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C. B. Fry – Part 1 – with Iain Wilton
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There are few cricketers from the Golden Age who remain such an enigma as C. B. Fry. Captain of the England cricket team, footballer, world-record long jump holder, classicist, politician, naval captain, novelist, journalist, academic - there was no end to his talent. He even came close to becoming the King of Albania. English commentator John Arlott described him as 'probably the most variously gifted Englishman of any age.' On more than one occasion during his playing career, he was the undisputed best batsman in the world; yet he never toured Australia as a player, had questionable ties to some senior figures in Nazi Germany, and was troubled throughout his life by mental health issues, probably ignited by a less than ideal domestic setting.
In Part 1, Tom is joined by biographer Iain Wilton, and they discuss Fry’s early life, his writing and batting style, and his relationship with his wife, Beatrice.
ABOUT IAIN WILTON:
Iain has enjoyed a varied professional career in fields of politics, statistics and sport, including six years as the MCC's Head of Communications, at Lord's. He's now in the process of making a career change, after completing some professional exams to become an independent financial adviser, based in the Essex/Suffolk area, where he now lives with his family. More than 20 years after his biography C. B. Fry – King Of Sport was first published, Iain is now hoping to write, much later than planned, a second cricket book - this one focusing on the first Cricket World Cup, back in 1975.
Iain's early research and interviews are going well but, if any of 1975's competitors are listening, he says that he'd absolutely love to hear from you! Please contact Tom at goldenageofcricket@gmail.com and he'll pass the email on.
CREDITS:
Presenter & Producer: Tom Ford
All music used in podcast comes from the University of California Santa Barbara’s remarkable collection of wax cylinder’s from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are free to download and use. You can donate to the upkeep of these recordings via their website.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Golden Age of Cricket Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Golden Age of Cricket Podcast, a program in which we interview historians about particular cricketers from that far gone period immediately prior to the First World War. My name is Tom Ford.
Who was C.B. Fry? A Multitalented Icon
00:00:23
Speaker
But there are few cricketers from the golden age who remain such an enigma as C.B. Fry. Captain of the England cricket team, footballer, world record long jump holder, classicist, politician, naval captain, novelist, journalist, academic, there was no end to his talent. He even came close to becoming the king of Albania. English commentator John Arlett described him as quote, probably the most variously gifted Englishman of any age.
00:00:53
Speaker
On more than one occasion during his playing career he was the undisputed best batsman in the world, yet he never toured Australia as a player, had questionable ties to the Nazis and was troubled throughout his life by mental health issues, probably ignited by a less than ideal domestic setting.
Introducing Guest Ian Wilton
00:01:13
Speaker
My guest today is Ian Wilton, who has enjoyed a varied professional career in fields of politics, statistics and sport, including 6 years as the MCC's Head of Communications at Lords. He is now in the process of making a career change, after completing some professional exams to become an independent financial advisor, based in the Essex Suffolk area, where he now lives with his family.
Ian Wilton's Upcoming Cricket Book
00:01:40
Speaker
More than 20 years after his biography of C.B. Fry was first published, Ian is now hoping to write, much later than planned, a second cricket book, this one focusing on the first cricket world cup back in 1975. Ian's early research and interviews are going well, but if any of the 1975's competitors are listening, he says that he'd absolutely love to hear from you. Perhaps you can write to me and I'll pass your email on.
00:02:10
Speaker
I'm thrilled to welcome Ian to the podcast to discuss the life and cricket career of CB Fry. Hello Ian. Hi Tom, how are you? Very well thank you and thank you for taking the time to do this.
How Did C.B. Fry's Era Shape His Talents?
00:02:24
Speaker
It's often been suggested that a cricketer like CB Fry, indeed a polymath like CB Fry, couldn't exist today. Was Fry completely of his time?
00:02:37
Speaker
Yes, I think he was. I think if you just look at maybe the two sports for which he's most famous, cricket and football, you know, there was the period where people could play both. So cricket in England would be played April or May through to September. You'd have the football season maybe starting in September going through to April or May. So it was possible for you to do cricket in the summer and football in the winter.
00:03:02
Speaker
I just don't think you can do that anymore. The football season as we know has just expanded and expanded and expanded. The cricket calendar also is just becoming ever more crowded off for longer as well and so I don't think you could do those two sports at CB level now in the way that you could have done in his time or into the inter-war period. I just don't think that's possible anymore.
00:03:25
Speaker
What about, and I'm going to quote Neville Cardes, if we're thinking about C.B.
C.B. Fry: The Amateur Connoisseur
00:03:31
Speaker
with all of his talents, I'm going to quote Neville Cardes, and I got this quote from your book, Ian, so forgive me for stealing it, but he wrote, he belonged to an age not obsessed with specialism. He was one of the last of the English tradition of the amateur, the connoisseur, and in the most delightful sense of the word, the dilettante.
00:03:55
Speaker
Do you think that's the perfect summation for CB? I think in most respects, I think it is. I think the one sort of question mark I would pose to that is, CB is an amateur. Yes, he was. And he absolutely sort of had to play as an amateur, given amongst other things, his sort of social status. You know, you should go to Repton to be educated, then go on to Oxford University. You sort of have to play as an amateur. You have to be a gentleman rather than a player, if you see what I mean.
00:04:26
Speaker
But C.B. wasn't a pure amateur, he just had the sense of the background, not least educationally, but he didn't really, for a long time, have money. So for him, he had to do this sort of awkward crossover between being an amateur and in a sense being a professional. There's the phrase chameter, which is the hybrid of two. And it wasn't unique in this respect. You have a number of examples of people who were supposedly amateurs but seemed to land quite sort
00:04:55
Speaker
cushy jobs as a club secretary or assistant secretary, for example, or they happen to get a bit of a non-job with one of the financial supporters of one of the English counties.
Fry's Professional and Amateur Blending
00:05:05
Speaker
See if I didn't do that, but he did do a lot of things that meant that he was actually earning money from sports in a way that was sort of frowned upon for someone of his background. So, you know, he did a lot of journalism in particular, average, he was extremely good. And he was the subject of a lot of advertising as well. I think a lot of people
00:05:25
Speaker
in the English Cricut associate, Dennis Compton is the first person to sort of go down that route. There's the famous Dennis Compton grill cream boy advert. I think if you go back further in the past, I think there was a Coleman's mustard advert that featured WG Grace, but the person who really went down that route pretty aggressively was CB Fry. I think through a natural necessity rather than anything else.
00:05:50
Speaker
You can be paid to play cricket, but he managed to make an earning living from it by writing on it and being subject to the advertising for a whole variety of products. What literature already existed on CB Fry when you began researching your book?
Literature on C.B. Fry
00:06:10
Speaker
I think there were two main things that were directly helpful. There was a biography of it by a man called B. Wallace Myers that came out in 1912, when CB was 40. So that was helpful. And then there'd been a biography, a longer biography, often published, I think, in the 1980s by a writer called Kly Bellis. And again, that was helpful. And in terms of the sort of context, seeing the man in the round,
00:06:34
Speaker
It was also remarkably helpful that a man called Ronald Morris had written a book about Mrs Frye, C.B. Frye's wife. And Ronald Morris had been a boy at the Mercury Naval Training College that C.B. Frye and his wife ran. And he wrote a very certainly honest book about his experience of Mercury and that had led him to
00:06:57
Speaker
look into the background or the scandalous background of C.P. Fry's wife who was a key figure in the running of the mercury for many decades.
00:07:06
Speaker
CB Fry's highly entertaining autobiography, Life Worth Living from 1939 was hugely influential in shaping our impression of him as an overachieving Renaissance man, but as your book showed on more than one occasion, Fry would embellish his achievements.
Reality vs. Embellishment in Fry's Autobiography
00:07:26
Speaker
How frustrating was this as a biographer and why do you think he did this?
00:07:33
Speaker
I think you're absolutely right. It is sort of hugely frustrating when he's got all these remarkable achievements to his name. Absolutely no embellishment was required. I mean, he did play football for England on a couple of occasions. He did appear in an FA Cup final. So those are his sort of footballing credentials, really clear and strong for everyone to see. As an athlete, he excelled at Oxford and he equalled the world long jump record. So again, he's got his
00:08:00
Speaker
remarkable athletic achievements to his to his name. And as a cricketer, I mean, his record is phenomenal. I've just been rereading the book in preparation for this this discussion today. And I've forgotten what an extraordinary cricketer he was and the sheer weight of runs that he scored, the number of records that he that he broke, and it was phenomenal records. So yes, he had absolutely no need to embellish things, but he did.
00:08:26
Speaker
And I think that is probably the result of when Life Worth Living was written. It was written in the late 1930s. And by that stage, obviously, C.B.'s sporting success years were well behind him. His career had pretty much ended just before the First World War that he then came back and did pay a bit after the First World War had ended. But yeah, by the time that the books come out in the late 1930s,
00:08:53
Speaker
20 years plus, maybe more than that, that his sporting glory days were in the past. So I think maybe because some of the things that he'd done in the interwar period haven't gone well, like his attempts to become an MP, they've been unsuccessful, because also he'd been absolutely limelight, which he enjoyed through a period of fairly serious mental illness. I think he wanted to, with his autobiography, sort of come back with a bit of a bang.
00:09:22
Speaker
And so, yes, I think that's why he did add some sort of bells and whistles to his sporting achievements, which you really didn't need to do. So I think that's, you know, it's one of the frustrations you have, I think, when you get close to your subject that he did these things which he didn't need to do. So that does take some of the gloss off him, in a sense. But on the other hand, you have to say that life worth living for all its factual inequities is a beautifully, beautifully written book. And so many people have praised it as something that gives a great insight to the
00:09:52
Speaker
the Golden Age of Cricket and some of the characters who played within it, but also to his life more broadly. So yes, it's flaws. Yes, it's got these exaggerations that I wish he hadn't put in, but it is still a fabulous, fabulous read.
Fry's Formative Years
00:10:16
Speaker
Ian, let's return to the very beginning. Charles Burgess Fry was born in Croydon on the 25th of April 1872. What can you tell us about his early education and later higher education at Oxford and how it shaped the man he was to become? Yeah, as you rightly say, he's born in Croydon in Surrey, it's basically on the verge of London.
00:10:42
Speaker
And there is now what we call in England, a blue plaque outside his house, the place where he was born to sort of signify his birthplace. In some ways, it's probably not the most appropriate place for the plaque. I can see why it was put up there. But there isn't really a deep connection between Stevie Fry and Croydon. It didn't have a big, big influence on him. The family's roots were very much in Sussex. And a lot of his formative experiences as a boy were actually in Kent. But then I think
00:11:10
Speaker
where CB Fry starts to emerge as CB Fry, in a sense, is when he goes off to a public school at Repton in Derbyshire. And that's when his talent first really becomes very obvious, especially on the sporting scene. And then from Repton, it's a fairly sort of logical path up to Oxford University, where he becomes, you know, the absolute, if you like, golden boy of his generation. So there are lots of other subsequently very, very successful people who went to his college, Wharton College at Oxford.
00:11:40
Speaker
but C.B. Fry was the absolute star. So in his time there, it becomes known as Fry College rather than Wharton College. He's known as King Charles, which I suppose is quite appropriate given they've got the coronation of King Charles coming up very soon. So he's known as all kinds of these names. There's Fry's College, there's King Charles, he's known as Almighty at one point. I mean, he was this extraordinarily successful, glamorous figure at Elloxford University.
00:12:08
Speaker
and that's when he first comes to national consciousness.
Fry's Sports Achievements
00:12:13
Speaker
He was a prodigious talent in numerous sports, as you've just mentioned, apart from cricket, namely football, rugby and athletics. How should we remember his contributions to these other sports today? I think he was an extraordinary cricketer clearly, and he was also a very good footballer and a very fine athlete. I think when you look back on his
00:12:38
Speaker
footballing career and back on his athletics career you think wow you know some of his achievements are pretty remarkable but maybe one of the frustrations is they could have been just even more remarkable than they were so yes he gets two England football caps ten years apart and does get through to the FA Cup final it is just a shame that he ended up on the losing side there after a replay because you know there's a bit of a difference between being an FA Cup finalist and being an FA Cup medal winner. Likewise with
00:13:06
Speaker
athletics, I mean, it's an extraordinary achievement to equal the world long jump record when you're a student at university. But again, you think it's just a slight change that you didn't actually get the record outright. And I think probably given the kind of character that he was, maybe a particular regret of mine looking back on his career, is that in addition to the
00:13:27
Speaker
football achievements that he had, in addition to the remarkable cricketing achievements that he had. He didn't do the one thing that would have been, I think, the stardust on top of his sporting career, which was to go to the Olympic Games and be successful there. So, yeah, certainly if you look at his figures, his statistics, he could have really done extremely well in the 1896 Olympic Games, the first games of the modern era. He could have absolutely won gold medals there.
00:13:57
Speaker
probably could have done so in 1900 as well. But certainly he said that he never knew that the 1896 Olympics were taking place. So an explanation didn't go there. And I've looked into that and we won't ever know whether he did know about them or didn't know about them. I think he probably didn't. They were organized in a slightly shambolic way. But yeah, our remark would have been had he gone to Athens and had he got gold medals to go top of all the other sporting activates that he got over the years.
Chelsea Football Club and C.B. Fry
00:14:28
Speaker
And to pick up on something you told me the other day, Ian, and I think this came about in some of your subsequent research, is he had a hand in, a small hand in the founding of Chelsea Football Club, is that correct? Yes, he was. I've not actually looked into it, but I did, after the book came out, I came across a fairly fleeting reference to the fact that he'd been a patron of Chelsea, I think, when probably the money was being put together to get Chelsea up and running.
00:14:57
Speaker
but his main connections were with you know some of the amateur clubs like Corinthians and then with Southampton and fairly briefly with Portsmouth. But yeah he got his first England cap when he was at Oxford, he got his second England cap when he was playing at Southampton and you know I think when you look at the records, look at the reports of the time, there's a fair degree of agreement I think on what kind of football that he was. I think he was good, he was far from you know faultless, he did make a
00:15:28
Speaker
lot of mistakes quite consistently. But a lot of the articles say, well, you know, one thing he did have is he changed his sprinter. He absolutely had the pace to get back. And so if he made one mistake, he'd get back and tackle a man who got past him in the first instance. So he was, I think, like I said earlier, he was probably a good or very good footballer, whereas in contrast, he was an absolutely brilliant player.
00:15:49
Speaker
Now, he was one of a handful of English amateurs of that era, the so-called Golden Age, who never actually toured Australia as a cricketer. Why was this in CB Fry's case?
Fry's Financial Constraints and Cricket Tours
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, I think, you know, he had the same sense of face, the same problems as a lot of other England amateurs did in that, you know, if you were going to tour, you had some of your expenses met, but
00:16:16
Speaker
But that was it. There was no sort of money to cover the loss of income that we'd experienced. First of all, of course, on the boat out, there was a long journey there, a long journey back. And then tours in those days were, by today's standards, pretty long ones. So he'd been away from England for pretty much half a year. And so that would have deprived him of the ability to earn the income that he was getting from his journalistic career. And as time went on, he had responsibilities to this mercury
00:16:44
Speaker
Naval Training College that I mentioned, and particularly I think we had the last opportunity to tour Australia. He was very conscious of being away for such a long period of time, and the school would have been sort of struggling without him. So I think it was a massive shame that he never toured Australia as a player. He obviously went there later, 36, 37, as a journalist. But yeah, he wasn't the only amateur amateur to miss out on touring Australia for principally financial reasons, but
00:17:12
Speaker
It was a shame that lots of people said the way he batted, they thought actually they're done incredibly well on Australian rickets as if he hadn't done well enough on English ones. So yeah, it's a big shame that we will never know how practice you've done in Australia. And again, one of the, again, sort of frustrations you experienced as someone writing about CB Fry is that he had these remarkable achievements, but one thing he never quite did was to get 100 first-class hundreds. And I'm sure if he'd done one or two tours of Australia and he'd played more in a whole number of English seasons.
00:17:42
Speaker
absolutely got that landmark and gone way, way beyond to be paid more.
00:17:47
Speaker
It's interesting you make the point that many critics mentioned both at the time and historians subsequently that had he gone to Australia, he probably would have met with a great deal of success because it would have worked in his favor because of the style of batsman he was.
Fry's Advice on Australian Cricket
00:18:06
Speaker
But despite him never going to Australia, and this is I think in keeping with his personality, he wasn't afraid to offer advice.
00:18:16
Speaker
to other cricketers on how to play cricket in Australia, most famously as you portrayed in your book in a series of articles, which was I think during the MCC tour of 1903-04, which of course the captain of the team at the time, Plum Warner,
00:18:37
Speaker
did not take kindly to probably knowing that Frye had never been in Australia and Warner hit back with his own series of articles repudiating what Frye had said. What does this tell us about Frye, the person? I think it does display that at that period he did have supreme self-confidence. I think in his understanding of cricket, his understanding of batsmanship,
00:19:07
Speaker
and also in his ability to write authoritatively and convincingly from thousands and thousands of miles away. So, yeah, I think it was immodest. In some ways it was possibly ridiculous to comment it in that kind of detail to make recommendations where you never set foot in the country at all. And as you say, I obviously found that deeply irritating at one point, I didn't really attempt to mask that. But yeah, I think it was just the confidence from CB Fry
00:19:36
Speaker
And I think the fact that he had thought a lot about batsmanship and, you know, he wrote the books on great batsmen, great bowlers that have gone batsmanship. So all of which were, you know, very, very widely praised or largely praised at the time and have been hugely praised in the intervening periods. I think he absolutely didn't know a huge amount about what he was talking about. But yes, I think he did sort of take things a bit far by pontificating on pictures and
00:20:05
Speaker
Things like that, but he had no first hand experience at all.
Batting Revolution with Ranji
00:20:10
Speaker
What sort of batsman was Fry? As an amateur or a shamacher, whatever word we want to use, I assume he belonged to the school that believed it was how you scored your runs and not how many? I think that's, yeah, that's largely true. I think one of the remarkable things about him and also his partnership with Rancho Sinji,
00:20:34
Speaker
was the way in which they changed perceptions of batting and, in a sense, what was the gun thing if you were an amateur gentleman. And certainly when you read about how the game was perceived in the very early years of Fry's career, it was, you know, you, if the ball was on off stump or outside off stump, you know, you, as a gentleman, you'd bear sort of a cavalier attacking shot at it. And if it was down the lakeside or on a lake stump, you would probably largely ignore it.
00:21:04
Speaker
And the remarkable thing about sort of Fran Ranges, they sort of regarded that as a nonsense. And so they started playing on the leg side in a way which was quite revolutionary really for the time. And again, I think one of the other conventions was that you did the sort of gorgeous, flowing front foot offside drives. That would be the sort of shot expected of the gentleman amateur. But Fran in particular was also just keen to exploit back foot play as well.
00:21:33
Speaker
So I think he did, with Ranji, he did change the way that batting was done, the way that batting was perceived. So that, you know, over time, even gentlemen playing on the leg side, gentlemen playing off the back foot was accepted. And, you know, CB proved that that was a sensible tactic just through the sheer weight of runs that he scored in that way. So I think cricket became a much more round the wicket, if you like, game, as a result of the way that CB Fry played it.
00:22:01
Speaker
Ranji played it with lit glances and so on. So I think that's one of his claims to phone. He did contribute to revolutionization of the batting. In terms of the point about, again, how gentlemen were expected to play, I think CB Fry wanted to be seen as someone who played the game sort of naturally and instinctively and so on. But it's very clear that he did
00:22:28
Speaker
think about the game a huge amount. You didn't practice the game a huge amount. It wasn't always very keen to be seen to be practicing. You know, it was the thing, as a gentleman, was to be seen to play the game in quite an effortless way. And sometimes he would, when he was out in the middle, he would bat in the rhythm of effortless, but a huge amount of thought had gone into the way that he would play. And a huge amount of practice generally behind the scenes of practice
00:22:53
Speaker
And those thoughts on cricket resulted in a lot of very entertaining cricket writing, as we've already mentioned.
Fry's Cricket Writings: Historical Insights
00:23:02
Speaker
He wrote on the art of cricket, his 1912 book cricket, also known as batsmanship. And he wrote the accompanying text to George Belden's iconic photographic series of great batsmen, bowlers and fielders, as you mentioned earlier, which were published in the first decade of the 20th century.
00:23:21
Speaker
Are his cricket writings now purely historical or can they still be useful today? I think the books are still useful and not least the books that you've just mentioned which give us this phenomenal record both written and photographic of the key characters from the golden age of cricket. So I think he's helped give us a really definitive record of the the cricketers of that time. I think the game is the better for it.
00:23:50
Speaker
But one of the things I tried to do in the book was to, yes, give C.B. Fry credit for his cricketing achievements, but also for cricket, I think, for his achievements as a writer, because I think he'd been regarded as quite a good writer. And that was something mentioned in previous articles and books about it. But I think he deserved a lot more credit than he'd previously received. So I think he'd mentioned already a whole load of the books that he was involved in.
00:24:18
Speaker
He also edited his own magazine, CB Fry's magazine, which went on for years and years and years, and he was obviously often producing that at the same time as playing for Sussex in particular. So that was a big, big commitment. Then we've mentioned a really life worth living that came out in the 1930s. I think one of the most truly remarkable things that he wrote was this column CB Fry says, The London Evening Standard in the 1930s. And I've read a few things about it, and people have written about it.
00:24:46
Speaker
revolutionary column it was and, you know, the Evening Standard literally used to clear the front page for it. And I thought that can't be true. It can't have a cricket column and I'd read extracts from it. You can't have a cricket column that would be on the front page or on the back page of the London Evening Standard, particularly in the 1930s with all the drama that was going on in the world at that time. But I went to the British newspaper library at Collindale, as it was in those days. And I think that was on Minecraft in those days that I was looking at the Evening Standard.
00:25:17
Speaker
And there is, yeah, one extraordinary front page that sort of summarizes it all. So you've got the front page split in half, left-hand column is whatever was going on, Munich crisis or whatever at the time, right-hand column, CB crisis, it is there on the front page. The standard attached such importance to it, but that's the opponents that it was given. And, you know, there are a number of records from people at a time saying that this is one very few things in the standards history of people shooting at the
00:25:45
Speaker
use vendors so they could get their copy above the standard as early as possible and read not anything else but read to before I say this from the words we'll be able to go wherever it might appear.
00:25:54
Speaker
So yeah, I didn't believe it until I actually sort of copied the standard properties itself. Extraordinary. Ian, I mentioned in my introduction to this podcast that you're currently researching a new book about the first World Cup in 1975.
1912 Triangular Series: A Precursor to the World Cup
00:26:10
Speaker
And I'm sure many listeners are thrilled to hear that. There was a similar, albeit much smaller format undertaken in 1912.
00:26:21
Speaker
known as the triangular series involving Australia, England and South Africa in England. What can you tell us about that and Fry's involvement in that series? Yeah, CB Fry was one of the sort of prime movers in making sure that the competition would take place at the time. There were big gaps between other countries, other test plane countries coming to England. The only other test plane countries at the time were Australia and South Africa.
00:26:49
Speaker
And so to sort of fill in some of the gaps between Australia Visiting and South Africa Visiting, C.B. Fry and some others thought, well, okay, let's have a competition that brings all three nations together. And so that happened for the first time, as you say, in 1912, the triumph of the tournament. And C.B. Fry not only had been a prime mover in organizing it, he was the only captain for that series. But it was a rather ill-fated tournament.
00:27:15
Speaker
So it was sort of the World Cup of its time through the three test play nations of that period. But yeah, there was no World Cup again until 1975, partly because the one in the competition in 1912 was pretty disastrous. The South Africans proved to be a lot weaker than everyone expected. There had been some behind-the-scenes disputes amongst the Australian players. They didn't like the way the tour was going to be managed or some of the funding arrangements. So a pretty weak Australian team came to think of all that.
00:27:44
Speaker
And the weather was just diabolical throughout the entire summit, really. So I think there's a phrase, I think it might have been in the Wallace Myers book, saying CB Fry was the captain who had the wettest summer since Noah. And it was that bad. Every night he sort of seriously, seriously rain affected. But eventually, England emerged triumphant from it. CB had struggled badly during the competition for runs, but finally delivered the goods and proved to be the deciding match. So his England
00:28:15
Speaker
career and then many captains he did end up on high with the tournament, the sort of first work. On the domestic front, Fry married a domineering woman called Beatrice Sumner in 1898, despite she being 10 years his senior.
The Complexity of Fry's Marriage to Beatrice
00:28:33
Speaker
How do you explain his marriage to Beatrice and what did he gain from marrying her? My goodness, that's a really big big question.
00:28:44
Speaker
she had I think you know I probably can't summarize it really I think you have to read either the book I wrote or the book by Ronald Morris about her to realize the sort of very scandalous background that she had she'd been pursued from a very young age by a married very wealthy banker Charles Hall of the Hall banking family and that was a relationship that well it was the love of he was the love of her life and vice versa it was a relationship that
00:29:14
Speaker
Hall was told to discontinue at various stages, but he never did. And ultimately, C.B. Frye was, well, some people say that he was sort of persuaded to marry her, to give her some respectability, to take her off Charles Hall's hands. And the theory goes that in return for this, Frye was given money by Charles Hall.
00:29:40
Speaker
That basically cleared the debts that caused him serious problems when he was at Oxford. And money would also enable him to give up his career. He didn't particularly relish as a school teacher and enabled him to concentrate on crickets and exploiting his cricketing potential to the full. So that I think is the way that it's often been seen. Fortunately, with the help I had from the Fry family when researching the book, I came across letters between CB and Beatrice.
00:30:08
Speaker
which made me think that actually there was a lot of affection between them, and it was a sort of genuine marriage rather than a marriage of convenience. But yeah, it was a marriage that may have worked for a while, but I think it went quite seriously, quite seriously wrong. And she was, she became an extremely difficult woman to be married to, I think, and was an extremely
00:30:36
Speaker
Well, Stern doesn't even do justice to it. Stern managed arrest, if you like, of Mercury Naval Training College. So I think it was a very, very difficult marriage, and I think it, over time, contributed to the mental illness that C.B. experienced quite acutely in the late 1920s. You know, I think there are a number of factors at play there. Had a breakdown his last year at Oxford.
00:31:03
Speaker
There were some signs during the various stages of his cricket career that he'd struggled with nerves, several references to being quite highly strong. But I think what contributed to his mental illness in the late 20s and early 30s was to a considerable degree that sort of won his wife the cup. That certainly was the information I had from CB Fry's or CBM Beatty's daughter-in-law who took the view that
00:31:31
Speaker
Beatrice over time rather ruined C.B. Fry's life and exacerbated the mental health problems that he'd long had. So it's a pretty sad story, unfortunately. But yeah, it's I think an extraordinary read. If you people would like to read the Ronald Morris book, I think that really does give a very, very good insight into Beatrice and her character. And then sort of my book has a sort of rather inevitably sort of edited version of that, because of that C.B. Fry rather than purely about Beatrice.
00:31:59
Speaker
But I think it was a painful marriage and I think it resulted in a lot of pain for the boys who trained at the North Group.
00:32:20
Speaker
In part two, Ian discusses Fry's cricket legacy, his remarkable statistics, and his infamous meeting with Hitler in the 1930s. Thanks for listening. My name is Tom Ford. Bye for now.