Читать книгу CB Fry: King Of Sport - England's Greatest All Rounder; Captain of Cricket, Star Footballer and World Record Holder - Iain Wilton - Страница 9

Fry’s life began in 1872 – and he timed his arrival to perfection. It was a year which contained many defining moments in the lives of the individuals, events and institutions which were to shape both his character and his career.

The future FA Cup finalist was born barely a month after Wanderers became the first Cup-holders by beating the Royal Engineers at The Oval.

A few weeks after the birth of its future captain, Sussex County Cricket Club opened its new ground at Hove, which was to be the setting for many of his most remarkable cricketing feats. A month later, it was the venue for the first match between Sussex and Gloucestershire, whose side included W.G. Grace – with whom, before the end of the century, Fry was to open the England batting.

Similarly, as Fry also represented his country at football, it was appropriate that he should be born in the year when England and Scotland played the first international match in soccer history.

As he represented Oxford University at rugby – in addition to captaining its football, athletics and cricket teams – it was extraordinary that 1872 should also have seen Oxford and Cambridge competing in a Varsity rugby match for the first time.

As a one-time master at Charterhouse, it was fitting that he was born just as the school was moving from London to Godalming, so that it could have more space for playing fields and devote extra attention to sport.

As the future husband of someone involved in a major Victorian sex scandal, it was a coincidence that Fry should be born in the year that the man responsible for the scandal made his only appearance: for Kent in county cricket.

Finally, 1872 was also the year in which Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji was born. By the end of the nineteenth century, Fry and Ranjitsinhji were not only the greatest of friends but batsmen who were forming the most contrasting, attractive and successful partnership that cricket has ever seen. It was a friendship and partnership which endured well beyond their cricketing careers, encompassing politics, diplomacy and even kingship. Not only did Ranjitsinhji become the ruler of an Indian state but Fry might have become a European king.

Although the timing of Fry’s birth was wholly appropriate, its location was not. Croydon may have been one of the first places to have had its own cricket team (as early as 1707) but it was only a temporary home for the Fry family, which had deep Sussex roots. According to Fry’s autobiography, Life Worth Living, his Sussex ancestry could be traced back to the Norman conquest when his ancestors fought on both sides at the Battle of Hastings. On the one hand, members of the ‘Le Fre’ family apparently came over to England with William the Conqueror; on the other, in Fry’s words, ‘one of our forefathers was the Saxon soldier who helped his Queen to find the body of King Harold.’

After their arrival the Le Fre family moved only a short distance from Hastings, settling in and around Mayfield and Rotherfield (barely 15 miles from Battle) in east Sussex. By intermarrying with a long-established local family, the Burgesses, the Frys gradually became major land-owners and prominent members of the gentry. The long-standing association between two families was clearly a source of pride well into the nineteenth century, as both Charles Fry and his brother, plus some of their relations, had ‘Burgess’ as their middle name.

By the sixteenth century, the Fry family was sufficiently wealthy to be paying for the construction of private pews in St Denys’s Church in Rotherfield. It was an early way for people to demonstrate their wealth and social status and created an asset that was either bequeathed or sold, according to the fortunes of the family concerned. Similarly, in St Dunstan’s Church at Mayfield, the Frys paid for the construction of monuments to various family members. In 1780, for example, the death of C.B. Fry’s great-great-great-grandmother, Hannah Fry, was marked by the erection of a monument bearing an inscription which concluded, rather grimly:

Those who the longest lease enjoyed

Have told us with a sigh

That to be born seems little more

Than to begin to die.

Hannah’s sister Mary married into another deep-rooted local family, the Bridgers, who farmed near Mayfield in Hadlow Down. It was an area in which Puritanism took hold and residents included those with fairly conventional Biblical names, like Aaron and Isaac, and others which had a more transient popularity, such as Obedience, Repentance and Feargod. (After the Civil War, a jury at Rye – 20 miles away – was composed of, amongst others, Kill-sin Pimple, Sleep-not Billing, More-fruit Fowler and Be-faithful Joiner.) As late as the mid-nineteenth century at least one member of the Bridger family – and one of Fry’s distant relations – did his utmost to ensure that local children continued to bear the most unusual of names.

The man concerned was undeniably eccentric, once carrying a large cannon ball from Eastbourne to Hadlow Down. (His reasons – if any – for doing so have, unfortunately, failed to survive.) His eccentricity also manifested itself in a lengthy pigtail: he was, accordingly, known as ‘Pigtail’ Bridger. His offspring, alas, had no choice about the names they were given – such as Jupiter Ammon, Venus Pandora and Octavia Echo. On one occasion, however, the vicar decided that ‘Pigtail’ wanted to go too far. He had brought his latest son to be christened and, on being asked what name he had chosen for the boy, replied, simply, ‘Beelzebub’. The clergyman objected, but Bridger was adamant: ‘Sir, the name is in the Bible and you are therefore bound to use it.’ Sensibly, the vicar suggested an adjournment. In due course Bridger returned and announced that he had selected a less controversial name. The boy was duly christened Augustus Caesar instead.

Unlike the Bridgers, the fortunes of the Fry family were not solely dependent on farming. From the 1600s until the start of the Industrial Revolution, Sussex was one of Britain’s most important industrial areas and, according to Life Worth Living, although ‘the conjoined families of Fry and Burges did not include any of the big iron-masters sundry of their members were interested in the mills’.

As C.B. was proud to point out, some members of his family were also involved in another, less respectable local industry, which helped to replace the wealth lost when iron production moved steadily to the North.

In the late seventeenth century, the Government’s policy of restricting wool exports to certain designated ports had led to a growth in smuggling and, by 1720, Sussex had its first major gang of smugglers, based in Mayfield. Led by Gabriel Tomkins, the members of the ‘Mayfield Gang’ loaded wool onto waiting French vessels and maximised their returns by illegally importing goods such as tea, spirits and silk, which attracted high rates of duty. It became an extremely profitable two-way trade but one which also involved significant risk-taking by both the smugglers and the Excise-men who were supposed to stop them. Tomkins himself provided a vivid demonstration of both the risks and the rewards of smuggling: in the 1720s, when he was believed to be worth £10,000, he was shot and captured after trying to free some fellow smugglers who were being detained in a pub. He was duly sentenced to seven years’ transportation but gave such valuable information to the authorities that he was not only released but subsequently became a customs officer and even bailiff to the Sheriff of Sussex. Tomkins eventually reverted to his old ways, however, with the result that he was hanged in 1750 for robbing the Chester Mail Coach.

Despite the death of Tomkins and the dispersal of the ‘Mayfield Gang’, smuggling continued on a massive scale, although occasional seizures were made. Mayfield was one of the villages successfully targeted by the authorities in the early 1780s: it seems that the houses in its High Street had unusually large cellars not by accident but by design.

One of the Frys’ family homes – Skipper’s Hill, near Mayfield – was also involved. Its very name gives an indication of the part it played in assisting the smugglers. For the captains of vessels lying off the coast, a lighted beacon on this hill was the ‘all clear’ to start off-loading their cargoes. Moreover, the house appears to have been used for the storage of particularly valuable goods: the cellars, according to Fry, were ‘spacious’ and when his father had lived at Skipper’s Hill they still contained a large consignment of ‘square-face’ gin.

Despite the Frys’ income from iron mills, agriculture and smuggling, some members of the family were not, by any means, well off. By the early nineteenth century, after almost 800 years in Sussex, there were inevitably several branches of the Fry family in the Mayfield area, with wide variations in their social and economic status. Parish records from the early 1800s show that some branches were headed by a blacksmith or a ‘cord-swainer’ while others, including C.B.’s ancestors, were simply listed as having a ‘gentleman’ as the head of the household. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century all branches of the Fry family seem to have faced a steady financial decline.

One of the reasons for the gradual downturn in the family’s fortunes was its size. In the late 1500s, two of C.B.’s ancestors had no fewer than seven sons and one daughter; in the early 1700s, Hannah Fry was one of five children to survive infanthood; and in the mid-1800s, Fry’s father had five brothers and sisters. As Life Worth Living commented ruefully, ‘In that part of the world they divide up inheritances.’ More generally, though, British landowners were being affected by the arrival of cheap food from the United States, which depressed farm values and reduced the income they received from tenant farmers.

C.B.’s financial prospects were further clouded by the fact that his mother’s family, the Whites, seem to have endured similar pressures at exactly the same time as the Frys. In 1866, for example, when members of the White family first enjoyed the social respectability of becoming churchwardens at St Dunstan’s (some 300 years after the Burgesses), Charles White suffered the indignity of going bankrupt. Nor was he the only member of the family to experience financial problems. An account of contemporary Mayfield by Fred Lester refers to another Mr White as ‘a very well-known and clever chemist, liked by everyone’, but mentioned that his house had been only half-built for years.

Although her marriage to Lewis John Fry may have done little to restore his (or her) financial fortunes, Constance Isabella White had an interesting background and in due course, many of her family’s athletic and intellectual qualities were passed on to their children and in particular, to their eldest son, Charles Burgess or, as he was soon known, ‘C.B.’ Fry. In Life Worth Living, Fry stated that ‘a forefather of mine on my mother’s side was one Bailly, Mayor of Paris in the French Revolution.’ More recently, his maternal grandfather Dr Charles White, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, had been a tutor to the Russian Prince who, in 1855, became Tsar Alexander II; and one of C.B.’s uncles, Percy White, was a well-known Victorian novelist and sufficiently good cricketer to represent the Gentlemen of Sussex.

C.B. also inherited some interests and traits from the immediate family of his father. For instance, his political leanings appear to have been inherited from his paternal grandfather, a local Liberal activist, and some of his athletic prowess seems to have come from one of his uncles, an excellent hurdler, high jumper and tennis player.

Academically, too, the Frys could rival, if not match, the record of the Whites. In addition to C.B.’s own successes, one of his cousins, Hubert Fry, was to become a university scholar of some distinction, studying at both Oxford and Naples. (Predictably, C.B.’s cousin, like his grandfather Robert, had ‘Burgess’ as his middle name.)

C.B.’s father appears to have been less distinguished. Even Wallis Myers, Fry’s first biographer – who usually went out of his way to portray his subject, and his family, in a favourable light – admitted that ‘except possibly as an oarsman, [Fry’s father] displayed no remarkable aptitude for outdoor sports.’ Moreover, Lewis Fry had to content himself with an unexceptional post in the Civil Service. According to Myers, he ‘finished a useful career by controlling the candidates’ department at Scotland Yard’, but one of C.B.’s long-standing friends, Harry Altham, recorded his achievements had been rather more modest. Although he confirmed that C.B.’s father worked for the Metropolitan Police, it was apparently as a mere clerk of accounts.1

For a man of Lewis’s background such a comparatively menial job would have provided a daily reminder of the Frys’ waning fortunes. It does explain, however, why the family needed to be within easy reach of central London and why, as a result, C.B. was born (on 25 April 1872) in Surrey rather than Sussex, the county in which the Fry/Le Fre family had made its home for the previous 800 years.

Contrary to the impression given by his most recent biographer, C.B. was not the first child of Lewis and Constance Fry. In fact, he had two sisters as well as a younger brother, Walter, who was five – not ten2 – years younger than Charles.

Despite his birth in Surrey (and the family’s Sussex background), Fry spent much of his childhood in Kent. At an early age, C.B. found that the family home had been moved to Chislehurst, which, like east Croydon, was within easy commuting distance of central London. Indeed, the garden backed on to the railway line and years later, C.B. recalled seeing trains going through the Chislehurst tunnel on their way to or from Charing Cross. They were, and continue to be, ‘some of the slowest trains in the world’.

The Frys’ home was also close to Camden House, ensuring that the first of C.B.’s many brushes with royalty came at a particularly early age.

Camden House had been the home of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew who, after being elected President of France, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1852. Following his defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, the Emperor and his family fled to Britain and led a reasonably comfortable existence in Chislehurst, thanks to assistance from Queen Victoria. After Napoleon’s death in 1873, his widow (the Empress Eugenie) and son (the Prince Imperial) continued to live there – making an indelible impression on the young Charles Fry. As he later recalled:

I used to see the Empress, a slim little lady, with a sunshade, walking in the gardens. She once came and spoke to our nurse, who was wheeling a perambulator, and inclusively to me. The young Prince Imperial one met any forenoon strolling in the Park. He was a handsome and attractive youth, and always said ‘Good morning’ with a friendly smile. He often stopped and spoke to me, and nearly always asked, ‘What are you going to do this afternoon, young man – games?’

Unfortunately, the Prince preferred martial pursuits to games and had become a student at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. In 1879, after news of the Isandlwana disaster reached London, he was keen to put his training into practice and managed to secure a post with the British Army in South Africa. Within months of his arrival, the Prince’s enthusiasm resulted in his death: along with two escorts and a native guide, he was killed in a surprise attack by Zulus. The news caused shockwaves in Britain and, for the six-year-old Charles Fry, it came as a particularly unpleasant surprise: ‘I can remember feeling quite shocked, as if someone I knew very well had died.’

As the Prince foresaw, the young Charles Fry soon became interested in a wide variety of games. Around the age of seven, when, as he wrote, ‘my home had been transferred one station down the line to Orpington’, C.B. developed an interest in cricket and a realisation of his athletic prowess.

Fry’s fascination with cricket and his ability at athletics were entirely natural and instinctive. From the top window of the family’s house in Orpington, he used to watch two of the best local cricketers practising in the nets. Both were near neighbours: one was Oliver Evans, a good bowler in club cricket; the other George Allen, an opening batsman for Orpington. Over 60 years later C.B. recalled how he had been captivated by the sound as well as the sight of their practice sessions. He remembered ‘the peculiar attraction, amounting to a thrill, of the sound of willow against hard leather. I had never had a bat of my own, or a ball, or played cricket; but the appeal was immediate and irresistible.’ In due course he took a closer look and ‘about the twentieth time that my head appeared behind the net over the quickset hedge, Oliver Evans invited me to come round and have a knock. I batted with a full-sized bat to the underhand bowling of these two swells for nearly ten minutes. I did not move my bat much, but kept the ball out of the wicket. That was how I began.’

Despite his gratitude towards the two men who introduced him to the game and his appreciation of their talent, Fry’s first cricketing hero was a left-arm bowler called Hawes, who played for St Mary Cray. Like many other bowlers, Hawes was an outstanding fielder off his own bowling and particularly good at throwing down the wicket if a batsman moved out of his crease. But despite exploiting one of the dangers of batsmen playing on the front foot, Hawes, who was regarded as the local oracle on cricket, insisted ‘forward play’s the thing’. As an impressionable young batsman, C.B. followed his advice despite feeling stiff and uncomfortable when he did so.

Inevitably, the enthusiastic youngster was pressed into service when a local team found itself a player short. It seems clear that the débutant must have been eight or nine years of age but the other details are hazy. The lack of clarity seems to have been caused by Fry himself, who allowed at least two versions of the same event to appear in print. In 1912, in what was effectively an ‘authorised’ biography, Myers reported C.B.’s first innings in competitive cricket yielded 7 runs. By 1939, however, in his autobiography Fry’s contribution had miraculously risen to a match-saving 17 not out. Indeed, in view of C.B.’s habitual exaggeration it has to be doubted whether, as Myers claimed, his début also featured the finest catch he ever saw: ‘A man in a deerstalker’s cap came to field as a substitute. He was sent on to field [at] long-on. The batsman hit a tremendous balloon up in the air, the substitute ran back with all his might to get under it, jumped a stiff iron rail that encircled the ground, and caught the ball in the middle of his jump. Technically, it ought not to have been out, but the batsman was a sportsman and retired.’

Whatever the truth of the story, such athleticism would have appealed to the young Fry. By the age of six he was already keen to emulate an uncle who was an accomplished jumper, capable of clearing a six-foot gate. C.B. began by constructing a hurdle-like obstacle from garden canes and soon found that, if he removed his shoes, he could clear it. Around the same time, to his initial irritation the nurse who looked after his brother and younger sister insisted on taking him to a Sunday school contest being held behind Orpington vicarage. The events included a high jump competition for boys: C.B. was duly entered into his first athletics competition and won it with ease.

A more practical demonstration of his jumping skill was prompted by one of the family dogs – Dan – who, according to Life Worth Living, compensated for his ugliness by being ‘the ratter of the century’. One day, after a local outbreak of hydrophobia, C.B. was alarmed to see Dan’s foaming mouth:

This sort of thing acts like lightning in a boy’s mind, so I ran half a dozen strides, cleared the sloping top of the bank and the high hedge half-way down it, landed in the soft earth, and was up a Victorian plum tree before Dan, who was looking at me from the top of the bank, knew what was up. Presently I saw my father, who had come back from London by the evening train. I shouted to him that Dan was foaming at the mouth. My father, as usual to anything I said, twirled his golden moustaches and shouted ‘Nonsense!’ but he came up the garden carrying an overcoat and a pudding-basin of water in the other hand. Shielding his legs with the overcoat, he presented the water to Dan, who immediately lapped up the lot. So I came down, though Dan was certainly still foaming. I then went back to see where I had jumped and was astonished at the distance I had cleared. That is how I found out that I was a long-jumper; and it also shows the value of a really ugly dog like Dan.

Despite his athletic potential and his enthusiasm for cricket, these activities absorbed only a small proportion of C.B.’s energy as a boy. Most of his spare time was spent on other outdoor pursuits and it was clear from a young age that Fry would admire and enjoy a lifestyle in which hunting, shooting and fishing played a prominent role.

In his childhood C.B. was too young to hunt and shoot but found that catapults could provide much of the entertainment his elders derived from guns. Taught by his uncle Percy, Fry soon became a marksman: ‘An expert could hit a shilling every time at ten yards’ distance. I was an expert.’ Unfortunately for the local bird population, he did not confine his expertise to shillings but targeted sparrows and starlings with deadly effect. On one occasion he also found himself firing – inadvertently – at a robin:

I was walking down the lane at the bottom of our garden one November afternoon by the gate of a long avenue leading up to the large red house, in the grounds of which the original Mr Cook invented and cultivated the world-famous Buff Orpingtons. I was looking for sparrows, when suddenly a little bird flew up from behind the oak fence, and I knocked it over with a snapshot just as one might shoot a rabbit crossing a ride. It was a bit of a fluke. The bird fell on the far side of the fence. As I stepped forward to collect the bird, a quiet voice just behind me said, ‘That was a good shot, but you shouldn’t shoot little robins.’

There in the road by me stood a tall thin man dressed in black broadcloth. He wore a wide-brimmed black felt hat, like a clergyman’s, and indeed had all the appearance of a Nonconformist preacher. He had a long, strikingly kind face and strangely searching grey eyes.

Fry assured the man that he thought the bird was a sparrow but, on finding its body, discovered it was indeed a robin. Turning round to address the stranger once more, C.B. was astonished to find he had vanished: ‘I went into the road and looked up and down, but there was no one to be seen; and in the time available there was nowhere for my sudden stranger to have turned out of sight.’ With due respect to the robin, the greatest significance of the incident was that it provided C.B. with the first of several experiences which left him with a firm and, by the late 1920s, self-destructive belief in the paranormal.

At the time the episode did nothing to dissuade him from continuing to wage war on local birds. On the contrary, he extended his repertoire to include trapping, as well as shooting, but it seems that he was less successful as a trapper than a shooter, a failing he attributed to his inability to obtain any proper bird lime. He improvised by boiling mistletoe into a kind of jelly: while conceding he had never actually caught any birds in this way, he added, with satisfaction, that he had succeeded in getting ‘several starlings into considerable difficulties with themselves’.

But it was fishing that became Fry’s first love. His interest was sparked by Every Boy’s Book – a present from one of his father’s colleagues at Scotland Yard. A section was devoted to angling and did more to improve C.B.’s reading than anything else. Eventually he persuaded his father to give him a fishing rod but the initial results were disappointing: despite frequent visits to a stream behind Orpington Priory, he always returned empty-handed. After about ten fruitless visits, a chance remark by Alice, governess to the Frys’ children, led C.B. to believe his fortunes would improve if he fished at Keston instead. He thought nothing of the 12-mile round-trip and claimed to have made the journey eight times before returning with ‘a single, very small roach; and I went another five times before I caught a second.’

Unfortunately for the young C.B., the hours he devoted to fishing and bird-shooting started to alarm his mother; as he later admitted, ‘she never knew where I was from morning till night.’ As a result she felt that he needed to be moved away from Hove Lodge, his first school. The decision cannot have been an easy one for Mrs Fry: the school had been founded by her father and run since his death by Percy White, her brother.

If Fry’s account is correct, his father took little time or trouble over finding a suitable alternative to Hove Lodge. He simply ‘met a man in the train who told him that Hornbrook House was the nearest school to Orpington that he knew. So there I went.’ The results were hardly an immediate success.

Hornbrook House was an old-fashioned establishment facing the West Chislehurst pond, which consisted of around forty boys aged between nine and nineteen. It was owned by a Mr Humphrey – known to the pupils as ‘Old Cribber’. He was, in C.B.’s words, ‘a bent old man’, with ‘a dome-like forehead’ and a long white beard which ‘covered where his tie ought to have been.’ He taught arithmetic and geography to the top class and conducted the school’s daily assembly – a ritual that was imprinted on Fry’s mind for the rest of his life. Every day Mr Humphrey arrived through the door of the side schoolroom, which also served as the dining room and, as he came in, the smell of porridge – which C.B. hated – would escort him. ‘Cribber’ then took a tuning fork from his waist-coast pocket, tapped it on the desk and reproduced the note for the beginning of the morning hymn. Well over half a century later Fry remembered that, three times out of five, it was ‘New every morning is the love’. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘if I hear that Ancient and Modern hymn-tune, I immediately smell porridge; and if by chance I smell porridge, I hear that tune.’

Fry’s early difficulties with long division put the relationship between pupil and teacher under its greatest strain and, in attempting to master the subject, C.B.’s diligence back-fired. After completing the arithmetic he had been set, Fry ‘virtuously wrote out some sums for myself to do. This was fatal, because I put down figures like 23 shillings and 19 pence. There is no law of nature why a boy should not add up any sets of pounds, shillings, and pence that he chooses. But Mrs. Humphrey regarded this virtuous effort at industry as an instance of ineffable deceit; I lost her minimum good opinion for ever.’

Before long, Mrs Humphrey’s opinion of Fry was to sink even further. After school one Saturday, C.B. decided that, instead of returning home by train he would use the fare to replenish his stocks of catapult elastic. He duly did so but later in the day, ate too many of the ‘small sweet yellow apples which grew on a tree in quantities in our little orchard.’ The fruit caused a severe stomach-ache, necessitated the summoning of the local doctor and meant that Fry was unable to return to school on Monday morning. Unfortunately for her son, Mrs Fry’s letter to the school, formally notifying Mrs Humphrey of his absence, mentioned C.B. had walked home on the Saturday instead of taking the train. As a result, when he returned to Hornbrook House, Fry was summoned to see the headmaster’s wife, received a severe rebuke and found that his earnest attempts to defend his actions were completely counter-productive.

In his defence, Fry had sought to argue no harm had been caused by his behaviour because he did not mind walking home and in doing so saved the price of the train fare. His honesty landed him in more trouble, not less. He was immediately asked what he had done with the money and explained that he had spent it at the local toyshop. By this stage he had at least realised that it would be unwise to own up to the nature of the goods he had bought.

Mrs Humphrey remained unimpressed and demanded to know what Fry had meant by behaving in the way that he had. Further compounding his problems, C.B. replied he did not know. ‘This,’ he later wrote, ‘was fatal.’ Mrs Humphrey concluded that he ‘was not only next door to a thief, but pitifully untruthful’ and sentenced him to extra homework in the subject – mathematics – with which he had been struggling since his arrival at the school. To Fry, ‘the point of the episode was that never in the whole of my life have I felt so poignantly the bitterness of injustice.’ For the young boy, the incident was clearly traumatic and it seems clear that the psychological wounds ran deep: almost 60 years later, he devoted over a page of his autobiography to giving his version of events, justifying his behaviour and complaining about his Nemesis, Mrs Humphrey.

Regardless of C.B.’s strained relationship with the headmaster’s wife, it is clear that ‘Old Cribber’ organised his school in a way which failed to recognise, let alone realise, the academic and sporting potential of a boy like Fry. Writers like Homer and Virgil, whose work had been taught at Hove Lodge, were ignored; the emphasis on scripture history was ‘the most terrible ordeal’3 and organised games few and far between.

Although Fry was first introduced to football at Hornbrook House, the rules were not merely unorthodox but varied according to the identity of the side’s captain. The results could be chaotic. According to The Man and His Methods: ‘In one out-match the distinguishing feature was the blending of Association rules with the visitors’ rules, an indecisive umpire making confusion worse confounded.’

C.B.’s hopes of developing his cricketing skills were also disappointed. Little cricket was played and one of the few practice games was abandoned after only one ball. Myers takes up the story:

The best bowler in the school chanced to be an Australian, with whom C.B. had many a fisty argument over the relative merits of W.G. and Murdoch. This embryo Jones started to bowl but, instead of sending down his usual flier, delivered an underhand ‘daisy clipper’ that proved fatal. The victim was an obstinate Scotchman, who took umbrage and refused to budge. There were hot words. Suddenly the Scotchman collared the ball and stump and made off across the field. The others gave instant pursuit; but the quarry was fleet of foot and headed for the country, up hill and down dale. ‘We cornered him once or twice,’ says Mr Fry, ‘but he kept us off with a pocket-knife in one hand and a stump in the other, and broke bay. Eventually, after about six miles’ run, we nailed him in a swing-gate by strategem and the aid of a postman, somewhere over near Bromley. We drove home in a four-wheeler, four of us and the captive inside, the rest on top, creating a great sensation all the way.’ The measles carried Fry off next day, but when he returned, weeks afterwards, pear-drops were still being distributed after tea as a reward.

In 1939, when his autobiography was published, Fry4 provided a rather different version of events. The bowler was a New Zealander, not an Australian; the batsman had acquired a name, Gloag; and the measles had become scarlatina. In addition, Fry gave the story a final flourish, claiming that Mrs Humphrey, armed with a thick strap, was seen heading towards the bathroom in which the recaptured Gloag was hiding. Her quarry, however, had turned on the gas, barred the door and climbed on to the window ledge. Mrs Humphrey, C.B. continued, lit a candle and managed to push the door open with the result that ‘the escaping gas went off in a largish flare in her face’. One cannot help but conclude this revised – and dramatised – account was based less on the facts than on hopes of retribution simmering by this stage for almost 60 years.

The shortcomings of Hornbrook House meant that Fry felt both unfulfilled and ill-at-ease. In particular, he disliked being a weekly boarder and in later life, not only admitted that he had learned little in his first two years there but, uncharacteristically, conceded while most of his fellow pupils ‘were happy enough, I was not.’

It would be wrong to attribute Fry’s unhappiness solely to those responsible for running the school; some of the blame should also be taken by his parents. As Clive Ellis has argued, C.B. ‘was acutely aware of their indifference to his upbringing. In those days, people even at a modest income level could afford to entrust governesses, tutors and maids with much of the day-to-day trivia involved in raising children [and] his parents were keen to hand over the responsibility of looking after such a lively child to institutions.’ Although Fry always resisted the temptation to criticise his parents directly, it is clear their indifference and the behaviour of his father in particular had hurt him as a boy. For example, when recounting the story about Dan and the suspected hydrophobia, he made a point of stating, ‘My father, as usual to anything I said, twirled his golden moustaches and shouted “Nonsense!”’ Similarly, when he walked home in order to spend his train fare on catapult elastic, he was conscious neither of his parents ‘took any notice of my being late.’ His father’s decision to accept a stranger’s advice about his son’s education without assessing the suitability of the school was another episode that clearly rankled for decades to come.

Indeed, it may be significant that Fry regarded the husband of a family servant in a far more idyllic light than his own father. Clifford Bax, one of C.B.’s closest friends from the 1930s to the 1950s, recalled how Fry had said that when he was four or five, his parents sent him to stay with his nurse, who had married a railway porter. C.B. told Bax, ‘He used to come home for supper, dressed in his green uniform, and for years afterwards I always pictured God as a very large porter in a green uniform with many brass buttons.’ Fry may have had this couple in mind when, in 1906, he wrote, ‘it seems to me that the happiest folk are those who apparently have the least worldly reasons for being so.’ More significantly perhaps, the same article argued although children had ‘a perfect gift for happiness’, it was accompanied by ‘an often unrecognised capacity for sorrows whose depths their elders rarely guage.’ It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the article’s observations were largely autobiographical in nature.

Happily, as he returned for his third year at Hornbrook House, the 11-year-old Fry found the place completely transformed. ‘Old Cribber’ (and, more importantly, his wife) had departed after selling the establishment to H.V. Pears – whose father, Dr Stuart Adolphus Pears, had turned Repton from a small grammar school in the 1850s into one of the country’s leading public schools by the time of his retirement in 1879. The changes at Hornbrook House were far-reaching: a new gymnasium had already been built, the food was improved and the school restricted to boys aged between nine and fourteen. After two unhappy years under the Humphreys, C.B. felt that he had entered ‘another and a better world’. His relief was further increased when Pears decided Hornbrook House should no longer accommodate weekly boarders but become a full-time boarding school instead.

The new headmaster also transformed the school’s curriculum and its approach to sport. Like his father, H.V. Pears believed that well-organised games could play a valuable role in improving the moral as well as the physical well-being of his pupils. Accordingly, under his leadership Hornbrook House attached far greater importance to sport than at any time in the past. The chief beneficiary was Fry. He soon became the school’s soccer captain and even appeared, aged 12, for the local West Kent football team.

C.B. also made steady progress as a cricketer, although he had a tendency to be dismissed cheaply in the first innings of many matches and it was while captaining the Hornbrook House XI that he had the first of his many encounters with people who were associated, directly or indirectly, with some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated literary works.

The incident occurred when the groundsman of the West Kent Cricket Club was umpiring in one of the school’s matches. He had some remarkable cricketing credentials: as well as being the nephew of Timothy Duke, the famous cricket bat and ball manufacturer, he had played for Kent as a fast round-arm bowler in the early 1860s. Furthermore, he made cricketing history in 1862 by bowling four batsmen with successive balls during a match between Sussex and Kent at Hove. (His victims included a great-nephew of Jane Austen.) Fry was unlikely to have known these facts when one of his favourite leg-side shots struck the umpire – Joseph Wells – on the forehead, knocking him unconscious. According to Life Worth Living, closer inspection of the injury revealed ‘a small red bruise, exactly like the caste mark of a Hindu.’ C.B. seems to have been almost as shocked as Wells himself, fearing the umpire had been fatally hurt. In due course, however, after the players had carried him to a nearby pub, Wells regained consciousness and, after a few minutes’ rest (and nothing stronger than a glass of water), he returned to his cricketing duties. As Joseph Wells was the father of H.G., Fry had ‘nearly slain the grandfather of Mr. Kipps and Mr. Polly and Mr. Hoopdriver.’5

While Hornbrook House was finally giving free rein to his footballing and cricketing talents, Fry demonstrated that his athletic ability would not be confined to jumping. During a family holiday, when C.B. was 12:

He won his first race, a steeplechase at a regatta in Dorsetshire. It was a mixed field, and included a policeman, two coastguards, a gardener and several boys. The course was about half a mile, and the first obstacle was a passage through the shafts of a big agricultural roller. After that, no one seemed to know the way; it was a case of follow-my-leader, with no one to guide. But when the competitors came to the straight Fry spurted ahead, and won.6

The prize was half a sovereign but more significantly, it was the first time that C.B. experienced, in his own words, ‘the thrill of forging ahead at the finish.’

Academically, too, H.V. Pears’ new regime suited him to perfection. Pears began by testing his pupils’ knowledge of Latin and thanks to the early efforts of Percy White, C.B. knew enough to get promoted towards the top of the school. Moreover, he was delighted that, in changing the Hornbrook curriculum, his new headmaster increased the emphasis on the classics (which he enjoyed) and reduced the importance attached to other subjects in which he was weaker. By playing to his strengths, the new curriculum allowed him to shine academically and would in due course secure the elite public school education his father would have struggled to afford.

Far from easing, the financial pressures on the Frys seem to have increased throughout the 1880s. By the end of the decade even Skipper’s Hill had been sold. C.B. had spent comparatively little time there but during his school holidays, he made a number of visits to the family’s traditional home. The young boy was impressed by what he saw and, years later, regretted his father had sold the place, wishing that, like previous Frys, he had been able to own and enjoy it. Intriguingly, after so long in the ownership of his family, the house changed hands several times in a comparatively short space of time. For example, one local historian – Anna Bell-Irving – referred to a ‘Mr Hughes, of Skipper’s Hill’, who came to the assistance of a fellow worshipper at St Dunstan’s. As the church was unheated and the man concerned was not only old but bald, he became so cold that, after a while, he stopped worshipping. Mr Hughes, a lawyer, tried to help by giving him one of his old wigs: after that the elderly man could be seen in his former place, sporting the unlikely combination of a smock frock and barrister’s wig.

As well as selling Skipper’s Hill, the Frys moved from Kent to south London. Although financial considerations may have played a part in the decision, C.B.’s father was experiencing a period of poor health and had been advised to reduce the time he spent commuting. While the move meant C.B.’s holidays were spent further away from his beloved countryside, he may have been pleased to vacate the family home in Orpington. Staying there before the end of an Easter holiday, he had been woken early one morning by the sound of heavy footsteps coming along a passageway and into his room. He recalled seeing ‘a tall figure pass behind the striped twill blind and a dim silhouette against the dim grey light outside.’ The drowsy boy assumed the silhouette was that of his father, who invariably looked out of his window whenever he heard any unusual noises coming from the backyard. C.B. was surprised, however, when the image gradually faded away – and shocked when he remembered his father was abroad on a walking tour intended to restore him to health. He remained awake and did not move until the darkness had been replaced by morning light. After breakfast, he told his mother what he had seen. She showed no surprise, explaining both the cook and the housemaid had handed in their notice after seeing, on several occasions, the mysterious figure of a tall woman in a black mackintosh in their room. This eerie day was one of the last that Fry spent in the house as, after he returned to school, the family home was transferred to Montrell Road, at Streatham Hill.

Initially, it was intended that, after leaving Hornbrook House, Fry should go to Aldenham, which had educated a large number of Whites. Whether they were related to Fry’s mother is unclear, although it is noticeable that several excelled at sport and represented the school at both football and cricket in the 1870s and 1880s. But, according to C.B., things didn’t go according to plan. In an attempt to ease his way into Aldenham, he was sent to Repton for practice – presumably through the influence of the Pears family – and ended up winning a scholarship there ‘by mistake’.7 For Fry, the consequences were far-reaching. ‘From that day onwards,’ he wrote, ‘the attention of my parents being otherwise occupied, I found for myself for the rest of my life.’