Eileen Joan (Frankish) Fry

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved on stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
- Pericles

Eileen’s parents were Fred Napper (born in 1902) and Ellen Annie Clack (born in 1900). They were married in England in October, 1932, and Eileen was born in Portsmouth, England on October 3, 1933. By then she had two brothers and one sister.

When they married, Eileen’s father was back in England on leave from the Royal Indian Army Service Corp, of which he had been a member since he was 19 years of age.

In the early months of 1934 the family went to India but returned to England in 1939. However, when war was declared, her father had to return to India immediately. The rest of the family followed later just before Italy declared war. Her father spent much of his service in Egypt while the family remained in India.

Eileen attended a number of schools, including two boarding schools, in India and in Pakistan. In 1947, the partition of India and Pakistan led to the end of British rule over the Indian subcontinent. The family returned to Portsmouth in 1947 when Eileen was 14.

Eileen attended Portsmouth Southern Grammar School and graduated in 1949. She then attended Underwood’s Commercial College for a year and learned shorthand, typing and book keeping. She worked in lawyers’ offices until 1959 when she flew to Kitimat, B.C., where she had a good friend also from England. From there she proceeded to Prince Rupert, B.C., and worked in the Skeena River Indian Agency. Peter Frankish arrived at the office a month later and in September, 1961, they were married in Portsmouth, England.

Peter and Eileen returned to Prince Rupert and in 1962 Peter was transferred to the Yukon Indian Agency in Whitehorse, Yukon. Their son, Kenneth Roy Frankish, was born on September 1, 1962, and their daughter, Carolyn Joan Frankish was born on December 15, 1964.

Eileen and Peter divorced in 1978 and the children remained with Eileen.

In December, 1980, Eileen married Alan Fry in Whitehorse. Alan had been Superintendent in charge of the Yukon Indian Agency and had lived in Whitehorse earlier. He had married and moved to British Columbia with his wife and two young children. Unfortunately, his wife died at the age of 39. Eileen had known Sylvia and the children, Margery and Lydia, for about five years when they were all living in Whitehorse.

Alan built a beautiful log cabin on twenty acres of land at Shallow Bay. He cut all of the logs and together they cleared a lot of land so that they could see Shallow Bay.

They spent some wonderful times at the cabin. Before Alan died in March, 2018, he had the title of the land at Shallow Bay transferred to Eileen’s two children, Kenneth and Carolyn.

Eileen and Alan loved to travel. They travelled to England several times. They went to Egypt on the Nile with friends where they saw Luxor and flew to Abu Simbel and visited the Valley of Kings. They spent a month in South Africa with cousins of Eileen’s who live there. For their 25th wedding anniversary, Kenneth and Carolyn paid for them to see Jordan and, particularly Petra. They were accompanied on that trip by Carolyn and a friend of hers from England.

Alan’s grandfather was Roger Fry of Bloomsbury Fame where he knew Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, et al. A lot of his paintings are in Courtalds Gallery and the National Gallery in England. Their own house has many of the paintings with children’s names on the back for later distribution. Alan Fry wrote seven books.

Alan’s daughter, Margery, lives in Kamloops, B.C. She and her husband, George, have two children and one of them has five daughters. Lydia, the other daughter, lives in Terrace, B.C. with her husband David. They have six children and among those six there are three children. So Alan’s two daughters have enriched Eileen’s life with eight grand-children and seven great-grandchildren.

Eileen’s son, Kenneth, is married to Alison Conant and has two step-sons and two step-grandchildren. They all live in Whitehorse. Eileen’s daughter has lived in England for the past twenty years and comes over to Whitehorse usually twice a year.

Eileen has travelled a great deal. She has gone to such places as France, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Israel, and Tunisia. Usually, when she goes to England, she and her daughter travel somewhere in Europe. She has taken Lydia’s six children to England, waiting until they were 8 to 10 years of age. Then she took two at a time for a month. Also, David, Lydia’s husband, travelled with her a few years ago and Carolyn and Eileen took him all around to places like Paris and Versailles. She also took Margery’s daughter, Sylvia, on a Holland America cruise through the Baltic to St. Petersburg and then they flew from there to Moscow to see the highlights.

Eileen lives in Riverdale, Whitehorse, in a lovely home filled with flowers and memories.

 She keeps very busy and is fit and healthy. She goes to the Canada Games Centre five times a week for 1½ hours. She walks a kilometre and then spends time with stretches, balancing, weights and a rowing machine.

Any spare time is spent crocheting blankets or knitting Teddies for Tragedies. She has possibly knitted hundreds of the latter. She takes them to England with her when she visits her daughter. From there the blankets and Teddies make their way to an orphanage in Gambia. They are picked up from her daughter’s home by the father of one of the people who runs the orphanage. Eileen also loves to read, particularly historical novels.