C. B. Fry
By. NEVILLE CARDUS
CB. FRY will be eighty on April 25th, according to Wisden, a witness to which he will pay a certain • respect. But he is not likelier to count eighty years in a man's life as of higher numerical importance than he counted, in his prime, eighty runs made on the cricket-field. He was usually sustaining a batting average of round about three-score-and- ten while taking in his stride achievements in other fields and spheres—first-class honours in Classical Moderations at Wadham, association football in the Oxford University and the England XIs, journalism, the captaincy of the England cricket team, acting as a substitute-delegate on the Indian representa- tion at the first, third and fourth assemblies of the League of Nations. Nobody will share his diverse distinctions, a century in a Test match and an offer of the Kingdom of Albania. Bradman has equalled Fry's performance which in 1901 seemed to verge on the marvellous : six centuries in six consecutive innings. But Bradman has never sent translations to The Times of the English Hymnal and written a speech which turned Mussolini out of Corfu. In hif stride Fry did these things.
We should just the same be writing something today in celebration of Fry's eightieth year if he had never handled a cricket-bat in his life. He himself thinks he might be remem- bered for his work as a moulder of character and educator of youth on the training-ship ' Mercury.' For a while Fry held the world's record long-jump. In these days athletes are schooled from cradle to beat records; the preparation is hieratical. Fry jumped by nature or, let us say, by grace. From zest of living he excelled in many and different callings, mastered by other people mostly by severe application or professional labour. Fry was one of the last of an English tradition or breed, an amateur in the things of mind and of the body, not bound or subject to skill but sometimes free of it because it has come, in part at least, by a sort of inspired dilettantism. But here is the para- dox; when Fry gave himself to batsmanship, Apollo turned fasting friar.
The comprehensive skill which won him lasting fame in two hemispheres was the consequence of hard study and practice. Not by grace but by reasoning and self-discipline did he in his career amass 30,000 runs, averaging 50 over his many summers. It was, in fact, as a fast bowler that nature first stirred the cricketer in him, until Jim Phillips, the umpire, no- balled him for throwing: His coaches in the school-nets said he would never make a batsman. When Fry was seen in his heyday at one end of the wicket and Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji at the other, on a June day at Brighton long long ago, imagina- tion beheld visions of oriental conjurations in contrast to a Spartan austerity of exercise. Fry batted by the book of arith- metic, and, while " Ranji " seemed to toss runs over the field like largesse in silk purses, Fry acquired them—no, not as a miser his hoard but as,the connoisseur his collection.
Fry was so much the student of batsmanship that often he appeared less interested in. the runs he was making than in the bowling as it presented itself to his intellect almost in the abstract. Only by staying a long time at the crease could he arrive at the detachment necessary for scrutiny as objective as this; his centuries accrued as a by-product. I am Certain that in his years of supremacy as a batsman no thought of personal records or aggrandisement occurred to him. He was absorbed in the problerps of technique; he was interested in the rationale of strokes, wining the answer to the great trick of S. F. Barnes. the ball which ran away " very late. (Yet Fry considers Barnes was not a more dangerous bowler than George Lohmann.) So lost was Fry to the common and external furniture and accountancy of cricket, so deeply did he thrust his mind into the heart and centre of it, that once I saw him, after he had been struck on the hand by a last ball while batting, walk beyond the square-leg umpire, shaking the bruised fingers, then looking closely at them, as though contemplating pain not as a personal experience or sensation, but as a metaphysical phenomenon.
At Harrogate, in 1930, &adman scored a triple century on one and the same day against England. I was sitting with Fry in the lounge of a Harrogate hotel, over the week-end, and he was recalling a season of the ,1900s and a match between Middlesex and Sussex at Lord's. I want the reader to try to imagine the scene : Fry stretched in an easy chair, playing with his monocle, myself and a friend fascinated by his talk, Bradman forgotten. " At close of play on the second day," he said, " I was not out 80 or so, and next morning it was our policy to get runs quickly as some rain had fallen in the night. I reached my century and then—and then . . . Albert Trott clean bowled me, yes, clean bowled me with an off-break." Here Fry rose from his chair, and his eyes were looking across the distance of thirty years. He walked up and down the lounge, and went through the motions of a batsman playing an off-break. " I can't think what I was doing," he said; I simply can't." Thirty years after the event he was still seeing Trott's off-break qua problem to be solved.
By concentration he conquered most bowlers. Against York- shire, with Hirst, Rhodes, Haigh, Wainwright and sometimes F. S. Jackson an attack superlative, Fry scored nearly 2,500 runs in all, average 70. In 1903 he made 234 against Yorkshire at Bradford; next summer against Yorkshire he made 177 at Sheffield and 229 at Brighton in successive innings. It isn't possible to convey the amazement felt by followers of cricket in the 1900s as Fry went his processional course. None but players truly great could get anywhere near a score of 200 in a period which saw bowling at its best. The game was still unstaled; the soil had not been entirely turned and morning was in the air, with much to be done that had not been done before. Batsmanship was on the gold standard; the currency hadn't been debased. When Fry scored six hundreds in six consecutive innings in little beyond a fortnight, two on bowlers' wickets, he caused not " a sensation " but wonder and nothing less.
Equally impressive was a failure by Fry to score. There was that staggering afternoon in 1902 when news came from Lord's that England, against Australia, had lost two wickets for no runs; and in the newspapers we saw in black staring print " C. B. Fry c. Hill b. Hopkins* 0 K. S. Ranjitsinhji b. Hopkins 0 " This same season Fry and " Ranji " were both dropped, in their pomp, from the England XI, for they had momentarily disclosed a mortal fallibility. It all seems legend now; great figures in the sun, sure of themselves. They remained at a distance from us; there was no means of rendering them familiar to us off the field, or ubiquitous.
I don't fancy schoolboys of the 1900s thought of Fry at all as an ordinary man who wore ordinary clothes, a stiff collar and the rest. On the field he was a sight for Phidias, the living sculpture of upright masculine grace and handsomeness, with just a hint of a Sir Willoughby Patterne hauteur. As he stood at third-man, on the boundary, waiting for the bowler to get to work, he would make movements on his toes suggesting a waltz. When he chased a ball, his long effortless strides kept thb indignity of hurry at bay; and his aquiline tawny face flushed in the sun and air. He was past sixty when he went to Australia to write comments on the Test matches there. I saw him one evening stripped and about to dive into the swimming-pool on the liner ' Orion.' The balance of him, the upraised arms and the suggestions expressed by nerve, sinew and limb of un- staled satisfaction in living, the rays of the setting sun on him and the deepening blue of the Pacific sky abova—somehow I think of him today as I saw him then, even before I think of him as I saw him in his prime, batting with " Ranji," while the bowlers toiled and sweated and wondered which end of the wicket was the one really to avoid.
" Play back or drive." " Watch the ball and deliver the stroke at the ball itself and not at a point in space where you hope the ball will presently be." This was the Fry-Ranjitsinhji doctrine that brought revolution to the game. The " classic " lunge forward, which extended the batsman to a point where stretching allowed little freedom of action, and where the ball could only be guessed at to inches, fell into obsolescence amongst the great players. " Play back or drive "—and no cricketer has driven a ball with more than Fry's easy power and imperious- ness of swing. " The only way of getting on top of Barnes," C. B. Fry has written, " and it was not often done, was to drive him over his head." Think of it !—advice to batsmen : drive S. F. Barnes for purposes of defence. It all sounds strange language in 1952, and indeed to read of Fry's prowess at cricket, and of the luxuriance of it all, impels us to imagine that the game once on a time was part of a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment; it certainly reads that way in Wisden now.
Every lover of the game; as he sends to C. B. Fry congratu- lations on April 25th, will fervently wish, a private indulgence, that he could just for an hour look again at Fry and Ranjitsinhji in conjunction : flicks and magical passes at one end of the wicket, while at the other Fry moves calmly towards close of play, the scholar athlete in excelsis.
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