Beatie

THE INDOMITABLE BEATIE

It’s an astonishing nautical tale and Mr Morris tells it well.
Sunday Times.
Link to Home
Link to The Victorian Scandal
Link to A Woman in Command
Link to Research
Link to email

The Indomitable Beatie An affair between an aristocratic girl and one of the richest men in England triggered the sequence of events that put her in effective command of a pre-sea school, the Training Ship Mercury. Under her rule it became the toughest and most successful of its kind in Britain. She was still giving the orders when she died in 1946 three months short of her 84 th birthday.

Her origins and the circumstances that put her in command were closely guarded secrets, kept from her pupils who knew only that the Mercury was founded in 1885 by a philanthropist, Charles Hoare, as a charitable institution for the care and training of boys from poor but honest families. After the death of the founder in 1908 it would become a fee-paying school. It also went into a mode of ruthless discipline, hardship and severe punishments that she ordained when the slightest offence came to her notice. Her marriage ten years earlier to C.B. Fry – ten years her junior - the great all-rounder, described as the handsomest man in England and perhaps the most variously gifted Englishman of any age, did nothing to soften her stance

For most of its 83-year existence the Mercury was based on the River Hamble, six miles from Southampton. There was always a ship on the river, with a shore establishment of 45 acres. The buildings included a 24-room mansion to house the people in charge, classrooms, halls recreational and dining, and a magnificent 300-seat theatre.

The wall of silence surrounding Mrs. Fry collapsed when the author researched the life of Charles Hoare, motivated by the anomaly of the man having founded the school in 1885, and a new hunt club the year following. In the foundation year he and a Miss Beatrice Holme Sumner – Beatie to her inner circle – were prosecuted for being in breech of a court order forbidding them contact of any kind while she was a minor, their love affair having begun when Beatie was 14 and Hoare twice her age, married, with five children.

It was in the immediate aftermath of the trial that Hoare founded the Mercury, basing it on the Illovo, an ocean-going barque, which he anchored off Binstead House on the Isle of Wight.

Instead of staying to see the school up and running, Hoare went to Cricklade in Wiltshire to set up a hunt club in opposition to the Vale of White Horse, Cirencester, his previous club, where the membership, swayed by the odium attached to the court case, wanted him out of the hunting field altogether. Defeated after a 3-year battle, he returned to Binstead to find that Beatie had taken complete control of the Mercury.

Illovo

In the first three decades of the last century the most powerful men in Britain came to her table, some invited by her husband, friends from his days at Oxford who matched him in brilliance, but who had become movers and shakers, their decisions shaping the lives of millions. Others were from her aristocratic background, including three Princes of Wales. Churchill, a friend, would stop by for lunch. It was he in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty who ordered the hulk of HMS Gannet to Hamble in 1914 to be made ready to replace the former Illovo. This intervention would save her from the breakers, as also did the efforts of Mercury Old Boys when the school closed in 1968.

HMS Gannet prior to restoration
HMS Gannet prior to resoration

© Ronald Morris

Read more in:
The Indomitable Beatie by Ronald Morris
(Sutton Publishing 2004, ISBN 0750937106)

Buy from Amazon