John Henry Skewes was born in 1910 and became one of Cornwall’s more unusual local characters. He worked first as a bus driver and later as a haulier, but he became best known for his frog collecting business. Based at the Countryman Pub in Piece, near Redruth, he turned a personal interest in frogs into a commercial trade. At his haulier’s yard, he kept thousands of frogs in tanks and advertised himself as “England’s Largest Frog Dealer.” Skewes supplied frogs to hospitals and universities, where they were used in medical and scientific research. He collected them from ponds, streams, ditches, and other damp places across the local area. Demand for the frogs grew, and he advertised them at 2 shillings and 6 pence per dozen. Local children were sometimes encouraged to help catch them, though Skewes was said to be particular about the quality of the frogs he accepted. In 1949, Skewes became involved in one of Cornwall’s more unusual court cases. He agreed to sell a motorbike to his neighbour, Albert Shortman, for 2,500 frogs, which Skewes valued at £25. The arrangement later broke down when Skewes claimed that only part of the payment had been delivered. His estranged wife testified that 1,000 frogs had been supplied, leaving 1,500 still owed. The case came before Judge Scobell Armstrong at Redruth. The judge acknowledged the unusual nature of the dispute, including the difficulty of treating live frogs as a form of payment. Even so, he ruled in Skewes’s favour and ordered Shortman to provide the remaining frogs. The case became memorable because of its strange currency, its courtroom humour, and the seriousness with which the frog debt was ultimately treated. Skewes remained closely associated with frogs for much of his life, although his interests later extended to snails, dogs, pigeons, adders, and vipers. He was often injured while collecting frogs, including falling into streams and quarries. During the war, he reportedly supplied large numbers of frogs to London and Scotland to support cultivation, as well as reptiles for scientific study. His story remains a distinctive part of Cornish local history, combining rural enterprise, eccentricity, wartime practicality, and one of the strangest legal disputes in the county’s records.