The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women

by Deborah J. Swiss

  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.

  Quickly the group reached consensus and despair dissolved into eager anticipation of the touch and scent of clean cotton against the skin. This was the first wish for the half-dressed women in torn and filthy rags. The indignity of near nakedness tugged at them in a way that an empty stomach did not. If Mrs. Fry could do anything, their first request would be for clean clothes. A simple shift would suffice.

  Mrs. Fry promised the women she would return with a dress for each of them. Anna, silent throughout the visit, spontaneously fell to her knees and began to pray. Elizabeth joined her friend in divine supplication. Several of the prisoners followed, kneeling rather awkwardly on the wet floor. In the eerie darkness, the embossed gold lettering on Fry’s Quaker Bible
flashed through Newgate’s shadows. Stillness enveloped the cell in a dreamlike state of heavenly quiet. Elizabeth described it in her diary: “I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered; a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene, the poor people on their knees around us, in their deplorable condition.”11

  In the early nineteenth century, Quaker views of the poor differed radically from those of other Christians. It was every Friend’s challenge to lift people up, whereas the prevailing Church of England view considered poverty a condition of sin resulting from the indigent’s own wickedness and self-damnation. Early Quakers had been persecuted vigorously throughout Europe. In England alone, fourteen thousand were imprisoned during the reign of Charles II, the “merry monarch” who ascended the throne in 1660. During that time, members of the Society of Friends were stripped naked, placed in stocks, publicly whipped, and gaoled for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. At the same time, its members in the American colonies were executed for practicing their religion. The most famous Quaker of all, founder George Fox, had been imprisoned at London’s Newgate Prison, as had William Penn, the Quaker who established the state of Pennsylvania.

  Swept into a rising crest of evangelism that defied the traditional British view, Elizabeth and Anna felt obligated to help “the wretched” heal both body and soul. Although Mrs. Fry believed that words from her Bible brought the gaoled closer to the Lord and to redemption, she might well have recited Shakespeare and achieved a similar reaction. For most Newgate women, religion played no part in their lives. Still, they were drawn to the Quaker minister who read to them, enthralled by stories strange and new. A few dared to ask aloud, “Who is Christ?”12 Never before had they heard this name. Even so, the ragged souls found themselves inspired by Fry’s kindness. Seduced by the rhythmic cadence in her voice and the serene softness in her eyes, the female prisoners found momentary escape in the soothing beauty of her words. No sooner had the women begun to feel comfortable than the visit was over. The turnkey swung open the gate and beckoned the two do-gooders to retreat. Mrs. Fry promised the women she would return, although few believed it.

  Elizabeth had much to ponder as her carriage slowed to a jolting halt. It had been a short, cold ride back to Mildred’s Court after they’d dropped off Anna. As the coachman helped her from the buggy, a liveried butler swung open the town house’s grand door to greet the mistress as she approached the steps. Before crossing the threshold, she first removed Newgate’s muck from the soles of her shoes using the wrought-iron boot scraper located just outside every upper-crust home. Elizabeth immediately requested that hot water be brought upstairs for a bath. Her house servants hurriedly set up the bathtub and prepared several steaming buckets of hot water to be carried from the kitchen stove. Mrs. Fry’s personal maid assisted her mistress in the complicated process of unhooking and unbuttoning her contaminated clothing. Like a rancid onion, every layer was permeated by Newgate’s putrid presence. Her clothes were in ruins, but her soul was on fire.

  A Promise Fulfilled

  For the next three days, Mrs. Fry lobbied her network of Quaker friends to assist in sewing garments. As promised, she collected and delivered clean clothing to everyone in Newgate’s congregation of the forgotten. The women she first visited left a lasting impression on Elizabeth, but after a week of prison visits, life events prevented her return to their stony tomb until four years had passed.

  Mrs. Fry’s Newgate work was put on hold as she gave birth to two more children and suffered the loss of her beloved daughter Betsy at age four. The Tambora volcano eruption led to the “year without a summer” in 1816, causing the tea crop to fail and bankrupting her husband, Joseph, who was heavily invested in it. While they dealt with their financial crisis, they sent their six oldest children to live with wealthy relatives.

  Although Elizabeth and Joseph were in debt, the Gurney family still owned a successful banking business. Elizabeth’s mother had died when she was twelve, so she had been responsible for helping raise the younger children, including her brother Joseph John Gurney, who was now an influential lobbyist. He was inspired by “Betsy’s” work to the point of bailing out the Fry bank and joining her mission of prison reform.

  When Elizabeth turned to Newgate again, just after Christmas in 1816, it was with renewed purpose. She organized regular visits and opened a schoolroom for the children who were imprisoned with their mothers. She taught the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1817, she founded the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners in Newgate. All of this activity occurred at a time when the public’s sordid interest was turning toward the plight of the poor. A female reverend was strange enough, but the image of her reading the Bible to the Newgate “beasts” was sensational. Stories and drawings of these encounters began to appear in London newspapers, which were now widely available to the general public.

  In 1818, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had married Elizabeth’s sister Hannah, was elected to Parliament and began to promote Elizabeth’s causes. Mrs. Fry had become a figurehead for a prison reform movement and was now backed by powerful allies in Parliament. Little did she know how her widely publicized visits would expose the empire’s secret plan to replace its slave labor pool with poor young Londoners, starving Irish, and other undesirables. Designed by effete Parliamentarians, the scheme hinged on a belief that outcast girls like Agnes McMillan would never be missed. These exiled citizens included the twenty-five thousand girls and women whose unfortunate fate included transport to an isolated island on the other side of the world. In the years to come, Elizabeth would meet many of these women as they passed through Newgate Prison on their way to the convict ships.

  Mrs. Fry and her Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners could not be ignored. She became one of the few advocates for treating the female inmates humanely. This plain and proper revolutionary broke nearly every rule for how a respectable lady was supposed to behave.

  On the afternoon of April 28, 1818, Elizabeth prepared for her call at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. Queen Charlotte was this day’s honored guest for a charity event at the mayor’s palace. Mrs. Fry could not possibly leave her brownstone without the layers and layers of attire required for a woman of her social standing. Fashion dictated that multiples of crinoline and lace measured pedigree. Abundant petticoats signaled affluence for a middle-class lady, although Elizabeth’s were modest and unfussy in the tradition of her Quaker upbringing. Her dark silk gown, light silk cloak, and unadorned Friends’ cotton cap stood out from the brocaded gowns and jeweled tiaras of her contemporaries.

  Elizabeth was among the last to arrive at Mansion House, delayed by a bitter dispute with Britain’s home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, over a young woman’s execution outside Newgate. As she entered the Egyptian Hall, filled with princesses, lords, and bishops, “A buzz of ‘Mrs. Fry,’ Mrs. Fry,’ ran through the room.”13 While the guests strained for a closer look, their exclamations were muted ever so slightly in the thick carpet fibers and sumptuous satin curtains surrounding the hall.

  At Windsor Castle, a rather miserable, cold, and distant Queen Charlotte prepared for another state function, donning in melancholy silence the sumptuous regalia demanded by her position. At public pageants, her well-practiced detachment helped perpetuate the royal mystique for those outside the inner circle. Quaker daughters in the prominent Barclay family who observed the Queen wrote: “She is vastly genteel with airs . . . truly majestic. . . . Her clothes, which were as rich as gold and silver and silk could make them, were a suit from which fell a train supported by a little page in scarlet and silver.”14

  Now a well-publicized humanitarian, Elizabeth Fry was more widely admired within British society than Queen Charlotte and her mad King George. Elizabeth spent her days on the unfashionable tasks of soliciting funds for soup kitchens, setting up schools for impoverished children, and lobbying to change Britain’s tradition of punishing petty thieves with death.
Her work at Newgate Prison had become a public spectacle, part of the Dickensian melodrama that ran in the daily newspapers. “The American Ambassador wrote home to say that he had now seen the two greatest sights in London—St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Mrs. Fry reading to the prisoners in Newgate.”15

  It was appalling for an upper-crust lady to consider any of the Newgate women worth saving, so shocking that the warden issued tickets for admission to view the fearless missionary who read to the prisoners. Each day, the idle rich flocked to the grey fortress to watch in awe as the gentle voice of hope transformed the “wretched creatures.” A schoolmaster who visited Newgate observed that the features of prisoners were “strongly marked with animal propensities” with “an approximation to the face of a monkey.”16 Newgate had become a zoo of sorts, with the full range of human suffering on display and safely locked behind its iron bars.

  On a much loftier stage, the royal family, too, was part of this theater of the absurd. At age seventy-four, Queen Charlotte often focused her attention on her husband, the mentally unstable George III. The king had recently taken to running naked through the palace as his dressers chased him, tackling him to put on his pants. He is today believed to have suffered from porphyria, a genetic disorder with symptoms that include mental disturbance. This may have been triggered by arsenic contained in a medication he was given. Queen Charlotte served as his “regency of the person,” his surrogate. In this capacity, she dispensed funds for the Queen’s Lying-In Hospital and for various orphanages. The queen’s concern for these causes, whether genuine or feigned, was an attempt to promote a favorable image for a monarchy whose political influence was in ruins.