Quantitative Easing
Quantitative Easing is a term banded about much lately and is taken to mean printing more money when the economy is in severe financial difficulties. However real money is printed in Essex at Debden, which is the home of the Bank of England banknote printing works. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 and its bank note printing division moved to Debden* in the 1950s. Today all Bank of England notes are printed there.
An Essex man Valentine George Crittall from the family window dynasty was responsible for supervising the move. He became the 1st Baron of Braintree and was appointed as a director of the Bank of England in February 1948. The first notes came off of the press in October 1956. In 2004 De La Rue PLC took over banknote printing operations although the Bank of England still retains overwatch and owns the Debden site.
English bank notes already have a county connection as the current five pound note displays a portrait of Elizabeth Fry, the Essex based prison reformer who worked tirelessly to improve prison and social conditions in the early nineteenth century. The poem below by John Debenham gives an insight into Elizabeth Fry's work. However for full details of this chapter in the history of Essex a copy of the Essex Hundred Histories is most certainly needed.
THE LADY ON THE FIVE POUND NOTE
Told of the horrors facing women in prison life,A mother of eight children and a good Quaker wife,
Elizabeth Fry went to see for herself in Newgate jail
Women crammed thirty to a cell, with no hope of bail.
Offenders of both serious and minor crimeLocked up together in squalor and grime.
Old, young, even babies, all in the same state,
In an unhygienic stench awaiting their fate.
Shocked and dismayed by the conditions she saw
She called for prison reform and change to the law.
Of the prison conditions there was official disregard
So Mrs Fry campaigned on, lobbying parliament hard.
She spoke to politicians, she spoke with the Queen.
To Prime ministers also she told what she had seen.
Newgate's school and chapel were small battles won,
In the rest of the country there was much to be done.
Travelling the country gathering evidence needed
Her pleas for reform were eventually heeded
And parliament came to see the need for revision
Of laws and rules governing conditions in prison.
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