Beatrice Holme Sumner

Beatrice Holme Sumner (12 July 1862 – 23 April 1946) was an English eccentric and, for some sixty years, the manager of a training ship for boys: TS Mercury.

[2] On the day of the Census of 3 April, 1881, Sumner is recorded as an eighteen-year old visitor in the household of Hoare and his wife Margaret in Cirencester.

[5] Sumner’s father responded to this romance by banishing her to live with his sister at Berkeley Castle, and when that failed to work he had her declared a ward of court.

[2] In 1883 Sumner’s father rented out Hatchlands Park, in the hope of being able to live on the income from it, but he sold the property five years later.

The ensuing scandal ruined the reputations of all concerned, with Sumner’s father retreating to Malta, her mother to Geneva, where she stayed for the rest of her life, and Colonel Kingscote resigning his seat in parliament[2] by being appointed as Commissioner of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues.

The Frys were quickly a well-known society “power couple“[2] and had three children, including the cricketer Stephen Fry, born in 1900.

[13] Mrs Fry died in 1946,[18] at the Royal South Hampshire and Southampton Hospital, leaving an estate valued at £10,362, equivalent to £542,907 in 2023, and probate was granted in September to her elder son Keith Robin Hoare, Commander RNVR.