatch bunker, now a museum).

The campsite — left by its founder Dr Cullen to a trust run by Communist Party members — was sold off in 1991, like so much of what had been a whole political ecosystem of clubs, bookshops and societies around the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

Frosty did not join the re-established Communist Party of Britain, but his attachment to the Morning Star continued.

“It was the most important thing to him,” Ann says, both as a political weapon and a journalistic space where the stories, struggles and traditions of working-class people continue to be celebrated.

For him, politics was always about building a world where ordinary people could enjoy the things their so-called betters tried to deny them, from “a flash of electric blue on a boating holiday” as he once described sighting a kingfisher, to real ales and delicious food. He was a champion of popular access to the countryside and of our national parks, and for a decade represented the government on the Broads Authority which oversees the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads.

The CPGB’s longtime leader Harry Pollitt famously said that when he heard about the Russian Revolution “for me the thing that mattered was that lads like me had whacked the bosses and the landlords...”

I remember Frosty referencing this at a Coventry meeting marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, stressing the power and creativity of working-class people whose right and destiny it is to change the world.

The stories he told so enchantingly in his Ramblings every Friday for 11 years, until forced to stop by ill health, are an enduring testament to it.

Peter Frost was born on January 16 1946 and died on September 9 2025. He leaves his wife Ann, son Julian, daughter-in-law Jane, grandson Jamie, granddaughter Lizzie and sister Christine.