by Arunabha Sengupta
While at Repton, after attending a performance of Macbeth, he supposedly dreamt of three weird sisters hailing him as ‘captain of Varsity soccer’, ‘president of Varsity athletics’ and ‘captain of Varsity cricket’.
CB Fry was not beyond decorating stories with increasingly implausible flourishes. Down the years, he contented himself with varying accounts of his world record long jump leap at Oxford—stating variously that he had eaten a hearty lunch before the jump, and that he had placed a cigar carefully on the ground before the leap and the ash was still unbroken when he picked it up after the little bit of scripting the world record. The truth was he exercised rigid abstinence when faced with important sporting challenges.
Hence, we cannot be sure about whether he really had the dream. However, he did become a blue at football, cricket and athletics at Oxford. He ran 100m in 10.6 seconds, broke the British long jump record with a leap of 23 feet 5 inches, and a year later equalled the world long jump record of 23 feet 6 and 1⁄2 inches. In 1894 he led the University in football, cricket and athletics.
He became one of the leading batsmen of England and led the side to victory the experimental triangular Test tournament of 1912. And in 1901, he played as full back for England against Ireland. The alleged prophecies of the witches did come true.
Not only that, he excelled at rugby, angling, skating, sculling, diving and tennis. Physically he was a specimen plucked out of Ancient Greece.
Brilliance, mythology, and controversy went hand in hand through his life. It is said that in 1938, at the age of 65 he astonished a golfing professional at Southampton by outdriving him, having picked up a club for the first time. However, there are records of his being rather good at the game in 1893, and in 1903 he himself wrote to Plum Warner about his misadventures with a niblick.
His mastery of the art of batting was universally acknowledged, but his extraordinarily safety-first approach did earn him a fair number of detractors. And then there was his controversial action while bowling.
He was a brilliant scholar and thinker, and did write speeches for his dear friend Ranji during the dalliance with the League of Nations. However, the claim that it was his speech that drove Mussolini out of Corfu was more than mere exaggeration. So was the legend of his being asked to become the King of Albania.
His forays into politics were rather unsuccessful. So was his dream of becoming an actor, something he cherished even into his sixties.
However, a man of inexhaustible energy and uncountable facets, he tried other avenues. He dabbled in writing novels and poetry. He was quite distinguished as a journalist as well. During a rain washed Test match day in the 1920s, Robertson-Glasgow found him hard at work at Lord’s. “I ventured to ask him what attracted his pencil and he said, ‘my dear fellow, I am writing about what ought to be happening at all. In short, the perfect critic.’”
No wonder Neville Cardus was such an unabashed fan.
He remained sprightly and agile down the years but fell prey to serious mental illness in the late 1920s. After recovery Fry was invited into Nazi Germany to discuss youth issues. The meetings left him impressed, especially the pool of Aryan men and women and their sporting ability. Fry was convinced about the possibility of a blonde WG Grace. His well-crafted but rather glorifying autobiography was published in 1939, and it had bits about his admiration for Hitler which would surely have been edited out in latter days.
After the War, well into his seventies, Fry was able to jump across a long table, a skill he demonstrated even in the library of Lord’s. He was magnificent company as commentator and conversationalist as well. At the same time, he courted controversy by referring to Jesse Owens as the ‘American darkie athlete’ in a recorded broadcast about Physical Prowess to Eastern Service listeners.
At the age of 83 he sent a letter to the Evening Standard which read, “Next time I see females undressed in bikinis in P and Q block at Lord’s I will go there in pyjamas and parade in front of the Pavilion of which I am a part owner.” He later acknowledged that he was wrong in describing the garments as bikinis. ‘But there has been the regrettable sight of young ladies … sitting uncomfortably on the iron seats in bathing costumes. And remember, Lord’s is as much a private club as the Athenaeum.”
It is a trifle strange. Fry was not really the archetypal upper class elite indulging in cricket as an amateur diversion—the type prone to such exclusive mentality. He played as an amateur but often did have to struggle for his living, until his marriage to the much older Beatrice Sumner, and an arrangement with her former lover Charles Hoare, gave him some financial stability with his position Mercury naval training school at Ham. Perhaps the frustrations of marriage to an older woman found expression in an old man’s bitterness.
In late 1955, Fry was the subject of This Is Your Life. They brought in a number of great names, including Jack Hobbs, Sydney Barnes, Jack Hearne, Tiger Smith and Wilfred Rhodes. Fond reminiscing went on deep into the night. Fry mistook his Mercury pupil Reg Sinfield’s voice as that of Jack Hobbs. Otherwise he was brilliant through the programme.
Fry enjoyed a life worth living, but there were patches which were not so happy and memorable. Patches he snipped out of A Life Worth Living, his autobiography. However, he was indeed the most versatile personality in English cricket.
Charles Burgess Fry was born on April 25, 1872.
Illustration: Maha