Peter Love

OBITUARY

Eric Fry (1921–2007)

With the death of Eric Charles Fry on Wednesday 3 October 2007 the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH) lost one of its founders and most staunch supporters. Remembered by all who knew him as unfailingly courteous and encouraging, Eric played a major part in sustaining the Society's organisation since its foundation in 1961 from his base at the Australian National University (ANU). He had a significant influence on the early transformation of the Society's Bulletin into a serious scholarly journal. His PhD research at the ANU into the Australian urban wage-earning class in the 1880s provided inspirational foundations for many later studies. He supported a legion of students and colleagues in their work and applied his acute insights and gentle diplomacy to resolve many a spat between people who had lost sight of the larger issues. He was one of the ASSLH's foundation stones, and we were deeply moved by his slow, sad decline and death.

Eric Charles Fry (21.08.1921 - 03.10.2007)
Photo: Australian National University PhD Conferring Ceremony, 1956, ANUA 225 item 422.
Courtesy Australian National University Archives (Note: the first ANU PhDs were awarded in 1954 so Fry was 'one of the earliest' - only 6 awarded previously.)

Eric Fry was born in Broken Hill on 21 August 1921, the son of an engineer. Although his family endured some tough times, young Eric barely noticed, enjoying a country childhood that 'was straight out of the pages of Henry Lawson'. Their circumstances improved when his father found a job in Sydney, a city that Eric came to love and always thought of as his real 'home'. He attended state schools in the 1930s and as he grew through adolescence began to notice 'the contrasts of wealth and hardship'. He concluded his schooling at North Sydney Boys High where he was both a good scholar and very handy rugby player, going on to play for Gordon in his adult years. After leaving school he worked as a junior clerk in the Customs Service and, having won a free place scholarship to the Economics Faculty at Sydney University in 1938, attended evening classes. In December 1941 he joined the Australian Army Field Regiment and began his war as Gunner Fry. He transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force in March 1943 where, while flying almost 700 hours in Hudson bombers around northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, he rose to the rank of Pilot Officer. After demobilisation in January 1946, he returned to Customs and then to the Commonwealth Office of Education, which a year later awarded him an ex-service training scheme scholarship to study Arts at Sydney. By this stage his sharp sense of the inequality and injustice of the capitalist system impelled him to join the Communist Party. Disillusioned with Andersonian philosophy, he turned to the study of history, which grew from an interest into an avowed vocation. He graduated with a first-class degree in 1950, and married a soul-mate, Sheila Williams on 19 May that year. They moved to Melbourne where he worked for a short while as a Research Officer in the Department of Labour and National Service with another CPA comrade, Lloyd Edmonds. Eric and Sheila returned to Sydney where he completed a Diploma of Education at Sydney Teachers' College in 1951, and began serving his term of bonded employment with the NSW Education Department.

In 1952 Eric won a PhD scholarship to the newly established Australian National University. Inspired in part by Engels' writing on the English working-class and T.A. Coghlan's books on Australian conditions, he researched and wrote a thesis on 'The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in the 1880s'. During the early stages of his candidature there were some changes of supervisor and department but, with the arrival of Bob Gollan, he found a sympathetic supervisor and congenial comrade who helped him shape and sharpen the thesis. A pioneering work of meticulous scholarship, it was accepted for the PhD degree in 1956 and, although not published as a book, it became a foundational work for many subsequent researchers in the field. In exploring several dimensions of ordinary working lives, it was an Australian precursor of the shifting interest away from more formal institutional labour history towards social history 'from below'. Eric's thesis, and his later extensive bibliographical research alerted many younger scholars to the richness of official records and other archival sources for the social history of labour.

Eric's first academic job was a temporary lectureship at the University of Western Australia during 1956. He took up a post at the University of New England in 1957 and in 1959 was appointed a Senior Lecturer in History at Canberra University College, which was incorporated into the ANU in 1960. Promoted to Reader in 1967, Eric remained in the department until his retirement in 1986. During this long period at the ANU he left an enduring legacy with students and colleagues who benefited from his teaching, supervision and collegiality. He was a patient, methodical and encouraging teacher of undergraduates, a supportive and reassuring postgraduate supervisor with the capacity to challenge without deflating students' self-confidence, and a thoroughly congenial colleague.

Eric's remarkable capacity for empathetic engagement with students was widely known and deeply appreciated. It went so far as a brief period in the Canberra lock-up in July 1972 for backing them in their protests against national service for the Vietnam War. This brush with the law did him no academic harm, despite the 350-page file the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation compiled on him.. He was elected Dean of the Arts Faculty from 1973 to 1975 and, not surprisingly, later served as Dean of Students for the whole University.

When Eric had returned to Canberra in early 1960 he continued his life-long love of rugby. When his playing days were over, he was not content to be a mere spectator. He served for many years as a fair and well-respected referee. Even when that, too, was no longer possible he continued to attend games with his old rugby mates who grew increasingly sympathetic at the sight of a collapsing scrum, commiserating with a swig from his hip flask.

In 1961 Bob Gollan and Eric were the prime movers in establishing the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Over the years he held every position in the Society, including being its first Secretary and later President in 1984–86. He was a wise and measured advocate of the more progressive tendencies in history writing, encouraging feminist colleagues in their campaign to broaden Labour History's horizons and supporting the Editorial Board's decision to embrace social history, while all the time retaining a commitment to politically engaged scholarly rigor in research and writing.

Eric helped build the Society's fraternal links with like societies, particularly in Britain, and especially at the University of Warwick. Many friends and colleagues savour memories of visiting Eric and Sheila during sabbaticals at the Manor Farm in the Cotswolds village of Broadwell. From Canberra to the Cotswolds, their gracious hospitality was legendary, as were Sheila's culinary skills. To this day, I still use her recipe for summer puddings. Up until his retirement, and for a while after, there was hardly a part of the ASSLH and their wider network of friends who had not benefited from Eric's constructive, unobtrusive support and had their political views fortified by Sheila's strictures on all who were mean and miserable in public life. Her delight at John Howard's humiliation in Bennelong, had she lived to see it, would have been incandescent.

While he did not leave a large body of authored works, Eric maintained a steady stream of writing that ranged from an oral history monograph on Tom Barker and the IWW, (1965), numerous bibliographical studies, some of which were quite extensive in their coverage, and two edited collections of essays on Rebels and Radicals (1983) and Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History (1986). He also wrote numerous historical articles for socialist journals. In retirement he wrote An Airman Far Away (1993), a biography of Sheila's brother, who was killed in the Dambusters' Raid in 1943. But Eric's work is, more than most, also to be found in other people's writing ~ in his nurturing, support and encouragement of their projects, completed in the secure knowledge that he cared about what they were doing and what they had to say. Indeed, one of Eric's great skills as historian, teacher and organiser was his ability to listen and hear what was being said, and implied.

When he retired as Reader in History at the ANU in 1986, he and Sheila rejoiced in the wide circle of friends they had attracted over the years, continued their golfing interests – and rugby in Eric's case – travelled a little, and enjoyed entertaining. Their most regular guests, however, were several generations of magpies and currawongs who maintained a continuing if uneasy relationship with a succession of the Fry's corpulent cats. In recent years Eric and Sheila's health declined to the point where they had to leave their Condamine Street home in Turner and move into Morshead veterans' nursing home where Sheila died on 4 May 2007 and Eric five months later on 3 October.

He graced the University with his learning, teaching, and quietly affable collegiality. In many ways, Eric Fry personified all that is admirable about the Labour History society in his self-effacing commitment to its common cause, his steadfast support of its various activities and, above all, in his loyal and congenial comradeship. He might be dead, but it will be a long time before his generous-spirited socialist humanism is forgotten by a generation of people who were grateful for and inspired by it.

Peter Love teaches at Swinburne University of Technology and is President of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.
<pjlove@infoxchange.net.au>

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