13 Facts About Margery Fry

Sara Margery Fry was a British prison reformer as well as one of the first women to become a magistrate.

Margery Fry was the secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform and the principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

Margery Fry was the child of Quakers Sir Edward Fry, a judge, and his wife, Mariabella Hodgkin.

Margery Fry's siblings included Joan Mary Fry, the social reformer, Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group, the biographer and bryologist Agnes Fry and pacifist Anna Ruth Fry.

Margery Fry was home schooled until she was seventeen when she attended Miss Lawrence's school at Brighton before proceeding to study maths at Somerville College, Oxford in 1894.

Margery Fry went home after she graduated but returned to Somerville to become their librarian.

In 1913 her uncle Joseph Storrs Margery Fry died and left her sufficient money that she left her position at Birmingham in the following year.

Margery Fry was Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform from its foundation in 1921 until 1926.

Margery Fry served as Chair of the league's Council from 1926 to 1929.

Margery Fry became concerned with compensation for victims of crimes which resulted in an article, "Justice for Victims", in the Observer in 1957 and republished as part of a round table article in the Journal of Public Law.

Gerhard Mueller in 1965 wrote "Margery Fry is at the root of all current proposals for victim compensation".

Margery Fry was a governor of the BBC from 1937 to 1938 and a participant in The Brains Trust series starting in 1942.

In 1990, the Margery Fry Award was established in her honour.