Elizabeth Fry: Banking Heiress Who Brought Order to Newgate Prison

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Elizabeth Fry was born Elizabeth Gurney in Norwich in 1780 and grew up at Earlham Hall; her father was a partner in Gurney's Bank and her mother was a Barclay. Her mother died when Elizabeth was 12, leaving her to help raise her siblings. In 1800 she married the Quaker banker Joseph Fry, moved to London and had 11 children. Prompted by the Quaker minister Stephen Grellet, she visited Newgate Prison in 1813 and found women and children, many awaiting trial, sleeping on filthy straw in freezing cells. Her response waited four years because a financial panic in 1812, and her brother-in-law William Fry's risky loans, forced the family to pool its assets to save the bank.

From 1816 Fry opened a school for children in Newgate, had the women vote on their own rules, and in 1817 founded an association supplying materials for sewing and knitting so prisoners could earn wages. In 1818 she gave evidence to a House of Commons committee. She replaced the open carts that took women to transport ships with closed carriages, met roughly 12,000 departing convicts and pressed captains on rations. Her lobbying fed the Gaols Act of 1823, which required female warders for women, and her 1835 testimony led to the Prisons Act and central inspectors. She founded a night shelter after finding a boy frozen to death, and died of a stroke in 1845 at 65.

• Her portrait appeared on the £5 note from 2001 to 2016.
• Each transported woman received a Bible, sewing tools, string and a knife and fork.
• Florence Nightingale took nurses trained in Fry's 1840 program at Guy's Hospital to the Crimean War.
• The King of Prussia visited Newgate to see her system, and Queen Victoria funded her causes.
• The Ramsgate Coast Guard lowered its flag to half mast at her death, an honor usually reserved for monarchs.