Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (10 page)

The Dawson
family was now split three ways. Catherine stayed in Broadmoor, her
moods swinging between excitement and depression. When she was
better, she kept in contact with her husband, reading his letters
and writing her replies. But as well as her mental illness, she was
often in poor physical health and unable either to write or to work
at her sewing. She would lay in bed, exhausted, with her hands and
wrists scarred from breaking windows in the female block. During
one such period, in 1871, Henry worried that the long silence from
his wife was fatal. He wrote directly to the Broadmoor authorities
asking whether his wife were dead or alive. Shortly after it was
confirmed that she was still alive, he visited her. He did not know
when he would be able to do so again.

Though
Catherine was slowly failing, it was Henry who died first, on 18th
June 1872. A friend of the family wrote to Broadmoor to pass on the
news, and Catherine was informed. Up in Birkenhead, the landlady of
the house that Henry and his two surviving daughters had lodged in
now took the remaining children on herself. Other friends took
Henry’s place as correspondent, but not to Catherine. Instead, they
continued to write to Broadmoor, asking after the health of Mrs
Dawson.

Catherine
spent the last two and half years of her life in the infirmary in
the female wing, losing weight and becoming weaker. She was
suffering from a degenerative disease. Her mind continued to sink
with her body, and by January 1876 she had ceased speaking to the
medical staff or being able to get out of bed.

There was one
last moment of clarity. On 16th April 1876, she rallied briefly on
her death bed. She spoke coherently, she chatted to her fellow
patients around her. Then she died from tuberculosis, aged
forty-one.

The story of
the second child born at Broadmoor was a somewhat different one.
Some fifteen months had passed since Catherine Dawson had given
birth when Henry Meller arrived 18th March 1868. Henry’s mother was
called Mary Anne, and she was a stonemason’s wife from Newington in
South London. Mary Meller was twenty-seven years old; a small,
stout woman with dark hair. She already had four children when she
became pregnant once again in the summer of 1867. A few months
later, on 1st November 1867 she attacked a widow who lodged with
her and her family, hitting the woman over the head as she stooped
to light the kitchen fire, and then trying to cut her throat as she
sat down to recover. Her victim, Mrs Mary Cattermole, managed to
run from the house to safety, while Mrs Meller tore at her lodger’s
hair and chased her into the street. Two men managed to tackle the
assailant, and held onto Mrs Meller until a police constable
arrived to arrest her. Her trial in December was at the Old Bailey,
and both her doctor and her father testified that she suffered from
regular but intermittent bouts of insanity. She had attempted
suicide on previous occasions. The prosecution made no attempt to
press her guilt, and after a short hearing she was found not guilty
by reason of insanity.

Despite the
verdict, the Governor of Horsemonger Lane Gaol was not convinced.
He wrote on her transfer document to Broadmoor that she was ‘quiet
and well-educated, betraying no symptoms of insanity’. Nevertheless
he noted that she had attempted to poison herself while in his
custody. She was admitted to the Asylum on 14th January 1868, seven
months pregnant.

Mary was in
better health than Catherine Dawson had been when her son was born.
As a consequence, she was allowed to nurse her child for around
three weeks before her husband, William, came to collect the baby
and take him home. Mary was also noticeably improved since her
admission, and though occasionally prone to physical outbursts, was
employed regularly in needlework on the convalescent ward. Her
change in character had been remarkable, and the Broadmoor staff
suspected that it could be attributed to one thing: that she was
sober. The possibility that it had been the drink that had driven
her to attack Mrs Cattermole had not surfaced at her trial, yet
Mary was prepared to concede that it might be so. She confessed to
previously intemperate habits, and even that she was drunk the
night before the attack. Her experience was not uncommon to
Victorian Broadmoor patients, several of whom had taken drinking to
such a stage that the courts considered insanity to have
intervened. In 1869, a report summarised her state as ‘no doubt a
bad-tempered woman but betrays at present no symptoms of insanity’.
With a comfortable home and a caring, solvent husband, she was
considered to be both well and at a low risk of reoffending. She
was subsequently conditionally discharged into William’s care on
3rd May 1870.

But this was
not the last contact between the family and the hospital. In
February 1873, William Meller wrote to one of the attendants saying
that his wife had recently begun drinking heavily again. He
complained that Mary was pawning the family possessions for money
to fund her alcohol addiction. It was the letter of a man who felt
that he had lost control of his spouse, detailing his inability to
divert Mary from her errant behaviour.

Amongst other
tales, Mr Meller recounted an evening when his wife had told the
servants that she was going out to listen to a lecture. Since the
venue was one where the couple had season tickets, with seats
reserved for each event, Mr Meller set off with the intention of
joining his wife. Of course, when he reached the auditorium in
question, both seats were empty, and Mary was not there.
Distraught, William Meller set off for a nearby chemist’s to buy
some pills to calm his frayed nerves. As he waited for his tablets
to be counted out, he chatted idly to the man behind the counter.
The chemist mentioned that he had just seen a drunken woman pass
his shop, pursued by a mob of ‘a couple of hundred people’. Meller
stopped dead: it couldn’t be, could it? He raced out of the shop,
following the direction in which the chemist had pointed, and
shortly caught up with the mob. Sure enough, at the centre of the
angry crowd he found his wife. Meller had no idea what she had been
accused of doing, and was not particularly interested to
investigate. He called a nearby policeman, who managed to disperse
the throng, and Meller took his wife home in a hansom: ‘but she
would not sit in the seat and I was compelled to bid her lie in the
bottom of the cab.’

William Meller
asked Dr William Orange, Broadmoor’s Superintendent, to write to
his wife. He said that she took no notice of him, but he thought
that she would take notice of Orange. About the same time, and
apparently unconnected, Mary Meller wrote to Broadmoor herself. In
it she asked Dr Orange to visit her. ‘I am miserable and unhappy
and require your assistance’, she wrote. Her side of the story was
different. She alleged that William had broken her nose, and stated
that ‘I would rather be under your care than be thus ill used’.

It seems
likely that Dr Orange did write to the Mellers, possibly as a
couple, as William addressed a further two letters to him directly
in April 1873. It appears that husband and wife had managed to
reach some kind of resolution themselves. Mary became more settled,
and had been on a trip to Lancashire and Yorkshire. William also
stated that Mary had bought little Henry home: whether or not he
had been looked after by relatives up till then is unclear.

Although they
had another child, the Mellers’ family unit did not last
significantly longer. Mary Meller would be another Broadmoor mother
who died young. Her death occurred on 23rd December 1878 at the age
of thirty-seven, and she was buried in Nunhead Cemetery in
Southeast London. However, unlike Stephen Dawson, Henry had enjoyed
an upbringing together with his parents and his siblings. He grew
up to have his own family.

The Broadmoor
staff had now experienced two quite different outcomes for the
children born in their care. They would use these precedents to
shape their future experiences. Their next chance to do so was
three years away. This time, the mother was Margaret Crimmings, a
twenty-six year-old single servant from London.

Unlike the
other Broadmoor mothers in this story, she was a convict patient,
rather than a ‘pleasure woman’. She had not been found innocent by
reason of insanity, but found guilty, and then developed mental
health problems while in jail. Margaret had been sentenced to seven
years’ imprisonment on 11th October 1870 at the Middlesex Quarter
Sessions. Her crime was stealing two coats, apparently from her
brother. The length of her sentence was down to her past record,
for this was not the first time that she had been inside. She had
four previous convictions for theft on her file, the first at the
age of eighteen, and a further one for assaulting a police officer.
Already, she had spent a little more than two years of her life in
prison.

The first few
months of this latest and longest sentence were spent at both
Westminster and Millbank Prisons in London. It was while she was
here that the Prison authorities formed the view that she was
insane, and asked the Home Office whether she could be transferred
to Broadmoor. The matter of her pregnancy was an added
complication, as it meant that should she move, accommodation would
have to be found for her in the infirmary. Before the transfer was
sanctioned, the Home Office took the step of writing to Broadmoor
to ask directly whether the Asylum would be prepared to take her
on.

Dr Orange
replied positively, and she was admitted on 10th May 1871. This
small, stout woman was eight months pregnant when she arrived
inside the Gatehouse. Her skin was pale from her incarceration, and
it contrasted with her dark brown hair. Immediately she was
interviewed, and the Broadmoor staff unconvinced of her suitability
for their care. Dr Orange wrote in her notes that she ‘talks
nonsense saying that she was frightened at Millbank and that I was
the person who frightened her…it is evidently her desire to be
thought insane at present’.

Nevertheless,
she was here now, and was not about to be moved again. Her child
was born soon after her arrival, at 5.15am on the morning of 8th
June. The first girl to be born in Broadmoor, she was christened
Margaret Julia by Broadmoor’s visiting Catholic priest. Like Mary
Meller, Margaret senior was allowed to nurse her baby at first,
doing so ‘in a sensible and affectionate manner’. But on 12th June
something changed, and she began to act oddly, suggesting that she
had known the attendants for many years, but that now they were
using false names; that the nurse helping her was not holding the
baby properly, intending to hurt it; and that people were being
unkind and speaking badly of her. Diagnosed as having entering a
maniacal state, her baby was quickly taken from her.

With no
husband or partner to care for the illegitimate child, Broadmoor
wrote to the St Marylebone Union, where Margaret had spent time in
the workhouse during 1870, to confirm the guardians’ duty to take
the baby. They acknowledged their obligation, but reluctantly, and
asked whether Broadmoor could allow the baby to stay with its
mother until her removal back to prison. Dr Orange considered this
to be of no benefit to the infant. He replied that ‘the mental
condition of Margaret Crimmings is such as to preclude the
possibility of leaving the child under her care…as under any
circumstances the child is deprived of its mother’s care its
removal from the Asylum would appear to be desirable on all
accounts.’

So the
Assistant Matron of St Marylebone Workhouse came to collect
Margaret Julia on 19th July, and take her back to central London.
Sadly, the baby girl was to have a very short life outside the
asylum. She died at the workhouse nursery, Southall School, on 19th
August 1871, when she was only ten weeks’ old. The guardians wrote
that her death was due to ‘debility’, an unspecific cause, though a
description of Margaret Crimmings’s teeth in her Broadmoor notes
raises the possibility that both mother and child suffered from
congenital syphilis.

Meanwhile,
Margaret remained at Broadmoor, and was pronounced recovered from
her mania by August. She was employed in the asylum laundry where
she was an industrious worker, occasionally prone to excitable
outbursts but otherwise diligent. She became a patient suitable for
discharge.

As a convict
prisoner, Margaret’s sentence had a defined end date of March 1877.
Several years of good behaviour and hard work meant that the Home
Office was prepared to consider releasing her early. As she
approached the last year of her sentence, the Broadmoor staff began
to make enquiries as to who might take care of her. Her brother,
from whom she had stolen all those years ago, had remained in
contact and occasionally visited her and so he was asked if he
might help. He was happy to do so, and to offer her accommodation
at his lodgings back in London. Once reassured on that point, her
order of licence for release arrived from the Home Office, and she
was presented with the parchment document, signed and sealed. She
was discharged on 9th February 1876. Orange paid her fare from
Crowthorne and she took the train to Waterloo, reporting her
arrival at her brother’s house to the Metropolitan Police.

Despite
Margaret’s good behaviour in Broadmoor, her life outside did not
change much. She was unable to keep herself away from trouble and
remained a petty criminal. At the time of the 1891 census, she
could be found resident in another cell, this time in a police
station in Paddington.

Margaret
Crimmings was the exception to the Broadmoor mothers, in that she
was more of a criminal than a lunatic. When it was time for the
next baby to arrive, it came from more typical stock. By now, it
was 23rd February 1873. A second girl, christened Elizabeth
Margaret, this child was born to Margaret Davenport, a thirty-one
year old housewife from Warrington, Lancashire. Like Catherine
Dawson, Margaret Davenport had also been detained in Kirkdale
Prison, and was transferred from there to Broadmoor on 26th
September 1872, when she was four months pregnant. She had been
detained in Kirkdale a little over two months while she awaited the
move.