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Elizabeth Fry

In the early part of the 19^th century John Howard tirelessly pursued prison reform and had numerous bills passed in Parliament but change had been very slow in coming. As awful as prisons still are they can’t be compared with the conditions that existed a century and a half ago. Newgate Prison in London was one of the worst. Dark, foul smelling, without ventilation and overcrowded. First offenders, hardened criminals, debtors, the mentally impaired and the insane, women and their children were all herded together to sleep, sit and lie around on vermin infested straw beds twenty-four hours a day with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Many of them were waiting to be executed and others waited to be shipped out to Botany Bay or some other foreign penal colony. In 1833 a nine-year-old child who broke a window and stole two-pennyworth of paints was condemned to death. The inmates begged money from visitors and spent what they got on buying gin from a tap there in the prison block. And on the nights when the awful and killing sailing ships left for Botany Bay riots would break out and anything that could be smashed was smashed. A callous sport for some visitors was to throw a handle of coppers into the clamoring crowd of about 850 inmates and watch the fury and the fighting of people desperate almost to the point of insanity.

Elizabeth Fry was the daughter of a wealthy banker and later the wife of a wealthy merchant. Stephen Grellett and William Forster, prison reformers, begged her to see what she could do and so in 1813 she and a lady friend made their first visit to the women’s quarters of Newgate. The men knew her character because she was already involved in so much social work and now she took a keen interest in prisoners.

Before long she was going daily, she started school for children and got a woman thief to teach it. She engaged other willing helpers from her acquaintances but amazed the authorities by getting such cooperation from the inmates. Profanity diminished and almost vanished, drunkenness was near obliterated and even on the nights of the awful sailings things were calm. She went to Ramsgate to see the women off on the convict ships and demanded and got better conditions on board for them. She started sewing classes, daily Bible readings (she was a Quaker), cleaning squads and a washing regimen that had been virtually unknown.

She badgered Parliament for the separation of the sexes and women to work with the women and enlisted her influential friends to gain further reforms or the carrying out of already existing reforms. She had no shame in the matter. She got Newgate whitewashed and fumigated, traveled to scores of places in Europe checking out prisons and noting what was helpful and what must be changed. Her husband’s bankruptcy curtailed quite a bit of her work. In 1839 she established a program for prisoner rehabilitation and sponsored “Nightly Shelter for the Homeless of London” (1820). She began public library facilities for the Coast Guard and some naval hospitals and established a girl’s school in 1808. She established a school for nurses from which Florence Nightingale later chose many nurses for duty in the Crimean War.

And in case we get the impression she had nothing else to do she raised eleven children who rejoiced to call her “mother”. We’re all going to die. Some of us will rust out and some of us will cheerfully burn out. As Kagawa often asked, “What are we saving our bodies for? That the worms might have a good meal?”

Elizabeth Fry was one of the faces of God's love for the world.

The Scarlet Letter

Elizabeth Fry