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Historical records matching Charles Burgess Fry
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About Charles Burgess Fry
Charles Burgess (C. B.) Fry
From The Weald of Surrey, Sussex & Kent
CB Fry was born on 25th April 1872 at Croydon, Surrey, the eldest son of Lewis John Fry and Constance Isabella White who had married at Hove, Sussex in 1871. His early years were spent in Kent and East Sussex before winning a scholarship in 1885 to Repton School where he established himself as an all-round athlete, footballer and cricketer as well as being a prominent classics scholar. A scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford in 1891 led to four years where he excelled at sports, winning blues for cricket, football and athletics as well as setting the world long jump record and being an enthusiastic member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and fine raconteur. However, a nervous breakdown led to a poor degree in humanities in 1895. On leaving university, his cricketing blossomed with Sussex, his adopted home, where C.B. Fry played from 1894 to 1908, and where he and Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji had a formidable partnership. He played twenty-six test matches for England culminating in his final appearance in India in 1921�2, and he finished with career statistics of 30,886 runs at an outstanding average of 50.22; he scored 94 centuries.
Fry taught at Charterhouse from 1896 to 1898 before establishing himself as journalist and writer on cricket. He collaborated with Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji and George Bedlam on various books on cricket and, with his wife, he wrote a novel about the world of cricket. C.B. Fry was a prolific journalist for The Captain, launched in 1899, and the Daily Express, which commenced in 1900 and, in 1904, The Newnes publishing house launched a magazine named after him for which he wrote numerous articles on many aspects of life until 1914 when the magazine ceased publication.
Fry married Beatrice Holme-Sumner on 4th June 1898 at St Pancras, London and the couple bore a son and two daughters. Beatrice had been the mistress of Charles Hoare, a partner in the family banking business, and after initial difficulties in the relationship, Fry's cricketing career was subsidized by Charles Hoare. On Hoare's death in 1908, Charles and Beatrice Fry took over the running of the training ship "Mercury" based at the Hamble in Hampshire and founded by Charles Hoare in 1885. Fry remained a Director of the training ship until 1950. Between the wars Fry suffered bouts of mental illness before returning to journalism at the Evening Standard in 1934 and he was very active for the rest of his life, in print, on radio, and on television. He wrote his autobiography, "Life Worth Living" in 1939.
Beatrice died in 1946 and Charles lived on for the next ten years until he died of kidney failure at the Middlesex Hospital, London, on 7th September 1956. A private funeral service was held at Golders Green crematorium on 11th September and his ashes were interred at Repton parish church on 28th September.
From Skippers Hill Manor School History:
1945 Founded in 1945 by JR Ward and his wife Maureen, Skippers Hill Manor Preparatory School was a boarding school for boys. JR and Maureen Ward ran a busy boarding school with pupils from all over the world, providing an excellent home and education to generations of boys, and later girls as well.
There are two commonly held theories as to where the school's name came from, the first being that the rarely seen Skipper butterfly was once common in the immediate vicinity.
Another theory was advanced by the famous English polymath CB Fry, who represented his country at both football and cricket, and who lived at Skippers Hill Manor.
His family discovered the underground tunnels previously used as safe-deposits by smugglers and their "Skippers". This theory seems more credible, as this area was known to be a centre for the illicit exporting of wool to France and Holland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the equally illegal importing of tea, spirits, tobacco and silk. During that period, smugglers transported their cargo along forest tracks and river valleys to the many inland distribution centres at the heads of the rivers. Skippers Hill, near the headwaters of the Ouse and the Rother, was one such centre.
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Charles Burgess Fry's Timeline
| 1872 |
April 1872
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Croydon, Surrey, England (United Kingdom)
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| 1899 |
1899
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Marylebone, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
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| 1900 |
May 23, 1900
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London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
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| 1910 |
1910
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London, United Kingdom
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| 1956 |
September 1956
Age 84
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