Fry , Isabel , 1869-1958 , educationist, social worker and reformer

Isabel Fry (1869-1958) was an educationist, social worker and reformer. She was born in March 1869 into the famous reforming Quaker family, as the daughter of Sir Edward Fry (1827-1918), jurist, and Mariabella Hodgkin. She was one of nine children. Her siblings included Joan Mary Fry (1862-1955), a leading Quaker; Agnes Fry (1868-1957), author; (Sara) Margery Fry (1874-1958), penal reformer and Principal of Somerville College, Oxford; Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934), artist and critic; and Anna Ruth Fry (1876-1962), pacifist and Quaker activist. In around 1885 Isabel attended school at Highfield and in 1891-1892 went to teach at Miss Lawrence's School in Brighton [later named Roedean] with Constance Crommelin [later Mrs John Masefield]. In around 1895 she moved to London with Constance and coached small groups of children in their own homes, including at Harley Street, and also at private schools in London, including at a school she founded in Marylebone Road. In 1908 Isabel Fry met the Turkish educational and social reformer Halidé Edib and visited Turkey for the first time. In 1912 she began to take deprived children to her summer cottage at Great Hampden, for holidays and teaching. Between 1913 and 1915 she held classes in Gayton Road, Hampstead and at other schools in London, in 1914 she paid her second visit to Turkey and in 1916 she worked as a welfare supervisor in a factory in the Midlands. In 1917 she founded The Farmhouse School, Mayortorne Manor, Wendover, Buckinghamshire, an experimental school in which training in farm and household duties were emphasised. It was here that she made a close personal friend of Eugénie Dubois, who taught French at the Farmhouse School. In 1930 she left Mayortorne Manor and worked in settlements for unemployed miners in Wales and Durham with her sister Joan, and in the Caldicot community in Maidstone, Kent. In 1934 she opened a new experimental school for deprived children and refugees at Church Farm, Buckland near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Isabel Fry died in 1958. She published three books, Uninitiated (Osgood, Mcilvaine & Co, London, 1895), The Day of Small Things (Unicorn, London, 1901) and A Key to Language: A Method of Grammatical Analysis by Means of Graphic Symbols (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1925).