ROGER FRY: A Biography. Virginia Woolf

his cousin R.M. Fry writes, “would you like a specimen of the Oxalis corniculata?” And the boy of nine was always careful to use the proper scientific names in reply. His elder brother Portsmouth, already at school at Clifton, instructed him in other matters. “On the envelope is a picture of the hawkheaded God, I forget his name, and in his left hand he has the ‘crux ansana’ or symbol of generation, that is of life. He isn’t exactly what you might call a handsome God but perhaps he was very powerful and that is much more glorious. … I enclose another skeleton of a speech against the notion that the Greeks did the world more good than the Romans…. Grandpapa … again remarked on the thickness of my hand and said it was a good hand for work; his are so thin and shrivelled.”[◉2]

      Nor did his father when he was on Circuit forget to write to him. It is true that he moralised: “I am glad to hear that you are good. You feel happy when you are good and unhappy when you are naughty”, but that did not prevent him from sending Roger the picture of a lion; and he picked a gentian and sent it him, and wished when he saw a squirrel in the Welsh woods that Roger at Highgate could have been with him and could have seen it too.

      Roger Fry about 1872

      Roger Fry about 1889

II

      But a change in the garden at Highgate was at hand, and it was connected, as it happened, with a great family occasion—his father’s appointment to the Bench. Roger Fry has described it himself:

      I must have been between 10 and 11 years old when our schoolroom lessons were suddenly interrupted by a message from my mother that we were all to go downstairs to her. We ran down to the dining room filled with rather apprehensive curiosity. For lessons to be interrupted it must be grave, it might—it probably would be, a criminal case—so peculiar were the intricacies of the moral code—one might quite well have committed an act of whose enormity one was still unconscious. My mother was seated gravely with an inscrutable air—no it was not criminal—it was solemn but we were not in disgrace—how quickly and surely we had learned to read the hieroglyphics on a face on which so much depended! Solemn it was but not evidently altogether unpleasing. Then we were told that our father had been made a Judge. It was a great honour, we must feel proud of him—but he would not be so well off as he had been—we must be prepared to sacrifice many comforts and luxuries that we had hitherto enjoyed willingly and gladly since the sacrifice would be due to his high station. Also he would be knighted—he would be Sir Edward Fry—that was a great honour but we must not be vain about it—though we gathered we might indulge some secret satisfaction in the far higher but more esoteric title of Mr Justice. We had nothing particularly to say to all this, but we knew how to murmur in a generally admiring and submissive way which was all that the occasion required. We went away encouraging one another to bear with Spartan fortitude those deprivations with which we were menaced. As my father must have been making something around £10,000 a year and as we lived in a smallish suburban house of I guess £50 a year rental—as moreover entertainment was confined to rare formal dinners each of which wiped out the hospitality scores of months and as my father had no vices and no expensive tastes I have no doubt that even the miserable salary of £5,000 a year to which he would be reduced more than covered our expenses—and thank goodness it did for I should scarcely be here if my father had not indulged in that grand Victorian vice of saving.

      However we never noticed any serious change in our way of life. The Sunday sirloin continued to appear; Sunday tea still had its tea cakes and really it would have been difficult to point to any luxuries that could be suppressed in our week day menus. However when the summer came we found something which we were called on to sacrifice. My father as junior member of the Bench had to be Vacation Judge. So our yearly visit to the seaside was impossible as he could not get to and fro every day or at least it was thought impossible. My parents rented a house near Leith Hill belonging to two old Miss Wedgwoods. From here my father could drive to Abinger Station and get to his Chambers in time for the day’s work, coming back in the late afternoon. The house was furnished with a good deal more taste than our own and I suppose in a dim as yet unconscious way I was sensitive to such things for the memory of it remains as a peculiarly happy interlude in my life. And besides that the garden was large and led directly into a wooded valley which belonged to the house and of which we had the free run. So that our sacrifice to our father’s honour cost us nothing and I believe we enjoyed those holidays much more than the usual holidays in some distressing seaside lodging house. My father had begun to be interested in me. I was old enough for him to talk to without too much condescension and we often went for long walks over Leith Hill and the neighbourhood. It was in 1877 and the Russo-Turkish War was in full blast, and I remember my father telling me that not only did he hope the Russians would win but he believed firmly that they would because God would not allow a Christian country to be defeated by a Mahommedan one. It was many years before the full enormity of such a statement from a man of my father’s wide knowledge of history and science dawned on me. At the time it appeared perfectly natural and made me an ardent Russophil without having the slightest knowledge of the rights and wrongs of the quarrel. A month or two later when I found myself at Sunninghill preparatory school this conviction, which I was always ready to defend with rapidly improvised arguments, earned me a good deal of unpopularity for, for some reason, all right-minded people were on the other side. I fancy that the real issue for all even for my father was between Dizzy and Gladstone.

      Fortunately during our delightful summer at Leith Hill I had no notion of the fate that was in store for me. So that when one day a clergyman Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley came to lunch I did not even wonder why this new acquaintance had turned up, although visitors were for the most part very scarce. After lunch he expressed a wish to see a particular view in the neighbourhood and I was told to show him the way. I suppose that he tried to draw me out during the walk, but I took very little notice of him or of anything he said believing in my incredible innocence of the world that he was just some stray acquaintance to whom my people wished to be polite. He left soon after and then I was called to a private interview with my parents and suddenly the bolt fell—would I like to go to a school with Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley? He was starting a new school at Ascot in a fine country house built by my uncle Alfred Waterhouse—this point was much dwelt upon as being likely to make me feel more at home than in a house built by an unrelated and unknown architect whereas I, who had so often staid at my uncle’s own country house, would be rejoiced to find the same sacred pitch pine boarding everywhere the same gothic windows with stained glass in the W.C. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was very fond of boys and there were no punishments. I had no desire whatever to go to school but I answered in the manner that was expected of me that it would be very nice to go to school with the strange clergyman.

      And so sure enough in September I went, armed with a silver watch which my father gave me, and a black leather bible which my mother gave me, with many solemn warnings against sin and the assurance that the Bible would always guide me through the difficulties of life.

      Now therefore Lady Fry began to receive the first of many schoolboy letters which she kept neatly tied up in little bundles. Many of them are stained with the juice of wild flowers, and still contain withered buds that Roger picked on his walks and sent home to his botanical parents. From the record of paper-chases and school concerts (at one Roger sang “The Tar’s Farewell”), of cricket and football matches, of sermons and visits from missionaries—“We are going to keep a nigger at Bishop Steer’s School. It will cost I believe £60 per ann…. He seems to be getting on well in most things but his character is only fair”—it would seem that he was tolerably happy at school, and was allowed not merely to have his own garden, but to keep pets—among them two active and adventurous snakes. As far as work went he was successful. He was almost at once at the top of the school. And yet there were certain sentences in the letters that might have made his parents uneasy. Bullying there was of course. A certain Harrison and a certain Ferguson “bully me as much as they can, sometimes by teasing, and sometimes by hitting me about … but their favourite dodge is to try and keep me under water and upset me when we bathe”. But