http://www.finecellwork.co.uk/products/show/DeMorganAnimalsThis interview from THE INDEPEDENT with the delightful Lady Anne Tree, friend of the rich and famous and penniless and infamous, will give you a wonderful lift.
'Throughout all these years, Anne Tree had continued writing her letters to ministers about her plans to give prisoners something worthwhile to do – including one that was hand-delivered to her cousin, Lord Cranborne, when he was a defence minister. "They had become," she admits, "ruder and ruder. One told one minister that, 'It is shits like you who let this country down.'" Its dispatch was followed by a long silence. "Then, out of the blue, Angela Rumbold [a Home Office minister in the Thatcher and Major governments] wrote to say she had read that letter. We met and finally she gave me the go-ahead. It was a humbling surprise. I nearly died."
Among the first to support the fledgling charity (Fine Cell Work) were friends of Tree and her husband in the States. Bill Paley, a former head of CBS, and Henry Ford both commissioned rugs to be made by prisoners. She even managed to persuade her sister-in-law, the 1960s supermodel Penelope Tree, to get some of her fashionable friends, including Mick Jagger, to do designs for cushions. Fine Cell Work was finally registered as a charity in 1995 and, with Tree now its president, is thriving with a six-figure sum generated annually by sales.
Needlework is suddenly very fashionable, and not just among Fine Cell Work's prison workers. "Stitch 'n' Bitch" circles are the new book clubs among young urban professionals. Julia Roberts, Madonna, Russell Crowe and Kate Moss are all said to relax with their tapestries. And versions of graffiti artist Banksy's street creations in cross-stitch are currently on sale in London's Spitalfields Market. So Anne Tree could claim to have been ahead of the pack. She prefers, though, to see herself as taking her lead from her grandmother who restored the hangings at Hardwick Hall, one of the properties linked to Chatsworth. Single-handed? "Yes, with a team from Chatsworth of mainly miners' wives."
On prison reform, too, Tree was arguing for more humane, enlightened treatment of offenders long before the modern penal-rehabilitation movement got going in the 1960s, but again perhaps, there is a better sense of perspective on her role in looking back. In the forthcoming V&A exhibition, the quilt commissioned from Fine Cell Work will hang with one made 160 years ago by female prisoners on a convict ship heading for Tasmania. It is sometimes known as the Elizabeth Fry Quilt, as the women had been given the materials to make it by the celebrated 19th-century prison reformer as part of her drive to find them useful things to do while incarcerated. I can't help wondering whether ministers placed as many obstacles in Fry's path as they did in Anne Tree's.'
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Here are some little-known facts: 52% of male and 72% of female adult prisoners have no qualifications. 40% of prisoners under twenty-one have been in the care of the local authority in their childhoods, where in the population as a whole the figure is only 2%. Half have serious problems with reading, two-thirds with numeracy and four-fifths with writing.
This means that giving support and incentives for learning is critical to improving these lives.
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