Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (12 page)

Fortunately,
this experience was to be short lived. As before, she rallied, and
by July she was sufficiently well enough for her transfer to be
effected. Orange wrote to Denbigh, and a female attendant from that
Asylum arrived by train on 29th July 1879 to collect Catherine and
escort her back to Wales. She had stayed in Broadmoor for a very
short time, a little over ten months, but for the time being she
remained a pleasure woman.

The care that
Catherine had received in Broadmoor had been considerable, and this
was acknowledged by her family. The last paper on her Broadmoor
file is a letter written on behalf of William Jones in January
1880. In it, he stated that although his wife seemed rational and
sane in Denbigh, her general health was worse, and he ascribed this
to the inferior diet she was given compared to her Broadmoor
rations. He asked for Dr Orange’s help in gaining his wife’s
discharge back home.

The Home
Office relented in her case within a year. She was conditionally
discharged from the Joint Counties Asylum and moved back to the
farmhouse that she now shared with William senior, William junior
and the other children at Llwydcoed Fawr in Llanllyfni. Her husband
carried on with the farm, and she carried on as a mother, that day
in May 1878 now forgiven, if not forgotten.

These women’s
stories are only five of some five hundred from the Victorian
period, but they serve as an illustration of the type of case to be
found in Broadmoor’s female wing. Apart from their confinements,
these mothers blended in amongst the other women on the wards.
Their crimes were unremarkable, even if we find them shocking.

There is no
evidence that the medical staff at Broadmoor ever sought to follow
up the fate of the children who had left their care. Any subsequent
discovery was down purely to communication from outside. As it
turned out, the Broadmoor babies had suffered differing fortunes.
The poor law welfare system had intervened for three of them, which
perhaps says something about the social class of woman likely to be
found in the Asylum. Only two ended up being cared for by their own
families.

For the babies
that lived, by the time they arrived in adulthood they would have
had no recollection of the place where they had spent their first
few weeks of life. They would not recall the walls, the wards or
company of lunatics. It is unlikely that they considered themselves
to have been born in Crowthorne. The fact that the hospital had no
further business with them meant that they were also free to make
their own lives away from any taint or stigma. Their stories would
remain separate from that of Broadmoor until now.

‘Escape from
Broadmoor’ is actually the title of a post-war British short,
starring John Le Mesurier as the patient on the run. The film has
nothing to do with the real-life Broadmoor, but the existence of
the film title is good evidence of the fear that an escaped lunatic
can cause to the wider community. This has been true of Broadmoor
since it opened. Of course, whenever there is an element of
coercion to keep people in one place, there will inevitably be some
whose thoughts turn to being elsewhere. Victorian Broadmoor was not
somewhere that most patients wished to make their home: it admitted
them not by petition, but by the order of the courts or of the Home
Secretary. So those domiciled in the Asylum were not necessarily
willing guests, and most were sufficiently aware of their situation
to object to it if they chose to do so. Some lunatics embraced this
power more actively than others.

Victorian
Broadmoor’s record on escapes has to be seen in context. The
relevant comparison at the time was to Her Majesty’s prisons, or
the county asylum network, and when this comparison was made, the
new Criminal Lunatic Asylum had an enviable position. This was a
fact that its Superintendents could parade before the Home Office
when things did occasionally go wrong. The public perception of
danger was always much greater than the reality, and eventually,
Broadmoor’s record was exceptional. In hindsight, however, this was
a hard won reputation after an eventful first decade of the
Asylum’s life.

When Broadmoor
opened in May 1863, everyone expected escapes to be attempted.
Indeed, the site had been chosen so as to be reasonably close to
London and the railways, but far enough away from other property
that it would take an escaping lunatic sometime to find
civilisation. Preparations for public protection were made onsite
by barring the windows and erecting boundary walls. The staff lived
mostly on the premises, and the patients were required to wear a
uniform of blue clothing, marked on the lining with a crown and the
Asylum’s name. There were strict rules about what items patients
could have access to, and handover systems were in place for staff
so that no patient should ever have the opportunity to escape.
There was also cure, as well as prevention: shortly after Broadmoor
had opened, the Asylum wrote to the Home Office asking for
authorisation to pay reward money to anyone bringing back an
escaped patient. The Home Office duly obliged, and suggested that
they would be prepared to pay up to five pounds as a reward.
Although these actions were essentially practical rather than
strategic, they put on an impressive show of Victorian risk
management in action, based on experiences in other custodial
institutions. Whether every eventuality had been covered would only
be tested by real-life attempts, and it was not long before the
patients began finding the flaws in the system.

Over time, it
would mostly be the men who tried to discharge themselves, so when
the first escapee came from the female side it was a more novel
event than might have been supposed. The date was Wednesday 8th
June 1864, and it was late at night. Mary McBride woke up from her
dormitory bed in the female block, went through an unlocked
internal door into the ladies’ chapel, jumped down from one of the
chapel windows and ran off across the estate. It had been a
remarkably straightforward escape. Not only had the dormitory door
been left open, against regulations, but also there were no bars
across the chapel windows, and once McBride was in the women’s
airing ground, she found only one wall, roughly six foot high,
between her and the outside world. Action was taken promptly: the
attendants in charge of the dormitory were reprimanded, and the
absence of bars on the chapel windows was rectified at once.

McBride was a
fifty-one year old widow, a tall, thin woman with grey hair who had
been convicted of theft at the Lancaster Sessions in 1857 and ended
up in the county asylum there. She was a factory worker who was
also allegedly a prostitute. She was a curious case for admission,
as although convicted, her sentence had expired five years before
she had been transferred to Broadmoor, within a month of its
opening, in June 1863. After her flight, her absence was not
spotted immediately, and so a potential head start was afforded to
her. Despite this, her apparel was spotted by a local bobby and she
was retaken the next day in Reading. Broadmoor’s Council of
Supervision fined the two attendants ten shillings each, and paid
two pounds to the Superintendent at Reading Police Station as a
reward. McBride tried to escape again in November, when she was
part of a walking party exercising in the wider grounds, and as a
result she found her future movements restricted solely to the
female block and airing court. She was removed to Rainhill Asylum
in Liverpool three years later.

Low walls
would remain a weak spot of the Asylum for a while to come. The
next escape also encompassed them, when George Hage made off from
the Terrace at around seven o’clock on the evening of 19th
September. On the evening of his escape, a gate had been left open
from that part of the Terrace that formed the airing court for
Block 5, one of the two Blocks for more trusted patients, and
beyond the gate, the Asylum boundary wall had temporarily been
knocked down while the water tower was being built. Once again, it
was a simple exit, with Hage ambling away from the Terrace, out of
the gate and through the dismantled wall.

Hage was a
young man, aged just twenty-two, with distinctive, auburn hair and
hazel eyes, who had been convicted of theft at Leicester in 1861.
In jail, he developed delusions that he was poisoned, so was
removed first to Bethlem and then to Broadmoor in July 1864. He
lasted a little longer than McBride outside, working in a coal mine
for a few weeks before his distinguishing features were recognised
by Police in Sheffield, and he was re-admitted on 8th November. His
escape, though, led to a minor scandal, when he explained that an
attendant called John Philport had agreed to turn a blind eye to
his run. Philport had been trouble to the Asylum throughout his
brief stay on its establishment. He had been found to be so
neglectful of his duties that a week before Hage’s escape, he was
given notice to leave at the end of the month. The authorities’
mistake was in allowing him to remain on site at all, and he
carried on misbehaving to such an extent that he was dismissed
summarily before his notice period expired. In the meantime,
unknown to anyone, he had intentionally assisted Hage with the plan
to allow the patient’s liberty. After Hage had implicated the now
ex-attendant, Medical Superintendent John Meyer turned the case
over to the Police. They located Philport, arrested him and charged
him, and in due course he was given twelve months’ hard labour at
the Reading Assizes. Hage, fresh from his gainful employment, was
certified as sane, and sent off to Millbank Prison to serve out the
rest of his sentence.

These first
two escapes set the general pattern for future years, where a lone
patient would first formulate, and then execute a plan which they
hoped would lead to their freedom. These plans were sometimes
thoroughly prepared, and sometimes wholly opportune. The level of
preparation involved did not statistically make a difference to
success. Yet while the lone lunatic runner was the norm, and it was
exceptional for patients to conspire in concert, the third and last
attempt of 1864 would also be the only one in the Victorian period
that might be described as a ‘mass breakout’.

Even then, it
was only four patients who were involved: Timothy Grundy, Richard
Elcombe, John Thompson and Thomas Douglas. The last two appear
again later in this story, where their tales are told in more
detail. Like McBride and Hage, they were also ‘time’ patients:
convicts who had become insane while serving a fixed sentence in
prison. Similarly, Elcombe was a thirty-seven year old sailor who
had been sentenced to seven years for theft in 1851. Sent to
Portland Prison, he had assaulted a warder and been given another
twenty years inside. Like Hage, he developed the delusion that he
was poisoned: a delusion that is common to many other patients in
Victorian Broadmoor. Elcombe ended up in Bethlem, and eventually
spent the whole of his sentence either there or in Broadmoor, from
where he was sent to the Dorset Asylum in 1874.

It was Grundy
who was the ringleader, ‘a powerfully built man’ according to
William Orange, Meyer’s then deputy. Accused of drowning his
sweetheart after a quarrel, Grundy had been found ‘not guilty by
reason of insanity’ at Worcester in 1863, aged twenty-seven. He was
the first ‘pleasure man’ – as opposed to the convicts, a patient
detained indefinitely at Her Majesty’s Pleasure – to try and
escape. He had come to Broadmoor from Fisherton House, the
provincial alternative to Bethlem, in Salisbury, only three months
before. He was noted by the Broadmoor staff as a man who liked to
try and organise direct action, and was often secluded in his room
for his troubles. In 1873, he directed a gang attack on the
Principal Attendant of Block 1, who was badly injured. By the
1880s, Grundy had calmed down sufficiently for his sister to
unsuccessfully petition twice for his discharge. However, it was
felt to be too risky to ever let him go, and Grundy remained inside
the walls. He died in the Asylum in 1908 from old age, at
seventy-one.

Back on
Sunday, 14th December 1864, these four men had an elaborate plan.
While the Chaplain was conducting an evening service on the ground
floor for the men of Block 1, this little gang stood in the Block’s
gallery upstairs, around the central staircase. They were not
attending the prayers. Rather, Thompson – a professed atheist -
asked the attendant on duty if the latter might fetch a small piece
of pie that Thompson had left in the ward. When the attendant
obliged, one of the men shut the gallery door behind him and jammed
the lock with a stone. The four of them then made their way into
the first floor day room, barricaded the door, broke a window, and
took out knotted ropes made from handkerchiefs, with which they
proceeded to shin down the wall. The Chaplain, part way through his
lines below, looked up to see four burly figures passing by the
ground floor windows. The alarm was raised, whereupon it was
discovered that an accomplice, presumably on a given signal, had
similarly stuffed stones into all the external door locks for the
Block, effectively locking in the attendants.

Fortunately,
the stones delayed rather than prevented the staff from getting
out, and the fleeing patients had not managed to exit the airing
court before they were caught. It had been a near miss on this
occasion. Block 1, together with the later Block 6, formed what
were termed the ‘back Blocks’, for the more ‘refractory’, or
violent patients. A breakout from one of these Blocks was likely to
have greater potential consequences for the public. It was clear
that the back Block design required improvement. After this event,
an additional, more secure entrance to Block 1 was created from the
administrative Block to ensure that the way out would never be
blocked in the future; the design of Block 6, under construction at
the time, was modified accordingly.