C. B. Fry in 1895
(Image: Charles Alcock, Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds, 1895)
Once upon a time, C. B. Fry was the fairytale hero of English cricket: one of the greatest of all batters, accomplished in innumerable sports, academically gifted, and attracting judgements along the lines of “greatest ever Englishman”. More recently, he has been largely forgotten, even as cricketing contemporaries such as Victor Trumper, Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes and Ranjitsinhji, the man with whom he was so long associated, continue to be written about. The many reasons for this include his flirtation with Nazism, a suspicion that lingers in modern writing that he was a thoroughly unpleasant man and, perhaps most importantly for the modern statistically obsessed age, a questionable Test record. Yet in some ways it is surprising that he ever enjoyed such a reputation. While he was a dominant figure at Oxford in his student days and undeniably popular around the turn of the twentieth century, he was hardly a man who would have endeared himself to the English establishment. Astonishingly eccentric, outspoken, overconfident and arrogant, he made choices throughout his life which would his peers would have judged as questionable at best. To use one of his own more memorable phrases (written largely to disparage professional footballers), he behaved like a “cad of the most unscrupulous kidney”. Not only that, but he was often hugely hypocritical; his determination to pursue his own course left him with decreasingly few defenders until he re-emerged in the 1930s in a new career as a writer and cricketing celebrity. After that, he was eulogised until modern biographers rediscovered the truth.
Fry called his 1939 autobiography Life Worth Living, which reflected the unusually varied nature of his experiences. But that book illustrated one of his biggest failings and perhaps demonstrated his fundamental insecurity. It portrayed his life as a succession of triumphs such as might be found in a “Boy’s Own” story. As it happens, large parts of it might as well have been fiction because the writing was fuelled by Fry’s desperate desire to have the last word, to always be proven correct and to exaggerate his achievements, which even unfiltered would have been impressive.But the fact is that there remains something unsettling about C. B. Fry, reflected in a notable lack of official recognition during his lifetime. Looked at as a whole, Fry’s life and career looks like a spectacular monument of achievement in sport, literature and academic success. Only when the individual aspects are examined more closely does the monument appear somewhat unstable and ragged around the edges. It takes careful excavation to ask: “Who was C. B. Fry?” And the answer is rarely pleasant.
Even with his many adventures and varied interests, the outline of his life is surprisingly simple. Charles Burgess Fry was born in Croydon on 25 April 1872. He was the eldest of four children to Lewis Fry and Constance White. His father was a clerk in the Metropolitan Police (but generally called himself a civil servant), his mother the daughter of a Hove schoolmaster called Charles White. C. B. Fry’s parents married in Hove on 29 August 1871; perhaps not quite a shotgun wedding but there might have been an element of haste. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 1871 census records Lewis Fry as a visitor at Charles White’s school and the 70-year-old Charles White as having been blind from cataracts (although a note said that his sight had been restored by an operation).
Quite why Fry’s birth was in Croydon is unclear because he was baptised at the end of June in Hove. In fact, Fry himself was fairly quiet on his early years and little has been written about his upbringing. We can only go by official records, and when we next meet the Fry family, in the 1881 census, C. B. has been joined by two sisters and a brother, and the family are living in Orpington, Kent, with two servants. In Life Worth Living, Fry recalled attending Hove Lodge, the school of Charles White, as a small boy. He said that his family relocated to Chislehurst when he was young before moving to Orpington when he was seven. He was educated at Hornbook House, a nearby school, where after a shaky start he thrived after a change in regime and eventually won a scholarship to Repton. He excelled there, in both an academic and sporting sense, and came away with various school prizes and an enviable record in cricket and athletics. Winning a scholarship to Wadham College purely on academic ability, he attended Oxford University from 1891 until 1895.
Fry (back row, centre) in a photograph of Wadham College’s rugby team from 1892–93 (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)
At first glance, Fry’s time at Oxford was a triumph. He received “blues” — colours awarded for representing the university against Cambridge — in cricket, football and athletics (equalling the world long-jump record in one athletics meeting). He even captained the three respective teams. Active in a wide range of pursuits, from drama to debating, he was perhaps the most famous man in Oxford, with a reputation that transcended sport. And in 1893, he was awarded a first in classical moderations, an apparent prelude to academic distinction as well. But in the end, he managed just a fourth-class degree when he left university when he apparently suffered a “nervous breakdown” owing to a combination of personal worries. From there, he drifted briefly into teaching and journalism, struggling to earn a living until he married Beatrice Holme Sumner in 1898. His wife already had two “illegitimate” children with her long-term (and not particularly secret) partner, Charles Hoare; and in a very unconventional arrangement, Hoare then supported Fry financially, enabling him to become, in effect, a full-time sportsman.
Fry began to play cricket regularly for Sussex as an amateur — his attitude towards professionals was at best condescending and he subscribed fully to the view of the time that amateurism was superior in all sport — and played Test cricket for England. He later moved to Hampshire and captained England in 1912. Meanwhile, he played for Southampton in football — one of the few amateurs in the football league — making an FA Cup final appearance and playing briefly for England in that sport too. Among his many other pursuits, Fry subsequently worked in journalism, writing for the Daily Express, The Captain and the eponymous Fry’s Magazine. From 1907, following the death of Hoare, he became closely associated with the Training Ship Mercury; although his wife was largely responsible for running the ship, Fry remained its figurehead until 1950.
In his later life, he had spells working with his close friend Ranjitsinhji at the League of Nations in the early 1920s and three unsuccessful attempts to be elected as an MP for the Liberal party. Disappearing from the public eye for around ten years owing to a prolonged spell of mental illness, Fry returned to cricket as a journalist in 1934 when he began an unusual but popular column in the Evening Standard. He remained a prominent figure until his death on 7 September 1956.
Over the years, many tales accumulated about his feats in all walks of life — many of them embellished, polished and propagated by Fry himself. He was the subject of a hagiography written in 1912, when he was the England cricket captain, and apart from Life Worth Living, has been the subject of two full-length biographies. If the latter works, especially Iain Wilton’s C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999), looked more questioningly and critically at their subject, earlier writers had swallowed everything that Fry had to say and extolled the virtues of their hero.
Such a whirlwind summary can only give a brief picture of a man who squeezed a great deal into his 84 years. For anyone looking for details, Wilton’s book remains the standard work and was so influential in stripping away Fry’s mystique that E. W. Swanton — hardly a man whose opinion was easily swayed — rewrote the obituary he had written after Fry’s death, incorporating many of Wilton’s findings, in 1999 for his Cricketers of My Time. For our purposes, there are just a few aspects of his life that merit closer attention. The first — crucial to understanding Fry as a cricketer and as a man — is his personal life. For this, it is worth dipping into Life Worth Living. The book is an entertaining read, even if we should treat it with an enormous degree of caution; but if many of its facts are questionable, it tells us a great deal about its author.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Life Worth Living is that it is an extended work of self-promotion and self-justification. Fry spends so many words trying to settle scores from decades before that the modern reader is drawn irresistibly to recall the frequent autobiographical refrain of Steve Coogan’s fictional character Alan Partridge : “Needless to say, I had the last laugh.” A few examples should suffice. Fry went into great detail to describe alleged injustices perpetrated upon him at Hornbrook House by the original headmaster’s wife (before the new headmaster took over to create an environment which suited Fry perfectly), the long-dead Elizabeth Humphrey. He bitterly — and inaccurately — detailed the circumstances of his arrest in 1894 for extinguishing street lamps, believing himself to have been unfairly treated by the Vice-Chancellor’s court; he was less than complimentary about the man whom he believed led him into trouble, F. E. Smith (who went on to be an MP and the Lord High Chancellor). He also attempted to absolve himself from a suggestion, in a long-forgotten article in The Idler, that he had been late to an interview which took place in his rooms at Wadham College one Sunday morning: the writer had noted that Fry was still in the bath when he arrived. Such defensiveness extended into his cricketing recollections, particularly his obvious resentment, four decades later, that he had been no-balled for throwing: he “borrowed” a story from another cricketer similarly no-balled — that he had hidden splints under his sleeves so that he couldn’t straighten his arm — but had done nothing of the kind at the time; he also wrote contemptuously of Jim Phillips, one of the umpires who no-balled him. Other less successful cricketing episodes were either retrospectively justified or omitted altogether, as were other incidents, such as his attempts to enter politics, which detracted from the image of constant triumph that he wished to project.
And some of Fry’s stories are so wildly implausible that he must have made them up; perhaps one or two extraordinary things might have happened to him as he described, but there are simply too many. Again, a few examples will suffice: his encounter with a man he believed to be a ghost when he was a child; his match-saving 17 not out playing in a men’s game of cricket at the age of around eight or nine; leaping from nine inches behind the board when breaking the British long-jump record in 1892; his miraculous and self-cured recovery from a ruptured achilles tendon in 1906–07; and even inflations of his cricketing scores. And some of his stories were verifiable lies: the invention of two bowling hat-tricks in first-class cricket; a claim never to have lost a match against Cambridge as captain in any sport; the suggestion that he won a house match at Repton with eight of his team indisposed so that he had to score the majority of runs and bowl half the overs. There was a similar emphasis in C. B. Fry: The Man and his Methods, written in 1912 by A. W. Myers in close collaboration with his subject. But Wilton notes several examples of how Fry embellished and exaggerated some of the incidents in his life between 1912 and 1939.
Fry also tried to enhance the picture of who he was and where he came from. In Life Worth Living, he manufactured an elaborate genealogical history — that the “Le Fre” family came to England with William the Conqueror, but another ancestor helped King Harold’s widow find his body after the Battle of Hastings. There were various other tales of the Frys through the ages which may or may not be true. But even if his ancestors were wealthy and influential (as he tried to portray them), the Fry family had fallen considerably by the time of his birth, and his parents were not wealthy: part of the reason for his “nervous breakdown” at Oxford was the worry of mounting debts and an income that matched neither his tastes nor his social obligations; financial considerations were probably a large factor in his marriage to Beatrice Sumner Holme. Fry also told a few childhood tales in his autobiography which are full of streams and woods and gardens, as well as encounters which leave the modern reader wondering if they were fabrications, such as regularly seeing the widow of the Emperor Napoleon III (who did live near the Fry family in Chiselhurst). Yet Fry also gave the impression that his parents were at best indifferent to him; for example, on one occasion he wrote: “My father, as usual to anything I said, twirled his golden moustaches and shouted ‘Nonsense!'” Nor did they particularly care for his whereabouts. According to Fry, his increasing fascination with outdoor pursuits meant that his mother “never knew where I was from morning till night” and thought he was “getting out of control”; this convinced his father to enrol him in Hornbrook House.
Fry had less to say in his autobiography about his private life. Wilton notes two abortive relationships that he had in the 1890s: Elizabeth Hopkinson, whose rejection of Fry contributed to his breakdown, and Molly Dawson, who lost interest when she was walking in Oxford and saw A Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students displayed in a shop window, open at a picture of the naked Fry, who had been photographed a few years previously, probably as a way of supplementing his income. Fry cheerfully told the story against himself in Life Worth Living, although he did not say that he was in a relationship with Dawson; Fry’s daughter-in-law told Wilton that Dawson had been with Fry’s sister at the time.
Beatrice Fry née Holme Sumner (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)
Fry was equally silent about his marriage. This requires a fuller explanation (and a few double takes). The story of Beatrice Holme Sumner, told by Ronald Morris in The Captain’s Lady (1985), is frankly astonishing. When she was just fifteen, the married Charles Hoare (who was thirty at the time) fell in love with her; two years later, he was caught in her bedroom. As both families were rich and well-connected, the scandal was initially managed discreetly and Holme Sumner’s family went to extraordinary but unsuccessful attempts to keep the pair apart. Matters were further complicated when Hoare loaned around £3,000 to the Holme Summer family to cover their mounting debts. In 1883, when Beatrice was 21 and legally an adult by the law of the time, she became pregnant and the couple moved in together. At this point, the story reached the newspapers and became an enormous scandal. Hoare was taken to court for breaching a restraining order taken out by the Holme Sumner family to prevent him seeing Beatrice; top lawyers and a great deal of legal debate ended in a relatively light punishment of Hoare having to pay legal costs, even though the judge stated that through Hoare, Beatrice had “suffered a fall from which no woman could live to recover from”. It was after this that Hoare began to take an interest in the ship that became TS Mercury, establishing a naval school. Beatrice aided him in running the establishment but the couple gradually drifted apart by the end of the 1880s, although they had a second child in 1890.
Fry met the pair in the mid-1890s when he played cricket at the naval school. He became close to Hoare but in 1898, he resigned from Charterhouse, where he had been teaching without much enthusiasm, and married Beatrice Holme Sumner. The reasons are slightly unclear; Ronald Morris suggested that it was a way for Beatrice to regain social respectability; Fry certainly benefited financially from Hoare’s long-term financial support of Beatrice. Wilton has argued that the couple simply fell in love, but concedes that “the union … was a strange one”. They soon had their first child together, although the Fry family believed that Charis Fry was the daughter of Charles Hoare rather than Fry. Beatrice and Fry later had two other children: Faith and Stephen, but there is evidence that Beatrice continued to care greatly for Hoare, even after his death.
Fry’s marriage was not an easy one and the couple did not always get along well. They spent a lot of time apart, and when they were together often argued. Wilton has argued that Fry had an affair with a nurse in 1909 — although there is little evidence of this other than family rumour. Beatrice was obsessively devoted to the Mercury, which she ran cruelly and mercilessly according to the testimony of former pupils. Fry’s daughter-in-law told Wilton that she blamed Beatrice for the prolonged breakdown suffered by Fry in the late 1920s (which Beatrice herself attributed to “thwarted genius”). She told Wilton in 1997 that Beatrice was “a domineering creature”, an “awful woman” and “terrible”. Many of the naval recruits and instructors at the Mercury were intimidated by her, and Wilton argues that Fry was too.
The breakdown suffered by Fry in the 1920s was not his first. In 1895 — glossed over as “nervous strain and anxiety” in The Man and His Methods and omitted from Life Worth Living — his health collapsed in his final term at Oxford. Myers hinted that financial worries were the main cause as he was heavily in debt (something that Fry mentioned in his autobiography). His mother was also ill (she died in 1898) and his brush with the authorities over the gas lamps may have been a factor. It was for this reason, and because he had been unable to study, that Fry recorded an uncharacteristic failure in his final exams, resulting in his ignominious fourth-class degree. Wilton also suggests that his rejection by Elizabeth Hopkinson, a fellow Oxford student, contributed to his malaise. However, Fry recovered from this breakdown with no apparent ill-effects. His second bout of illness was more dramatic and longer lasting.
Fry first fell ill in India in 1928, becoming paranoid and believing that people were attempting to steal from him. He returned home but did not get any better, continuing to fear theft. Clive Ellis, in his biography of Fry, relates how on one occasion Fry strolled naked along Brighton beach; on another he cast a fishing rod out of his bedroom window. Other incidents included Fry being observed dancing with an invisible partner, or mounting a horse facing in the wrong direction. At this time, he lived away from Beatrice and his care was bankrolled by Ranjitsinhji, who was then the Maharaja of Nawanagar; Fry could not see his old friend, however because according to his daughter-in-law, one of his symptoms was “a horror of Indians”. He had brief spells of better health, but there was little overall improvement. Although he came out of “seclusion” in 1934 — perhaps not coincidentally shortly after Ranjitsinhji’s death — he continued to behave and dress eccentrically for the rest of his life. He often showed some distress in private, and his daughter-in-law suggested that he had for a time received electroshock therapy in the 1930s.
If Fry was never quite the same after recovering from his illness, he was never the easiest man with whom to get along. Clive Ellis wrote in his 1984 biography: “[Fry] was not only highly self-opinionated, but also low on tact, so it was inevitable that there would be flashpoints, on and off the field.” Ellis also wrote, for Fry’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “A stubborn conviction that he was invariably right did not always endear him to the establishment or even to his fellow journalists.” His determination could have benefits, such such as when he taught himself to head the ball to be able to compete better with professional footballers. But his snobbery led to problems. He wrote often about the superiority to amateur footballers to northern professionals: he considered the inclusion of the penalty area during amateur games as an insult to their sportsmanship: “It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack, and push their opponents, and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney. I say that the lines marking the penalty area are a disgrace to the playing field of a public school.” His attitude towards class persisted all through his life. For example, in 1938, he caused some offence by writing about the educational and social backgrounds of the Australian players and continued to regard it as a stain on someone’s character if they had not attended public school.
Even during his playing days, long before his illness in the 1920s which might account for his later eccentricities, he clashed with spectators, opponents and team-mates. And despite his loud championing of the superiority of amateur sportsmen, he was sometimes guilty of the very faults which he criticised in professionals. For example, playing football for Oxford against London Caledonians, he was involved in controversy when he was accused of being too rough, and for calling an opposing player a “pig”. The matter was reported in The Scotsman, but Isis defended Fry and the other Oxford players denied anything of the sort had taken place.
This was not the only example of Fry’s difficult character. On his first appearance for Oxford against Cambridge at football, his team lost 5–1; Fry was heard to say: “I never want to play again with such a lot of **** crocks.” During an 1894 cricket match between Sussex and Gloucestershire at Bristol, when there was no play owing to poor weather, the crowd became restless as the sun shone (the pitch was still wet) so the teams played football to entertain them. But the spectators were unimpressed, wanting to see cricket. Gilbert Jessop, one of the Gloucestershire players, later wrote: “[The spectators] were orderly until Charles Fry ‘cocked a snook’ at them.” The crowd came onto the field and surrounded the players and attempted to damage the pitch. When the teams escaped to the pavilion, they were prevented from leaving by around 2,000 people; Fry and the Sussex captain were surrounded and jostled when they tried to sneak away.
On his various playing fields, he had a reputation for posing and contemptuous arrogance. And he certainly enjoyed attention, such as when in the icy winter of 1894–95 he ostentatiously skated at great speed on the Cherwell, leading enormous groups of people and attracting quite an audience. Even though he never played in Australia, Fry was keen to offer his expert guidance in the press about what teams would encounter, most notably before the 1903–04 series and to the considerable irritation of the MCC captain Pelham Warner. It was not his only incident with Warner. In 1908, Fry made a protest to the MCC Secretary over the choice of Warner as the captain of the Gentlemen at Lord’s ahead of Ranjitsinhji. It led to a strained and unpleasant atmosphere which was even picked up by the press: the News of the World referred to the “internal feuds” of the amateur side.
This was not the only time that he adversely affected his own side. On several occasions, notably in 1902, 1907 and 1908, he drifted in and out of the Sussex team, proving unreliable. He also irritated some of the team’s professionals, such as when he made Robert Relf go in as nightwatchman one evening in 1907 when he had already changed to make a quick getaway for an evening out in Canterbury. Fry failed to turn up for the opening game of the 1908 season, having promised to play for the Gentlemen of England (led by W. G. Grace) against Surrey. Most notable was an incident that season when the Sussex team, captained by Fry, failed to appear for their game against Hampshire; they were staying with Ranjitsinhji who told them that no play would take place owing to poor weather. The press — including Wisden — were critical of Fry (although he was not always directly named), mentioning “unpleasantness” and “discord” surrounding him and Ranjitsinhji, and the negative influence he had on the Sussex team. Wilton said of Fry in 1908: “His off-field antics became increasingly petulant and, as a result, began to tarnish the sporting reputation that had taken him more than fifteen years to earn.” The following year, he moved to Hampshire, for whom he was qualified by residence.
And Fry reacted badly to any perceived slights, however small. It was rumoured in 1908 Fry refused to play at Kent that season owing to some “ironic cheering” from the crowd when he had misfielded at Canterbury a year before. He had also, as at the time noted by Cricket, not played at Gloucestershire or Nottingham for some time — which may have been connected to incidents with the crowd in previous seasons. When Hampshire played Kent at Canterbury in 1911, the home crowd barracked Fry for slow scoring in the first innings, when he made a century. When Hampshire batted again at the end of the second day, Fry faced the last over from Colin Blythe, who deliberately bowled two high full tosses at him, after which Fry protested by coming down the pitch to speak to the bowler. Blythe bowled the rest of the over wide of off-stump. Fry was once again roundly jeered by the spectators, and as he left the field at the end of the day, he challenged some of them. It later transpired that his objection was that Blythe was bowling with the sun behind him and therefore he could not see the ball. Fry — who scored a century on the last day to save the game — continued to complain about the incident in writing even into the 1950s and, rather ridiculously, claimed that Blythe — a slow-left-arm spinner — was bowling extremely fast short-pitched deliveries around the wicket at him.
C. B. Fry in his naval uniform (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)
This attitude persisted long after Fry’s playing career was over. When working at the League of Nations with Ranjitsinhji, he was thought to be behind several incidents where his employer made complaints about the lack of deference according to him. In Brisbane in Australia in 1936, annoyed by the lack of respect given to him and frustrated by his failure to find better seats to watch the first Test, Fry tripped over the typewriter of Bruce Harris and either hurled or kicked it into the crowd. And he was obsessive about his naval title. During the First World War — when he was never even close to active service (his brother died of typhus as a prisoner of war) — his work with the Mercury, although not especially difficult, earned him the honorary naval rank of Lieutenant, and he was later promoted to Honorary Commander. But his wartime experiences were limited to playing cricket; even so, in the 1920s and 1930s he insisted on being listed as “Commander” and enjoyed wearing his naval uniform. He was later promoted to honorary Captain.
In the 1930s, Fry enjoyed holding court on any topic, and once he started it was hard to stop him talking. When he was in Australia covering the 1936–37 Ashes as a journalist, he worked closely with Neville Cardus, who found him fascinating. In his Autobiography, Cardus wrote: “Fry, I swear, talked all the way to Australia and all the way across Australia and all the way back home. At Melbourne on Armistice Day, the English journalists and the English cricket team were about to attend a reception; we were gathered in the lounge of the Windsor Hotel when the sirens announced the two-minutes’ silence. We all stood side by side and Fry was next to me. Before all sound had subsided, I could not help whispering to Fry, “This’ll irk you, Charles.” He nearly died, but he checked his retort. I think this was probably one of the most severely disciplined acts of his career.”
To counter this negative view of Fry is difficult. There are few examples of anyone writing warmly about him as a person rather than a sportsman. But he was a relatively benevolent figurehead of the TS Mercury — certainly nothing like as cruel as his wife — and could be generous with his time and praise for others. He took interest in the careers of players like Hampshire’s Phil Mead. At times, he displayed wit and could be quite self-depreciating, such as in his assessment of his own batting in the Book of Cricket in 1899 or his columns for the Daily Express in 1902, when he wrote wryly of his repeated batting failures in the Tests. But this became less and less frequent as time went on, and his sense of self-importance increased. There may have been many reasons for his faults — his upbringing, stress, his illnesses — but tarnished his reputation in his own lifetime and afterwards. However, if there is little doubt that Fry was never a pleasant man — even before his mental illness — his fame did not arise from his personality but from his sporting achievements. Do these stand up to modern scrutiny? The answer here is more complex …
Old Ebor 