Page:Elizabeth Fry (Pitman 1884).djvu/79

Rh money and obeyed rules. Plenty of work could be done, seeing that they all required more or less clothing, while Botany Bay could take any number of garments to be utilised for the members of the penal settlement there.

Two months after Lord Lansdowne’s motion was made in Parliament, Mrs. Fry, together with Joseph John Gurney, his wife, and her own daughter, Rachel, went into Scotland on a religious and philanthropic tour. The chief object of this journey seems to have been the visitation of Friends’ Meetings in that part of the kingdom; but the prison enterprise was by no means forgotten. In her journal she records visits to meetings of Friends held at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Knowsley. At the latter place they were guests of the Earl of Derby, and much enjoyed the palatial hospitality which greeted them. They made a point of visiting most of the gaols and bridewells in the towns through which they passed, finding in some of them horrors far surpassing anything that Newgate could have shown them even in its unreformed days. At Haddington four cells, allotted to prisoners of the tramp and criminal class, were “very dark, excessively dirty, had clay floors, no fire-places, straw in one corner for a bed, and in each of them a tub, the receptacle for all filth”. Iron bars were used upon the prisoners so as to become instruments of torture. In one cell was a poor young man who was a lunatic—whence nobody knew. He had been subject to the misery and torture of Haddington gaol for eighteen months, without once leaving his cell for an airing. No clothes were allowed, no medical man attended those who were incarcerated, and a chaplain never entered there, while the prison itself was destitute of any airing-yard. The poor debtors,