Your Last Paper Five Pound Note by Janie Hampton

For the past fifteen years, all of us who live in Britain have looked at this woman many thousands of times. But within the next few months she will disappear from public view as paper notes are replaced with plastic ones.. Who is she? 

The last paper £5 note

She is Elizabeth Fry, the woman on the “back” of the £5 note. (The woman on the “front” is Queen Elizabeth II, who appears on all British sterling notes.) So why was she chosen?
Elizabeth Fry changed the lives of prisoners in the 19th century, in Britain and all over the world. Much is already known about her extraordinary humanitarian work , so I’ll tell you a bit about her early life.
Betsy, as she was known, was the daughter of devout Quakers from East Anglian banking families – her mother Kitty (1755-1794) was a Barclay; and her father John Gurney (1749-1809) was a partner in Gurney’s bank. Eventually the two banks married too.  Born in 1772, Betsy grew up the third of eleven children in Earlham Hall, a country house in Norfolk built over many centuries. It had 80 cupboards for ‘hide and seek’ and was set in beautiful park land - now the site of the University of East Anglia. There were at least two dozen indoor and outdoor staff, who were treated as part of the larger family.
The Gurneys of Earlham were known as ‘Gay Quakers’ – they loved to dance and sing, and they wore cloaks with colourful linings. Kitty believed in liberal and equal education so Betsy and her six sisters were taught French, Latin, Botany, History and Geography, as well as needlecraft and family economics. Drawing lessons were given by John Crome and John Sell Cotman, leading members of the Norwich School. As part of their social and moral education, Kitty would fill jugs with soup and march her children off to feed the local poor.
Unlike her rowdy siblings, her mother described her third daughter as ‘my dove-like Betsy, scarcely ever offends and is truly engaging’. Her sisters found her moody, self-absorbed and difficult. She resisted joining them in the North Sea at Cromer or duck-shooting on the Norfolk Broads. Following Quaker practice, the children were encouraged to write their true feelings, and faults, in daily journals – and then had to read them out to the family. Betsy was unsparingly honest about the sins of both herself, and her sisters. Her four younger sisters were often irritated by her goodness: ‘she does little kindnesses, even to those who ignore her.’
When she was only 37, Kitty died of erysipelas, a skin infection which is easily treated nowadays. The Gurney children were then aged between one and 16 years; Betsy was just 12. To keep them cheerful, their father would hire a blind fiddler on Saturday evenings who could not know that the sound of laughter and dancing came from Quakers. Despite being shy, Betsy had a beautiful singing voice and danced with grace. She observed in her journal that dancing made her flirt more and at 17 she wrote, ‘I must beware of being a flirt, it is an abominable character’. Much to the disapproval of the Plain Quakers, her father invited guests belonging to other Christian denominations, and encouraged his children to know about the world. Just as many of us boycotted South African wine to bring down apartheid, as early as 1800 the young Gurneys resisted eating sugar to try and end slavery.
On Sunday mornings, the family walked the three miles into Norwich for “Goats”, the Goat Lane Friends Meeting House. On the way there any child who lapsed from speaking French was fined a farthing. Quaker meetings lasted three or four hours, sometimes in complete silence. For children who loved riding, swimming in the river, dancing and drawing, this was an agony of self-sacrifice and they found  it “extremely dis” [disagreeable]. By the end they felt “thoroughly goatified” until they got home to Earlham for a “romp and a dance”. Their journals refer as often to dancing, as they do to their sins.

A watercolour of Betsy's Quaker cousins at Friends Meeting House, Gracechurch Street, London in 1778.  Twenty years later, Betsy would have been sitting on the left and William Savery speaking from this platform.  Note the speakers hat hanging above him.

One Sunday in February, 1798, the seven sisters were sitting in the front row at Goats. Betsy intended to spend the meeting contemplating the beauty of her new pair of purple boots with red laces. But she became transfixed by the speaker, an American Quaker called William Savery (1750-1804). ‘I had a feint light spread over my mind…it has caused me to feel a little religion,’ she wrote. Determined to hear Savery speak again, she asked her father to take her to London. During the week, she attended Drury Lane theatre, Covent Garden opera, saw performances of Hamlet and Bluebeard, went dancing, had her hair done, and finally on Sunday went to hear Savery again. Her life was never the same again. Much to her family’s annoyance, she gave up dancing and singing, wore only plain grey clothes, spoke quietly and determined to overcome her fear of the dark. She visited the sick and poor with clothes and food, started a Sunday school and became a Plain Quaker. Two years later she married a fellow Quaker, Joseph Fry (1777–1861) – whose family made their fortune in chocolate, although Joseph was an unsuccessful banker.

The 'Angel of Prisons' reading in Newgate Gaol.  The man on the left wearing spectacles is her brother-in-law Thomas Fowell Buxton MP. Painting by Jerry Barrett, 1816, on which £5 note is based.

The couple lived in London where in 1813 Betsy visited Newgate Prison. She was horrified by the filthy, overcrowded conditions of women, many imprisoned with their children. Five years later she became the first woman to present evidence to Parliament, which led to the MPs John Peel and  Thomas Fowell Buxton supporting the ‘Gaols Act of 1823’. She formed the “British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners”, the first national women's organization in Britain; and campaigned against capital punishment. She established a "nightly shelter" in London for the homeless,and in towns all over Britain she organized volunteers to help the poor in their homes. After Betsy set up a college for nurses, Florence Nightingale took some of them to the war in the Crimea. Queen Victoria supported her work and the King of Prussia even joined her on a visit to Newgate Prison. Betsy visited over 100 convict ships before they set sail, giving each woman a ‘useful bag’ for her transportation. She wrote, “My mind is too much tossed by a variety of interests and duties — husband, children, household accounts, Meetings, the Church, near relations, friends, and Newgate....it is a little like being in the whirlwind and in the storm; may I not be hurt in it, but enabled quietly to perform that which ought to be done.”
Betsy died of a stroke aged 65 and was buried in Essex. There are many buildings named after her, including an 1849 women’s refuge in Hackney; part of the Home Office headquarters; and a school in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA. There are statues of her in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, East Ham Library, and the Old Bailey Court, London.

“Oh Lord, may I be directed what to do and what to leave undone.”
Statue of Betsy in The Old Bailey,  the site of Newgate Prison, London.

There’s even a National Elizabeth Fry Week in Canada every May. Many thousands of people, mostly unknown to her, benefited from her humanitarian work. Nevertheless some people criticized Elizabeth Fry for neglecting her domestic duties - despite the fact that all but one of her eleven children reached adulthood. Sadly, this is a problem women still face today. So before you spend your last paper five pound note, think about this woman who changed the way we think about the homeless, prisons and slaves - and yet still managed to annoy her sisters!
Elizabeth Fry, née Gurney, 1780-1845.
Janie Hampton is descended from four of Elizabeth Fry’s Gurney siblings.
This blog uses her mother's book: 'Friends and Relations - three centuries of Quaker families', Verily Anderson, Hodder & Stoughton, 1980.

THREADS: the delicate life of John Craske by Adèle Geras

There are many kinds of books in the world. Some, you quite  fancy when you hear about them. Others you know you have no interest in at all. With a few you think: I'll wait for the paperback. And then there are the ones that you have to have the minute you read about them. In hardback. However expensive, and the sooner the better. 

On April 11th, 2015, I read Rachel Campbell-Johnston's review of THREADS by Julia Blackburn in the Times and I bought the book as soon as I possibly could. It was a volume I had to have in my possession, on my shelf at once, and when I got it, I dropped every other book that I was reading and started it immediately. To say this was a pleasure is an understatement. In every possible respect (production, paper, cover, illustrations, and above all the text itself) this book is a thing of beauty. You need to pick it up and touch the smooth pages and feel for yourself the heft and weight of it. 

More than anything  else, though, it was the subject that drew me.  I am interested in artists who have no training, and I love seascapes of every kind. Also, I am fascinated by embroidery in all its manifestations  (see the History Girls post I wrote after a trip to Bayeux) and I support the charity Fine Cell Work who give male prisoners a chance to express themselves creatively and in the process find some measure of rehabilitation.

When I read about John Craske, I was quite determined to go and see the exhibition that Julia Blackburn put together in Norwich.
The book details her search through the obscurer parts of Norfolk to find out what she could about this amazing artist who spent much of his life in a small cottage first painting images of the sea on every imaginable surface and then embroidering the most astonishing art on to a piece of cloth stretched on to a frame. I'm afraid that I failed in this ambition and the illustrations in this post come from my amateur photographs of pages of my book. I went to the wrong place....the website was ambiguous to say the least and directed me and my companion on the trip, Helen Craig, to a place which was shut in a way that looked as though it had no hope of ever opening again. There was no poster advertising the exhibition anywhere in Norwich and the kind folk we asked at the Cathedral knew nothing about it.....I feel sad to have missed it, and will treasure my book even more. I live in hope that the exhibition, which finished too soon for me to revisit, moves to somewhere else.

Craske, born in 1881, was a fisherman from a family whose lives were bound up with the sea. It was Craske's  natural habitat and his whole life was  spent on it, beside it and depicting it in paint and thread. He fell ill at the age of 36, and from then on, he described himself as being in a 'stuporous state.'  From 1923 onwards, he painted the sea until he could no longer stand. The embroidery happened when painting became too difficult for him.  Valentine  Ackland, and her lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, discovered him and championed him and that provided some money at least.  Some people in the thirties (Peter Pears, for instance)  were aware of him, and thought highly of him, and there is one newspaper cutting reproduced in Threads, but he never became fashionable, unlike his contemporary, Alfred Wallis of Cornwall.  Craske's devoted wife looked after him. Her name was Laura and she cared for him till the end of his life. The review by Claire Harman in the Guardian provides a good overview of his life and a wonderful description of the book, and I do urge you to read it. I'm grateful to Sally Prue for pointing it out to me. 

Blackburn is a wonderful writer. Her account of how she looked for Craske and uncovered the details of his life reminds me very much of W.G.Sebald's Rings of Saturn. She doesn't stick to the main biographical thrust of the narrative but wanders in and out of many places, meeting strange people and seeing wondrous things. You want to make notes to prompt yourself to follow her on the journey she took. I have a whole notebook full of leads to chase up one day. Meanwhile, an exhibition in the gallery of Norwich University of the Arts is a good start to getting Craske's name to a greater public, though it's disturbing that so little sign of the show was visible in Norwich. This seems spookily of a piece with his invisibility throughout his life, and  points to a flower that's born to blush unseen, but that's not quite true. I'm sure LOTS of admirers have visited the gallery and enjoyed his work first hand and the hope is  that the word will keep spreading and that more people will become aware of  this amazing and almost forgotten artist's life and work.

By the end of Threads, you know about Craske, but you also know about Julia Blackburn. Her husband, the sculptor Herman Makkink, dies suddenly and she becomes a widow.  The way she describes widowhood touched me very much. I felt she'd expressed much of what I felt when I lost my husband, in 2013. She was urged to go on working by her late husband, and it is the work, she says, which ensures that life goes on: that and the birth of a grandchild. Blackburn has gone on working in great style with this book about Craske, restoring some of her own life in the process of describing his.

And I, because I missed the exhibition, went to the Cathedral in Norwich. Any readers of this blog will know I have a love of cathedrals and this one is beautiful. I was glad to have had the opportunity to see it. I also saw a terrific collection of teapots in the Castle Museum....that's something I'd never have found in the normal course of events, and I felt quite Julia Blackburn-like about the pleasure of bumping into unexpected things.  On the train home from Norwich, Helen Craig took a most beautiful photograph of the sky, which is as interesting as the sea, and I'm putting it up at the end of this post for everyone to share. 

Please do not miss this book.  The photo above shows the back of one of Craske's embroideries and, like the rest of his work, it's lovely. Threads is easily the best non-fiction book I've read in years and years: always accessible, never obscure, endlessly fascinating and full of the strangest and most unusual characters.

A VISIT TO CASTLE RISING by Adèle Geras

 On a perfect April day, when the trees were "coming into leaf/like something almost being said," (Philip Larkin)

 I visited Castle Rising with Stephanie Nettell. The older readers of this blog will remember Stephanie as the Guardian's children's book reviews editor in the days when we had four foolscap pages of children's book reviews a year....those, as they say, were the days.

We'd had a lovely lunch and set off to this castle, which is very close to where Stephanie lives. I had, to my shame, never heard of it before, but I'm always up for visiting a castle - I like them  almost as much as I like  cathedrals and this one, as you will see from the picture below, is the most castle-y of castles...it looks like the kind of thing a child might draw.

It was built in the twelfth century by William d'Albini, to show how much he'd risen in the world on his marriage to the widow of Henry I, Alice of Louvain. I wonder whether that was the reason for the name RISING but I think that's a frivolous idea....in any case it's most beautiful.

 The walls are intact, although the roof no longer exists. Stephanie and I were each given a wonderful hand- held audio device which took us in order through all the rooms in the palace, pointing out fine details and letting us admire everything in  our own time. As a contributor to "DAUGHTERS OF TIME" the History Girls anthology of stories, I was impressed that they'd adopted a 'history girls' approach to the commentary and some of the information was given to us in the voice of a fictitious lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella. She was the wife of Edward II. As  we  know  he was murdered in a most brutal way.   After his death, Isabella was imprisoned here for more than thirty years and was visited in her captivity by her son Edward III.

 After her death, it became a hunting lodge for the Black Prince and in 1544 passed to the Howard family, who still own it today. 

You can see much of the original fabric of the building and Stephanie and I wondered how the 12th Century folk got up and down those spiral stairs in a hurry and especially at night. They were vertiginous, even with a  rope to hang on to....how did ladies  manage it in long skirts?  Or at night? 

After we left the Castle, we went to see the lovely church of St Lawrence in the village of Castle Rising. It's an idyllic looking  place and the church stands surrounded by lovely houses and a most beautiful set of almshouses.

I liked particularly the font decorated with three cat faces .....

...and this kneeler, which shows the coat of arms of Castle Rising. I've only photographed one lion but the kneeler runs  all along the bottom of the altar rail....there is a long line  of little yellow lions, looking very friendly. 

I do urge anyone near King's Lynn to go and visit this delightful place.  It's quite close to where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be bringing up Prince George and his forthcoming sibling and the shop attached to the Castle is full of wooden swords and small t shirts printed in a  chain mail pattern: they'd like those, as would any child. 

  

Many thanks to Stephanie Nettell for taking me there.