Frederick Charlwood Frye (1845 – 20 March 1914) was a

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grocer and

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politician.

Business

In 1870 he formed the business partnership of Leverett, Frye, and Scholding, opening the first of a chain of grocery stores in

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. Frye took sole control of the company in 1880. In 1892 the business was renamed

Leverett & Frye Leverett & Frye was a chain of high-class grocery stores which was founded in 1870 in Greenwich, England, as Leverett, Frye, and Scholding. The chain expanded throughout Great Britain and Ireland, having over fifty branches at its peak. Frederic ...

, and by 1894, when it became a limited company, it had 50 stores in England and Ireland, concentrating on opening shops in newly developed suburbs. Frye became president of the Metropolitan Grocers Association and in 1891 helped found the Federation of Grocer's Associations of the United Kingdom. Frye was a progressive employer, operating a profit-sharing scheme with his employees and was on the Radical wing of the Liberal Party. He became a member of the

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, and in 1889 was elected to the first

London County Council London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today kno ...

as a

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councillor representing

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. He stepped down from the council at the 1892 elections, having been nominated as Liberal candidate to contest the parliamentary seat of Kensington North. He was elected at the general election held later that year, serving one term in the House of Commons as a member of parliament before losing his seat in the next general election in 1895. His family faced financial problems in 1911. In 1912 his home and all its contents were auctioned. He later became an alderman of Kensington Borough Council. He retired to

Worthing Worthing () is a seaside town in West Sussex, England, at the foot of the South Downs, west of Brighton, and east of Chichester. With a population of 111,400 and an area of , the borough is the second largest component of the Brighton and Ho ...

on the Sussex coast, where he died aged 68.

Family

Frye married Jane Kexia Crosbie and they had two daughters. The youngest was Katharine Frye who was born in 1878. She became an actress, suffragette and diarist. Elizabeth Crawford, ‘ Frye, Katharine Parry (1878–1959)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 201
accessed 21 Nov 2017
/ref>

References

For more about Frederick Frye and his family see E. Crawford (ed)
''Campaigning for the Vote: The Suffrage Diary of Kate Parry Frye''
Francis Boutle, 2013.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Frye, Frederick Charlwood 1845 births 1914 deaths Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies UK MPs 1892–1895 Members of London County Council Members of Kensington Metropolitan Borough Council Progressive Party (London) politicians Members of the Metropolitan Board of Works