Sir John Claud Fortescue Fryer KBE FRS FRSE (13 August 1886 – 22 November 1948) was an English entomologist. He was president of the Royal Entomological Society 1938–1939, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.^[1][2]

He was born in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, the son of a farmer, and educated at Rugby School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Like his father and his uncle, the naturalist Alfred Fryer, his main interest was in natural history.

In 1908-09 he spent time on the Seychelles and Aldabra Islands on a Percy Sladen Trust expedition to study the fauna and physiography. In 1914 he was appointed the first entomologist at the Board of Agriculture and in 1920 was appointed Director of the Plant Pathology Laboratory at Harpenden. He became Secretary of the Agricutural Research Council in 1944. ^[3]

He was knighted KBE in 1946 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1948. ^[4] His application citation described read:" [Fryer] is an entomologist, his early researches on the genetics of mimetic polymorphism in Papilio polytes are classic. He is distinguished for his scientific public service to Agriculture. As the first entomologist employed by the Board of Agriculture, and later as Director of the Board's Plant Pathology Laboratory he established the advisory and quarantine services in this country on such sound scientific lines that they enabled the great development of agriculture during the war to take place. During the war as first secretary to the Agricultural Improvement Council he rendered important service to scientific agriculture, and now as Secretary to the Agricultural Research Council is playing a large part in post-war development in this field."

He died suddenly from pneumonia in London in November 1948. He had married Constance Joan Denny-Cooke and had a son John Denny Fryer.

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