Frank was born in April 1939 in New Romney to Lomas and Florence Jones. He was the youngest of eight, having four sisters and three brothers and they all lived in a tiny two up and two down cottage in Lions Road. He went to the Primary School in Church Lane and Southlands Secondary School and his father died when he was still at school.
He left school in 1954 and for three months was assistant gardener for Captain Howey, who owned the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, at Red Tiles in Warren Road, Littlestone. He then followed in the footsteps of his father and headed towards Chatham and joined the Navy. Frank served for 12 years and during this time he established himself as unofficial ships barber to earn some extra pocket money. During his time, he served on 12 ships and visited many places and whilst on an island near Singapore, he met his future wife Levina who was stationed nearby whilst serving with the Queen Alexander Royal Army Nursing Corps. Six months later whilst on leave at New Romney, Frank asked Levina to marry him, and they married in Levina’s home town of Sheffield in 1960. They had two boys, Roger and James.
Frank left the Navy in 1966 and he bought their first home in Greatstone in Channon Road and he started work painting and decorating with his brother Jim. At the time he was decorating new build houses for a local developer/builder but Frank soon branched out on his own in a Ford Popular Van and started doing other building jobs for local people and was building up a nice group of lregular customers.
Around this time, he bought a plot of land in Prior Road, Greatstone and built his own four-bedroom house. As it was his first house build, the bricklayer Ray Gozett said to him, “Well, it has got two chances, it can stay up or it can fall down”. This amused Frank and he named the house “Two Chances”. Much to Levina’s disappointment and disgust, after a year they moved to Lydd-on-Sea where he bought an old wartime house that needed some work, in modern parlance a “doer upper”. Around this time, he built his first house for a paying customer in Manor Road, Lydd. In 1972, after talking to Rodney Ansell of Ansell’s Garages in Lydd, he bought his first classic car, an old 1935 Standard 12 Saloon. It was drivable but in need of restoration.
A year later he bought some land at the end of Seaview Road, Greatstone and got planning permission to extend the road a few hundred feet. He then went on to build a further six bungalows there, one of which was to be their home until 1985. The new bungalow had a large garage – big enough for a caravan, and several cars and he included an inspection pit so that he could restore his Standard 12. He attended many vintage car rallies and was a regular at the Sellindge Steam Rally, but in 1980 he had the first of several heart attacks. He spent ten days in Dover Bucklands Hospital but made a reasonable recovery and gradually got back to work. By now he had added a mini tractor/digger to his armoury, and this was used when the mains drainage system was extended into Greatstone.
In the mid-1980s he saw details of a derelict farmhouse for sale on the outskirts of Lydd. He saw it as an ideal opportunity to get the space he wanted and over the next year or so it was fully rebuilt, and the family moved there in 1985. During this period, he built more houses at Greatstone and Littlestone, but he also suffered a couple more “minor” heart attacks.
1990 saw the birth of the first of four grandchildren and by then he was known as “Grumpy” and all the grandkids and their partners always call him by that name. In the same year he was admitted to hospital for a quadruple bypass. He recovered well from this but decided that it was time to retire. In the 20 odd years he had been building he had completed some 24 houses and numerous extensions and smaller jobs in the area.
Once retired, he spent more time enjoying his hobbies of gardening and more importantly classic cars and along the way he “acquired” a 1960 Peerless GT. He didn’t really know what it was until he saw a similar looking car at a car show and he got talking to the owner and eventually totally rebuilt the car getting it on the road in 1995. He made several trips down to Le Mans in it and also went to rallies in the UK. Sadly in 2006 Levina passed away at the age of 66. Fortunately, he had his hobbies to keep him busy.
He sold the Standard 12 after 40 years of ownership as it was hard to drive with heavy steering and as the years went by he decided he needed more comfort than a tent to sleep in at car rallies, so he built a trailer tent but eventually bought a camper van for the ultimate in weekend car rally comfort. Frank also had a passion for old clocks and loved stripping them down, cleaning them and getting them up and running like new.