Behind Closed Doors Fine Cell Work

Some of the Biggest Names in British Textile Design Are Working With a Charity That Helps Prisoners to Rebuild Their Lives

- Catherine Coyle

Back in the 1960s, when she first began volunteering in prisons, the philanthropist Lady Anne Tree would spend time with inmates who didn’t have any visitors. On one visit to Holloway, the women’s prison in London, she took a piece of half-finished needlework to occupy her as she kept the inmate's company. When some of the women helped her finish it, she was eager to pay them for their efforts – but she wasn’t allowed to: it would be tantamount to letting prisoners ‘profit from their crimes’, according to the authorities. Tree disagreed. She could see the many benefits – therapeutic as well as financial, to say nothing of gaining a skill that could be used once they were released – of teaching inmates needlework.

But it took three decades of campaigning before the government of the day, under John Major in 1992, gave the go-ahead to her scheme, and her charity, Fine Cell Work, could finally get off the ground.