The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (10 page)

As Elizabeth’s coachman turned onto the notoriously bad Cheap-side, tiny figures scampered around the carriage in a slippery blend of horse manure, dead rats, human waste, and rotting refuse. These were the bone gatherers. Ragged six- and seven-year-olds grabbed at the prime bone pickings, their barefoot toes bleeding into the gutter’s muddy winter sludge. Bone ash was mixed with clay to strengthen the ceramic that lined the shelves of the wealthy. If the bone grubbers were lucky in foraging for a key ingredient to delicate bone china, they earned enough to pay for a meal.

If one of these street urchins had parents, his mother probably worked as either a laundress or a prostitute. Perhaps his father was one of the few who hadn’t been drafted and was able to find work in the winter of 1813, when jobs were hard to come by. Gin, however, was cheap and all too easy to find, so there was a good chance that father, mother, or both were drunks. Even children stumbled through the byways in an alcoholic stupor, fed beer to fill their stomachs.

While the Fry children fancied pony rides and tea parties, the poor were chained to their lot in life like donkeys to a cart. Some crawled through the alleys, stuffing into their pockets the dog dung they could sell to tanneries, where it was used to cure fine leather. From baby to toddler to drone, as soon as a child could carry a bucket or hold a tool, he or she was put to work. Physical aging arrived early, stealing youth and health. As in Glasgow, half of London’s children died before age five, poverty’s only blessing offering them an early grave and an end to their suffering.

Mrs. Fry’s carriage rolled through the cobbled streets now bustling with activity. As the morning fog lifted, dead horses, drunks, and sometimes infants were found decomposing, stiff, mouths agape, and covered with flies. Despite the handkerchief pressed to her nose to block the cold and filter the soot, Elizabeth could not help but gag on the noxious vapor of raw sewage and decay that clung to everything, and everyone, on the streets of London.

“I Come as a Thief ”

The street grew noisier as the Frys’ driver arrived at the corner of Newgate Street and the Old Bailey. The coachman began to slow the horses when the carriage approached the gaol entrance. In the flesh-chilling morning rain, Elizabeth and Anna came face to face with Newgate’s stoic presence. The prison had been rebuilt after a fire in 1780; creator George Dance’s design drew on the school of
architecture terrible
, a style intended to evoke terror in those on both sides of its walls. London’s Lord Mayor William Domville eagerly and enthusiastically promoted Newgate’s sinister reputation, believing that fear deterred crime.

The very structure of the building was designed to undermine the prisoner’s spirit in every possible way. Female statues depicting Liberty and Plenty interrupted the harsh masonry blocks under the protection of sheltered niches in the wall. The cornucopia of plenty taunted those for whom there would be no feast of abundance. A French-capped Liberty mocked the freedom lost by those within the granite walls.

Newgate’s ominous exterior characterized what novelist Henry Fielding described as a “prototype of hell.”
⁸
Iron chains carved above the main entrance offered a stern warning as newcomers were admitted into this human-made purgatory. A façade of windows composed of stone, rather than glass, reinforced the prison’s impenetrability and purposeful claustrophobia. Bricks filled in framed indentations where light should have entered, suggesting a cruel joke by designer George Dance. Newgate’s real windows faced inward and delivered a ridiculing message to the damned: This hell hath no escape. His design allowed the prisoner not a single glimpse of the outside world. Instead, the windows faced the inner yard, where fellow inmates were marched in circles for exercise.

Elizabeth and Anna looked up at the chains and shackles carved over each doorway, representations of the leg irons worn by prisoners inside who could not afford to pay an “easement.” Inscribed on a sundial just above the menacing iron door were the words
Venio sicut fur
(I come as a thief). The two Quakers had passed Newgate many times but had never considered entering.

The horses came to a stop. Newgate’s center gate opened, and the driver helped the ladies down from the carriage. John Addison Newman, the gaol’s governor, greeted them personally. Bundles of flannel baby gowns tucked under her arm, Elizabeth explained the reason for their visit. They wanted to attend to the physical neglect of the infants and the spiritual deprivation of their mothers. This was a highly unusual request, and Governor Newman planned to dissuade the ladies from their folly. Seldom did outsiders find the courage to enter this dreary enclave. Fewer still dared visit the Newgate females, a place where no male risked entry by himself, fearful of assault by the unruly creatures.

The governor had no choice before a determined Elizabeth Gurney Fry. He grudgingly acquiesced to her request and unlocked the inner gates to the gaol. The ladies were led to the infirmary, housed in a small room on the prison’s second level. At first, Elizabeth and Anna stood motionless outside the tiny quarters. Gagging from the reek of death, the two needed a moment to regain their composure. Nothing in their serene souls could prepare them for the scene before them: A woman was in the process of removing clothing from a dead child to put on her own suffering baby. Without saying a word, Elizabeth and Anna untied the flannel bundle and passed out the gowns to women too ill to react. They had not brought enough clothes to outfit every infant and would need to sew more gowns for another day’s visit.

Mindful of her promise to Stephen Grellet, Mrs. Fry asked to be taken to the common criminal ward. Governor Newman reluctantly escorted the women to the turnkey station that guarded the women’s wing. An agitated turnkey, responsible for keeping the cells locked, issued a stern warning to the two ladies, just as he had cautioned Stephen Grellet. The gaoler was certain that the caged women would injure the do-gooders and that he alone would be held responsible. He pleaded with the surely misguided women, imploring their retreat from the gaol’s dark recesses and its subhuman population.

There would be no turning back. The tall Quaker stood her ground, refusing to leave. The turnkey saw the answer in her eyes and shook his head. If he could not spare foolish Mrs. Fry from the vile and the violent, he could at least protect her material possessions. Fearing that within minutes her gold watch would be stolen, he beseeched her good sense to remove it. Once again, Elizabeth stood her ground. Shrugging his shoulders in resignation, the turnkey plunged the iron key into the gate’s lock, and the bars swung open.

Bibles in hand, Elizabeth and Anna entered the cavernous tunnels that connected Newgate’s wings. The gas lanterns that lit the passageway to the women’s ward seemed to whisper a warning to the two intruders, like the sound of the wind before a storm. The gate slammed shut, and the outside lock fell against the latch. Its impact reverberated down the stone hallways with a sorrowful shudder. The two were undeterred, though a terrified Anna relied on her friend to lead the way. A painting by Henrietta Ward depicts a later Newgate visit and shows another volunteer hiding behind Elizabeth’s ample frame, eyes wide with trepidation, hands clutched tightly to Fry’s. In the same painting, Elizabeth appears at ease, her countenance calm and saintly.

The ladies began to walk hand in hand. Their footsteps reverberating through the long hallway made a sound as though there were many people walking with them. Reluctantly, the turnkey led the two ladies toward the deafening outburst of bellows, screams, sobs, and cries that emanated from the hallway’s end. Bony, blackened hands grasped at the cell’s iron grating, begging for notice. Unbolting the barred door, lifting the heavy latch that creaked under its own weight, the turnkey took one more look at these silly women before ushering them across the cell’s threshold. He sighed, then retreated quickly and snapped the gate shut.

Three hundred women and children began to claw their way forward, moving as a teeming mass of misery, fascinated by the two ladies who wore clean clothes. The scraggly group deduced their upper-class status immediately by their polished fingernails and clear skin. Elizabeth stepped forward to meet her audience, revealing her “tall, large figure . . . with eyes small but of sweet and commanding expression—a striking appearance, not plain, but grand rather than handsome.”
⁹

A frenzied jumble of the innocent, the mad, and the condemned greeted them. Anna’s brother, Thomas Fowell Buxton, described what confronted another Quaker upon visiting Newgate for the first time: “The railing was crowded with half-naked women, struggling together for the front situations, with the most boisterous violence, and begging with the utmost vociferation. She felt as if she were going into a den of wild beasts, and she well recollects quite shuddering when the door closed upon her, and she was locked in with such a herd of novel and desperate companions.”
¹⁰

In this communal cage, young girls who had stolen small items to fight off starvation and get through another day were trapped with murderers, violent felons, shivering babies, and the feeble-minded. Lurking in the shadows, tormented souls would explode at the slightest provocation with rage so overwhelming that it oozed from their every pore. Mayhem and madness were the order of the day. Pelting the air with foul language and encouraging fights among the inmates helped the condemned pass the time and release their seething frustration. The crowd surged forward again, tearing at the ragged clothing on the silhouetted figures closest to the entry. The rowdiest prisoners called out to the two well-dressed Quakers in a chorus of competing voices begging for money.

A few pence went a long way in gaol, where everything was available for the right price. Bribes to the guards could buy a pint of beer from Newgate’s prison tap, an extra source of income for the wardens. The tap flowed continuously, even when food ran out. Cheap gin was also for sale. Consequently, many prisoners were drunk day and night.

Still adjusting to the dim haze of near darkness, Elizabeth and Anna looked toward the blurry outlines surrounding them. They were the ghostlike remains of women whose stooped frames clung tenuously to the remnants of existence. As the two Quakers moved closer, they were greeted by vacant stares, many too numbed from life’s weariness to speak.

Heavy-lidded eyes crusted thick with grit and infection opened slowly as women from all corners squinted to focus on their unexpected visitors. Their matted hair ran wild with lice and fleas. Most had learned to ignore the live vermin that continually ravaged their tired bodies. Rats brushed against their flimsy clothing, skittering around their legs. Beetles and cockroaches moved in a constant parade across the floor, where the women lived, ate, and slept. Lying on the stone floor, scratching half heartedly at scabies and other itchy rashes born of filth, scores of women and children lay covered in oozing sores raw with infection and neglect. Most were pockmarked. Some stank from the rotting odor of syphilis. Others squatted along the cell’s perimeter to relieve themselves.

The two finely dressed ladies had no choice but to breathe in the cell’s stagnant air, thick with the taste and smell of urine, unwashed bodies, and rotting afterbirth from infants born in prison. Unshaken by the stench, Elizabeth stood straight up to her full height and stepped forward. Immediately, her heels sank deeply into the muck of mud, menstrual blood, rotting straw, and human excrement carpeting the entire cell. Never once did Elizabeth look down, her blue eyes level with the curious mass that pressed closer to examine her. Not for a moment did the Quaker minister avert her glance in the manner expected from a woman of her stature.

Captivated by the three hundred pairs of eyes riveted on her face, Elizabeth felt drawn to a young mother who cowered against the stone, anxiously cradling a tiny infant to her breasts. Eyes lit with compassion, so many times a parent herself, Fry reached forward to comfort the mother and child, unfazed by the lice as she stroked the baby’s fine hair. This gesture of touch, pure in intent and unmarked by judgment, composed the chaos and hushed the room to an eerie silence. The Quaker’s gentle manner shocked the condemned as it drew them yet closer.

Compassion was a rare commodity at the turn of the nineteenth century. The wealthy rarely spoke to those outside their class, save to bark orders at their servants. Neither Elizabeth nor Anna carried the slightest hint of moral condescension into Newgate’s dungeon. Three hundred women immediately connected with the two Quakers, the lines of caste erased by an act of human decency. In this grey mildewed pen, the boundary between England’s black-and-white social orders dissolved for an instant. Dignity entered a setting where it seemed out of place but where it took hold in its purest form.

As the crowd pressed against her, Elizabeth seized the moment to introduce herself and her friend Anna: “I am Mrs. Fry and this is Miss Buxton.” Even among the condemned, etiquette demanded certain polite customs. Fry spoke plainly in the Quaker style, addressing royalty and prisoners alike as “thee” and “thou,” well-mannered references that would have sounded quite strange to her Newgate audience. It was unlikely that a lady of Elizabeth’s pedigree had ever addressed these petty thieves and prostitutes with this courtesy. Acknowledging them as one woman to another, the Quaker minister asked: “Tell me. What doest thou need?” This question, luxurious in its directness and simplicity, kindled a bond between Mrs. Fry and London’s forgotten that lasted many decades. The answer to her question would also ignite social change and prison reform across Europe and around the globe.

Minds numbed by the January cold, the mob paused to consider the Quaker’s request. A momentary reprieve of silence reverted to Newgate’s cacophony: the hollow cough of tuberculosis, the whimper of a sick baby, moaning, bickering, and the occasional piercing wail of the insane. The women with the sunken eyes and yellowed teeth searched to understand Mrs. Fry’s intention. It was puzzling to receive an offer of hope, but the initial shock soon dissipated, and the throng began to speak all at once.