Edward Fry

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Sir Edward Fry (1827-1918), a judge on the British Court of Appeal (1883-1892) and also an arbitrator on the International Permanent Court of Arbitration. He was a Quaker, son of Joseph Fry (1795-1879) and Mary Ann Swaine.

He was called to the bar in 1854, took silk in 1869 and became a judge in Chancery in 1877 (the same year he was knighted). He was raised to the Court of Appeal in 1877 and retired in 1892. Retirement from the court did not mean retirement from legal work. In 1897 he accepted an offer to preside over the royal commission on the Irish Land Acts. He also acted as an arbitrator in the Grimsby fishery dispute (1901) and between the London and North Western Railway Company and its employees (1906, 1907).

He was also involved in international law. In 1902 he acted as an arbitrator at The Hague between the United States and Mexico in the pious funds of California dispute. In 1904 he was the British legal assessor on the commission to investigate the Dogger Bank incident where the Russian navy accidentally attacked a British herring fleet in the North Sea. He was involved in the second Hague Conference (1907). In 1908/1909 he was an arbitrator between France and Germany over a case where France had seized deserters (including some German citizens) from German diplomatic protection.

Besides law he was on the council of University College London and interested in Zoology (he was elected to the Royal Society in 1883).

He wrote two books on bryophytes, British Mosses (1892) and, with his daughter Agnes, The Liverworts: British and Foreign (1911).

Edward Fry married Mariabella Hodgkin, granddaughter of Luke Howard and sister of the historian, Thomas Hodgkin, and they were the parents of among others:

• Joan Mary Fry (1862-1955) Quaker social reformer
• Roger Fry (1866-1934) - Artist, member of the Bloomsbury Group
• Agnes Fry (1868-1957) - co-writer with her father on several scientific treatise and later wrote a biography of him
• (Sara) Margery Fry (1874-1958) - penal reformer, principal of Somerville College (?-1931), founder of the Howard League
• Anna Ruth Fry (1876-1962) - pacifist and Quaker activist

[edit] Sources

• Edward Fry - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• A Social and Biographical History of British and Irish Field-Bryologists by Mark Lawley, 2006. Contains information on Edward Fry's interest in Bryology.
• AIM25: Institute of Education: Fry, Isabel (1869-1958) - contains information on her siblings also