Joanna Kelley

Forthright governor of Holloway Prison

Joanna Elizabeth Beadon, prison administrator: born Murree, India 23 May 1910; Governor, HM Prison, Holloway 1959-66; Assistant Director of Prisons (Women) 1967-74; OBE 1973; married 1934 Harper Kelley (died 1962; marriage dissolved); died London 12 April 2003.

Joanna Kelley was a remarkable individual, whose life was characterised by both concern for social reform and a passion for appreciating and understanding the world around her. She served in the Prison Service for nearly 30 years, and was Governor of Holloway from 1959 to 1966. A challenging and forthright figure, she was, in the words of one longstanding friend, "more remarkable than other people; she never thought of herself as important, but she did important things".

She was born Joanna Elizabeth Beadon in 1910 in Murree, a hill station in India (now Pakistan), where her father, William Beadon, was a commanding officer in the 51st Regiment of Sikhs. He was killed at Kut, now in Iraq, in 1916. Joanna was educated at Hayes Court, and then read Economics at Girton College, Cambridge (of which she was later made an honorary Fellow).

In 1934, she married Harper Kelley, an American 14 years her senior. For five years, she worked with him in the Department of Pre-History at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. When the Germans threatened Paris, Joanna and Harper separated, and she went back to England while he returned to America.

It was typical of Joanna Kelley that she saw the outbreak of war as an opportunity to contribute to the beleaguered society of which she was a part. Although prehistory was an area in which she remained interested for much of her life, she now turned her attention to social concerns. In 1939, she became a youth club leader in the YWCA, and in 1942 she took up a position as a welfare officer with the Admiralty in Bath.

With the end of the Second World War, her marriage also ended. She was devastated by the fact that her husband had found another partner, and it was because of her belief in the sanctity of the vows she had made that she never married again (a position on which she may have softened later in life).

Kelley then embarked upon a lengthy career in the prison service, to which she believed she had been called and for which she had a vision. She was made (successively) Deputy Governor and Governor of Askham Grange, near York, before becoming Governor of Holloway in 1959. She remained in post until 1966, when she was appointed Assistant Director of Prisons (Women). She wrote two books related to her prison work, When the Gates Shut (1967) and Who Casts the First Stone?: a new look at crime and punishment (1978).

Kelley struck those with whom she worked as "a doughty, highly educated and impressive woman who had a commanding presence and considerable compassion for the women in her charge". It was her belief that sentences should not be focused solely on containing the women prisoners, but should also equip them, practically and socially, for the life which awaited them outside prison.

When she became Assistant Director of Prisons (Women), she presided over the experimental redevelopment of Holloway (which she had spoken of as "a very sad place") along communal, rather than institutional, lines, allowing prisoners to live together in small, family-type groups. Her experiment was not entirely successful – the new building was never used in the way Kelley had intended – a frustration about which she, as a public servant, remained philosophical. Nevertheless, since the Holloway experiment had stemmed from deep conviction, an inevitable sense of disappointment stayed with her.

At the end of her career, Kelley made a considered decision to remain in the capital rather than retiring to the countryside. She wanted to remain intellectually active, and felt that London was the best place for her to be (although she also found time to travel round China). She had a clear Christian faith, and in her retirement, became an active member of St Michael's Chester Square, and, subsequently, St James the Less, Pimlico. She was unusually able to relate to diverse elements of the church community and was much loved by many of the younger members of the congregation, who saw her as something of a mentor.

Her dynamic Christian faith informed her life and work. In her young days, she was one of very few women involved in the Oxford Conferences (Anglican forums for learned theological discussion), which she would attend with her mother. In the 1950s, she spent much time with Brother Edward (founder of the Village Evangelists) and her spirituality was also influenced by Michael Ramsey and by Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary before the Second World War. She was also a keen promoter of the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin.

Kelley had a considerable knowledge of poetry; well into her eighties, she took great pleasure in organising evening poetry readings. Her favourite occasions seem to have been those at which her friend Edward Fox read selections from T.S. Eliot to small gatherings in her south London home. According to another close friend, she was acutely aware of the capacity of poetry to "express the mood of the moment"; The Waste Land always remained, for her, powerfully evocative of the period after the First World War, and during the Second World War she organised readings of Milton's Paradise Lost in her Bath home.

Annie Sutherland