A darker shade of grey
Andrew Barrow
BETSY: THE DRAMATIC BIOGRAPHY OF PRISON REFORMER ELIZABETH FRY by Jean Hatton Monarch, £8.99, pp. 368, ISBN 1854247050 The somewhat starchy figure of Elizabeth Fry — in this racy, popularising biography, Jean Hatton has chosen to call her Betsy hovered over my childhood. Like hundreds of thousands of other descendants of the ‘East Anglian mafia’, I can claim the Norwich-born prison reformer as an aunt, a very distant one.
I doubt if other Fry descendants and collaterals — we include Princess Diana’s one-time heart-throb Oliver Hoare, Barclays Bank former chairman Andrew Buxton and the actors Christopher Cazenove and dear old Stephen Fry himself — have ever dined out on this particular connection. In my case, however, ‘Aunt Fry’ was a dominant ancestral presence never mind about the link with Fry’s chocolates — and even the subject of a wax statuette kept under a domed glass case in my grandmother’s bedroom.
Alas, for many years Elizabeth Fry’s true and highly complicated character remained impenetrable under her tightfitting bonnet. This was partly her own fault — she ripped out key pages from her tell-tale journals — and partly the fault of her daughters, who published a book after their mother’s death presenting her as a saint and obliterating anything that could tarnish her pious image.
In recent years a few details of Mrs Fry’s darker side have trickled out, not least about her drinking habits, but here at last is the Full Betsy. Jean Hatton has raked through the surviving 47 volumes of the prison reformer’s handwritten journals and holds nothing back, not even menstrual blood or details of her first baby’s tiny bowel movements.
We learn that the woman who made history by entering Newgate prison alone and taming its savage inhabitants, who established the first-ever prison school, then a workshop, and who went on to become an international star and adviser to monarchs and prime ministers, was an extraordinarily vulnerable creature under neath, prone to chronic post-natal depression — she had ten children in all — and every form of insecurity, jealousy, panic attack, matrimonial hiccup, suicidal impulse and dark despair.
We also get full details of the calamitous financial affairs that engulfed this Quaker heroine. Born in 1780 into the affluent Gurney family of Earlham Hall, and marrying into the even richer Fry dynasty, she could not have anticipated her husband’s bankruptcies or the loss of their family home — she hid in the attics when the bailiffs moved in — and the humiliation of becoming dependent on one of her brothers, even if he did put an olive-green coach and neat footmen at her disposal.
And, of course, in her hour of need she reached out more and more for the bottle and for drugs. ‘A small portion of opium and a rather free use of port wine,’ she noted in 1842, ‘are essential to keep me in the degree of health that I am favoured to partake of.’ Oh dear, oh dear, but without this Dutch courage would Elizabeth Fry have conquered Newgate, changed convicts’ perceptions of themselves across Europe or persuaded diehard politicians — sometimes only a cliché will suffice — to be tough on the causes of crime? And would she have ever addressed those huge, bedazzled crowds who flocked to witness her ministry?
During her lifetime, Betsy was often an embarrassment to her family. After her death in 1845 she acquired the patina of the formidably frumpish do-gooder portrayed on the current £5 note. Now, thanks to this recklessly honest book, she has at last emerged as an all-round human being whom her huge, extended circle of presentday relations can be quietly proud of. For my part, I must now try and restrain myself from telling every shopkeeper to whom I extend a fiver that the lady on the reverse is my aunt. The other day, I relayed this boastful information to my local Muslim newsagent and met with the lugubrious reply, ‘You told me that before.’
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