The somewhat starchy figure of Elizabeth Fry — in this racy, popularising biography, Jean Hatton has chosen to call her Betsy — hovered over my childhood. Like hundreds of thousands of other descendants of the ‘East Anglian mafia’, I can claim the Norwich-born prison reformer as an aunt, a very distant one.
I doubt if other Fry descendants and collaterals — we include Princess Diana’s one-time heart-throb Oliver Hoare, Barclays Bank former chairman Andrew Buxton and the actors Christopher Cazenove and dear old Stephen Fry himself — have ever dined out on this particular connection. In my case, however, ‘Aunt Fry’ was a dominant ancestral presence — never mind about the link with Fry’s chocolates — and even the subject of a wax statuette kept under a domed glass case in my grandmother’s bedroom.
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