FRYER, Richard (1771-1846), of The Wergs, Staffordshire

A Black Country ironmaster and banker, Fryer was a Radical Reformer and early campaigner for the abolition of the corn laws which he asserted ‘were brought by the devil from hell’.Staffordshire Advertiser, 17 Nov. 1832. A regular contributor to economic and social debates during his two sessions in Parliament, Fryer described himself as ‘a plain-spoken man’ whose ‘speech was quite unvarnished’.Staffordshire Advertiser, 22 Dec. 1832. He generally voted in Radical minorities, and was frequently critical of both Whigs and Tories. His successor as MP for Wolverhampton Thomas Thornely later wrote that Fryer was ‘ungovernable’ and ‘rash in the extreme’ for speaking ‘of putting ministers out and putting them in again, as if it was merely shuffling a pack of cards. It is quite lamentable how indiscreet he is’.Thomas Thornely to Charles Pelham Villiers, 31 Dec. 1839, Thornely-Villiers correspondence, transcripts, 2 vols., London School of Economics, R (SR) 1094, I, f. 53 Josiah Clement Wedgwood, chronicler of Staffordshire parliamentary history and founder of the History of Parliament, suggested that Fryer’s radical anti-landlord rhetoric anticipated that of later Victorian and Edwardian land reformers.J.C. Wedgwood, Staffordshire parliamentary history (1934), iii. 84-5.

Fryer succeeded his father while a minor and acquired The Wergs, later described as possessing ‘no architectural beauties’, through marriage in 1794.J. Burke, A genealogical and heraldic history of the commoners of Great Britain and Ireland (1836), iii. 490; W. White, History, gazetteer and directory of Staffordshire (1834), 289. Through the match Fryer became a ‘considerable landed proprietor, having an [annual] income of upwards of £3,000 from land only’.Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1841. In the early nineteenth century he founded a bank at Wolverhampton, later known as R. and W.F. Fryer, or Wolverhampton Bank.A correct alphabetical list containing all the country bankers residing in England, Scotland & Wales (9th edn., 1811), n.p.; M. Dawes, Country banks of England and Wales, 1688-1953 (2000), ii. 651. He was also ‘extensively engaged in the coal and iron trade’ of the Black Country, and owned an iron works in Walsall.Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1841. By 1830, he was a wealthy man and the ‘acknowledged leader of the Wolverhampton reformers’.G. Barnsby, The working-class movement in the Black Country 1750 to 1867 (1977), 23. That year he founded the Wolverhampton Political Union to agitate in support of the Grey ministry’s reform bill and his ‘populist style’ of speaking was well-suited to public meetings.J. Lawrence, Speaking for the people: party, language and popular politics in England, 1867-1914 (1998), 74; Political Union Register (1832), 76.

Fryer offered for the newly-enfranchised borough of Wolverhampton at the 1832 general election.Staffordshire Advertiser, 17 Nov. 1832. His hostility towards the corn laws was popular in the constituency and he was elected in second place. After his return, Fryer launched an unprovoked attack on his colleague, William Wolryche Whitmore, for his moderation on the issue. Fryer declared that he had been elected ‘not only to reform the church; not only to abolish slavery’ and ‘to throw the vast East India colossus to the dust’ but ‘for the purpose of overturning the base and selfish oligarchy of landlords, who ruled the country with a rod of iron and made the agricultural districts one vast truck-shop’.Staffordshire Advertiser, 22 Dec. 1832.

Fryer made little attempt to modify his speaking style for a parliamentary audience, and his speeches were peppered with fierce denunciations of landlords. He had a low opinion of both front-benches, which consisted, in his view, of ‘bastard Tories, born on a dunghill’ and ‘degenerate, apostate Whigs, possessed of no statesmanlike principles’.Hansard, 18 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 966. Fryer generally voted with radical minorities supporting the retrenchment of state patronage and radical political reforms, including the ballot and shorter parliaments, while opposing Irish coercion. He was especially critical of the Whig ministry, who ‘did not seem to know what they were about’ and complained that their promises of reform had produced ‘meagre fruit’.Ibid., cc. 967-8. He spoke at the Birmingham Political Union meeting in May 1833 that called for the King to dismiss the government.Freeman’s Journal, 24 May 1833. Many of the Whigs’ shortcomings stemmed from their cowardly fear of the landlords, thought Fryer, and he was willing to see them ousted from office if they did not reduce taxation.Hansard, 30 July 1833, vol. 20, c. 182. Neither could he ‘stomach’ the grant of £20 million to compensate slave owners for the abolition of slavery.Hansard, 2 Aug. 1833, vol. 20, c. 292.

Fryer never wavered from his belief that the corn laws were the cause of distress and this informed his contribution to social and economic debates. Abolishing them would free trade, cheapen the cost of food and break the political power of landlords. In his first speech he described the corn laws as a ‘wicked, abominable and infamous tax on bread’, 18 Feb. 1833.Hansard, 18 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, c. 853. Despite his personal antipathy towards his colleague, he supported Whitmore’s motion for a low fixed duty on corn, 17 May 1833. A month later Fryer presented an anti-corn law petition from Wolverhampton and proposed the alteration of the corn laws, 18 June 1833. All other trade reforms or tax cuts, such as opening the East India trade or repealing house and window tax, were secondary issues. Protection was ‘robbery’, which benefited landlords and reduced farmers to serfdom. He warned that there ‘must either be Reform or Revolution’. However, Fryer’s proposal, which would have reinstated a lower level of duty from 1791, was intended as a first step away from the high protective duties that had prevailed since 1815. The motion was defeated 73-47.Hansard, 18 June 1833, vol. 18, cc. 964-9 (at 966, 969).The proposal would have meant that if the price of wheat was between 50s. and 54s. per quarter, the duty would be 2s. 6d. He continued to raise the corn laws in other debates, and backed Hume’s motion for a low fixed duty, 7 Mar. 1834. On one occasion Fryer spoke favourably of a ‘peaceable revolution’ that would wipe away the national debt, church establishment and tithes.Hansard, 18 July 1833, vol. 19, cc. 904-5. He repeatedly predicted an out of doors alliance of manufacturers and workers to smash the ‘cursed’ corn laws.Hansard, 18 July 1833, vol. 19, c. 905; 13 Mar. 1834, vol. 22, c. 171; 19 June 1834, vol. 24, c. 589. The ‘people were ripe for rebellion’, he warned, 7 July 1834.Hansard, 7 July 1834, vol. 24, c. 1274.

More broadly Fryer supported retrenchment and the repeal of the malt, hop, soap, cotton and wool duties with a tax on fund-holders to make up the revenue shortfall, 18 Feb. 1833.Hansard, 18 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, cc. 852-3. Although he maintained that the corn laws were the country’s chief economic blight, Fryer was critical of the 1819 Bank Act and during the debates on the currency and the renewal of the bank charter in 1833 he expressed support for an inconvertible paper currency or a silver standard.Hansard, 18 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, c. 853; 23 Apr. 1833, vol. 17, cc. 483-6; 9, 19 Aug. 1833, vol. 20, cc. 463-4, 769. On other economic questions, his attitude was undoubtedly influenced by his position as a large employer. He described factory regulation as a ‘delusion’ and was ‘decidedly opposed to trades unions’ which he argued ‘would do the workmen no good’.Hansard, 20 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 879-80; 13 Mar. 1834, vol. 22, c. 170. In other respects, however, he objected to those political economists who ‘prate[d] about surplus population’ and advocated the ‘iniquitous and blasphemous doctrines of Malthus’.Freeman’s Journal, 24 May 1833. Accordingly, he resisted the 1834 poor law amendment bill as it was ‘intended to overturn the whole system of poor-laws’. While the corn laws existed, landlords had a moral duty to support labourers in agricultural districts, argued Fryer, 1 July 1834.Hansard, 1 July 1834, vol. 24, cc. 1054-5.

Fryer retired at the 1835 general election, but proposed Charles Pelham Villiers at the nomination and ‘continued to exert great influence over Wolverhampton politics’.Lawrence, Speaking for the people, 77. Villiers, with the support of his colleague Thornely, became the leading parliamentary advocate of the repeal of the corn laws after 1838. However, for a time, Fryer remained more advanced than them on the issue, advocating a ‘perfectly free trade in corn’ in 1836, a policy that Thornely thought was not practical.For this reason, Thornely thought free traders should lobby for a fixed duty as a step towards abolition: Thornely to Villiers, 10 Nov. 1836, Thornely papers, LSE R (1094) SR, I, f. 13. Fryer’s vocal attacks on the Whig government in Wolverhampton were also not to the taste of Villiers or Thornely, who thought they gave succour to the Conservatives.Villiers to Thornely, 31 Dec. 1836, 2 Jan. 1837, Thornely papers, LSE R (1094) SR, I, ff. 20-1. In 1839 Fryer developed ‘erysipilas on one side of his face’ and looked ‘very ill’, although Thornely noted that he kept ‘up his spirits and is as boisterous as ever’.Thornely to Villiers, 25 Aug. 1839, Thornely papers, LSE R (1094) SR, I, f. 44. He was well enough to intervene on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League’s candidate at the Walsall by-election in February 1841 and to again nominate Villiers at the general election later that year, expressing satisfaction that Wolverhampton ‘would have no bread taxer’ and confidence that the repeal of the corn laws was only a matter of time.Morning Chronicle, 2 Feb. 1841; Staffordshire Advertiser, 3 July 1841. Fryer remained ‘as wild as ever’ in his public speeches, declaring that he wanted to ‘turn out Peel, and dispose of the landlords, as there will be a revolution’ at one Wolverhampton meeting in late 1845.Villiers to Thornely, Nov./Dec. 1845, Thornely papers, LSE R (1094) SR, I, f. 103.

Fryer died in August 1846, living just long enough to see the corn laws finally repealed. Although his arguments and fiery rhetoric anticipated elements of the successful anti-corn law campaign of the 1840s, he lacked the patience, tact and political following to be an effective parliamentary champion of the cause in the early 1830s. Nevertheless it was fitting that Villiers, celebrating the triumph of free trade at the 1847 general election, paid tribute to Fryer’s pioneering role.Staffordshire Advertiser, 31 July 1847. Fryer’s role was also acknowledged in a poem by the celebrated anti-corn law rhymer Ebenezer Elliott: ‘Hymn’, in E. Elliott, More verse and prose (1850), i. 75. Fryer was succeeded by his elder son Willam Fleeming Fryer (1801-91), who sold the family bank to Lloyds in 1872.Burke’s landed gentry (1871), i. 474; Dawes, Country banks, ii. 651. He played little part in public life and after selling off The Wergs for £120,000 retired to Hemel Hempstead and then London.Birmingham Daily Post, 29 Sept. 1891.