In Newgate Prison, about 300 women, and their many children, were confined in four small rooms; crowded together, tried and untried, serious criminals together with those who had committed a mere misdemeanour, they had no occupation and were superintended by just two men. Ragged and dirty, with no clothing or bedding provided, they slept on the floor. With money begged from visitors they were able to buy spirits from the prison: drunkenness, riot and misery prevailed.

It was into this terrible scene that on 15 February 1813 Elizabeth Fry made her first prison visit, accompanied on this occasion by Anna Buxton. For some time they were besieged by begging and fierce drunken revelry. By their kind words and steadfast manner the two brave women at last succeeded in getting some kind of order in the crowd, and then Anna Buxton fell on her knees and prayed for the prisoners; ‘and’, said Elizabeth Fry in her diary, ‘very unexpectedly to myself, I did also. I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered; a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene; the poor people around in their deplorable condition’.

So who was Elizabeth Fry? Born into a Quaker family, she was quiet and devout, and in 1800 married Joseph Fry, another Quaker, at the age of twenty. In 1809 her father died, and she was inspired to speak and pray as he was buried. She decided to make use of her gift for public speaking, and became a Quaker minister. In was in that capacity that she made her first visit to Newgate.

It was some years before she visited again, for her time was fully taken up with preaching, charitable schools, and other philanthropic activities. But she never forgot that fateful day, and at last visited Newgate again, only to find the condition of the prisoners to be even worse. Alone with the desperate women, she stayed with them for some hours, finally calming them enough for her to be able to read to them from the Bible and to preach. After repeated visits, she established a school in the prison. She succeeded in getting the sheriffs of London and the prison officials to help her, a code of practice was drawn up, and a committee formed to organise an ‘Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate’ to provide clothing, instruction and employment for the women so that they might be ‘peaceable while in prison, and respectable when they leave it’.

The Association became the talk of the town, and facilities in the prison were vastly improved. But Elizabeth Fry’s success was in large part due to the way in which she involved the prisoners themselves in the improvements. She made it clear that no rule would be made without their full agreement, and that proper debates and democratic voting would decide every issue.

The newspapers wrote up the amazing transformation of Newgate, and parties of inspection streamed through the prison made up of high society, benevolent aristocrats, Members of Parliament and even royalty. It became fashionable to be philanthropic. Public interest was now fully aroused to consider the necessity of general prison reform.

Elizabeth Fry was the heroine of the day, and she remained faithful to her cause until her death in 1845. Much good work was done by her and by the Ladies’ Prison Associations which were formed throughout the land upon the model she had established. In later life she received and enjoyed much attention from the nobility and royalty, but she always devoted herself with untiring zeal to the cause of the prisoner, the ragged, the illiterate, and the outcast

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