REPTON CELEBRATES OUR SCHOOL'S GREATEST EVER ALL-ROUNDER, C B FRY
Today Repton Role Models celebrates our School's greatest ever all-rounder on what would have been his 150th birthday.
With the cricket season underway the name C.B.Fry is synonymous with a skill and passion for the game that remains legendary to this day, winning four cricket Blues at Oxford, playing for Surrey CCC and captaining England in six Test matches. He scored 94 first-class centuries, including an unprecedented six consecutive centuries in 1901. Yet Charles Burgess Fry (Cross, 1891) was so much more than a great cricketer.
He joined Repton in 1885 as a scholar with a flair for Classics, winning prizes for Latin verse, Greek verse and Latin prose, as well as for French and German. Whilst at Repton he captained the football team and played for the amateur London-based team, the Casuals where he found himself turning out for the FA Cup tie at just 16 years of age. He made his professional debut for Southampton FC in 1900 and was selected to play for England in 1901.
A brilliant track and field athlete, he equalled the world long jump record and at the world’s first international athletics event held at London’s White City stadium in 1894, he won both the long jump and 100 yards sprint. It was said at the time that he could have won a clutch of golds at the 1896 Olympics but chose instead to indulge his first passion in South Africa as a member of the England cricket team.
But Fry's talent went deeper than sport: he qualified as a teacher, joining Charterhouse and then The Training Ship Nautical School. In 1920 he became India's representative at the League of Nations, which took him into politics standing in three local elections. He wrote for several publications and had a number of books published.
Journalist, commentator and author John Arlott said of Fry: "He was probably the most variously gifted Englishman of any age." and he was dubbed 'King Charles' by Vanity Fair for his all-round prowess, which included a party trick of being able to leap from a stationary postion backwards onto a mantelpiece!
Today, C.B.Fry's legacy of all round excellence is celebrated in every Reptonian as we aim to develop a set of skills - rather than a single attribute - in every pupil from nursery through to sixth form.