He was a Quaker from a prominent Bristol family which founded and owned the chocolate firm J. S. Fry & Sons.

He was called to the bar in 1854, took silk in 1869 and became a judge in Chancery in 1877, receiving the customary knighthood.

He also acted as an arbitrator in the Welsh coal strike (1898), the Grimsby fishery dispute (1901) and between the London and North Western Railway Company and its employees (1906, 1907).

[8] Besides law he was on the council of University College London and interested in Zoology (he was elected to the Royal Society in 1883).

[10] In his preface to the 1884 report to the Houses of Parliament titled The Indo-Chinese opium trade considered in relation to its history, morality, and expediency, and its influence on Christian missions, Fry wrote: "We English, by the policy we have pursued, are morally responsible for every acre of land in China which is withdrawn from the cultivation of grain and devoted to that of the poppy; so that the fact of the growth of the drug [opium] in China ought only to increase our sense of responsibility".