Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (16 page)

Eighteen
seventy-one would turn out to be a busy year for escapes. On 18th
June, the sleepy east dormitory on the first floor of Block 4 was
woken by the sound of a window breaking. It was three o’clock in
the morning. Patient Patrick Burke had taken a rasp from the
shoemaker’s shop, filed off one side of his bedframe, plunged it
into the window and exerted such force that he had begun to bend
the new wrought iron frame. The windows in the dormitory were a
decent size, and very quickly, Burke had managed to bend enough of
the frame for his five foot six body to have a chance at escape.
Now that the windows were made of wrought iron, this was a
considerable achievement of power. Two other patients, William
Biglands and Patrick Lyndon – who, it may be recalled, had himself
tried to escape five years earlier – got up and went over to where
the remains of Burke’s bed lay lopsided on the floor. Burke,
meanwhile, had already begun to tie his sheets together, and
proceeded to throw them out of the window, anchoring them on the
remnants of the frame. The other two men gave him a leg up and he
began to squeeze himself through the tiny aperture, before shinning
down his makeshift rope. Biglands took up the next place in the
queue. During the whole commotion, not a single attendant had
peered in on the dormant lunatics, and it seemed as if the patients
might succeed in their endeavours. Then Burke’s sheet was seen by
an attendant below, the alarm was raised and the dormitory secured.
Burke was retaken on the roof of the covered way between the
central Blocks, the line of which was just below the level of the
first floor, and whose useful situation had featured in earlier
escape attempts. It would not do so again: Orange ordered this roof
to be taken down immediately, making the potential drop for future
exploits much less inviting.

Both Burke and
Biglands were convicted thieves, which added fuel to Orange’s
gently burning, convict fire. Burke, forty-one, was serving seven
years for stealing potatoes in Lincolnshire; Biglands, thirty-six,
had a similar sentence for the theft of three shirts in County
Durham. More heavily secured within his block, Burke begged to be
returned to prison: he said that he had faked delusions so that he
could get to Broadmoor, under the mistaken belief that not only
would he prefer it to prison but also that he would be able to
miraculously recover and walk free. He got his initial wish and was
back in Millbank only six weeks later. Biglands remained habitually
destructive, of both his bedding and his clothing, for the
remainder of his term until he was discharged to the Durham Asylum
in 1873.

Another
convict made a bid for freedom on 5th August 1871, though it was
probably unplanned and certainly poorly executed. Forty year-old
robber William Watkinson was a spectator at a match when he tried
to run off over the cricket field. He was caught by two attendants
before he made it to deep midwicket. A quarrelsome man, Watkinson
served out his time at Broadmoor before being moved to Rainhill
Asylum in Liverpool.

The two
remaining attempts of 1871 also came from convict patients. The
first came from a man who had arrived at Broadmoor from Millbank in
October 1869. Henry Leest was a thirty year-old shoemaker from
Pimlico who had been found guilty of theft in 1867, and was
suffering from tertiary syphilis, which had caused him to become
insane. In Broadmoor, he had already attempted suicide, endured
hours of lonely seclusion due to his destructive nature, and
attacked the Principal Attendant of his Block. Most disruptively of
all, in April 1871 he had beaten Orange’s new Deputy, Dr William
Douglas so badly that the poor man had been forced to resign
through ill-health only six months after joining the staff.

Leest had
already packed a lot into his time at the Asylum, when on 14th
August 1871 he was working with a party in the kitchen garden.
Recently better behaved, he had spent the day digging up potatoes
as part of a small group of patients helping with the harvest.
Elsewhere in the garden, an attendant and another group of patients
were shelling peas into baskets, while another attendant sat on a
box nearby and kept a close eye on proceedings. Leest asked if he
could go to the toilet, and was given permission to do so. Taking
an empty basket with him, he made off towards the closets. The
attendant watched him till he entered the building, seemingly
thinking nothing of the basket’s transport, and then turned his
gaze back to the remaining workers. Leest was also keeping a close
watch on things. When the attendant turned away, the patient used
the opportunity to come back out immediately of the closets and to
make his way to the edge of the kitchen garden. Placing his basket
lengthways against the wall, Leest, a small man, was light enough
for it to take his weight. He stood on the end of it and was high
enough to grip the top of the bricks of the external wall. He was
quickly over it and then away into the woods, leaving only the
basket behind him as evidence. A pursuit followed within minutes,
but came to nothing.

The Asylum had
the address of Leest’s brother in London, and they wrote to this
gentleman to ask him for information. His brother was only too
pleased to co-operate. The second Mr Leest told the authorities
that he had just received a letter from his escaped brother, and
that it came with a Winchester postmark. Orange received this
intelligence keenly, and at once supposed that Leest would make
from Winchester for one of the southern ports. Attendants were
despatched to Southampton and Portsmouth to hunt down the fugitive.
Orange was correct, and it was at Southampton docks that Leest was
found, six days after his escape, waiting to board a ship to New
York. He had managed to find work in the interim and had a week’s
wages on him.

It seemed
quite clear to Orange that if Leest was employable and could
operate a clear strategy for living, then he should be considered
sane. Leest was sent back to Millbank as soon as the paperwork
could be arranged. Eventually, we know that he was able to follow
his American dream: a letter, probably written in the 1870s,
survives on his file which was written to Orange from the distant
shores of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leest reported that he had been
shuttling between Rhode Island and Boston on the Atlantic coast.
Now he was writing to the Asylum to ask for money, because he was
broke. No copy survives of the Asylum’s reply, but if Orange
obliged, then it would not be the first time that such an informal
grant had been made to one of his ex-parishioners.

The last
attempted escape of the year was wholly unsuccessful. In the early
morning of 18th September 1871, William Heaps followed Patrick
Burke’s methodology. He had managed to secret a small knife in his
single room. He used it to saw first through a window bar in his
room in Block 3, and then to take off the end of his wooden
bedstead, using that as a lever to try and bend aside the weakened
bar. The noise of wood splintering against iron alerted the
attendants, who found that Heaps had failed to make much impression
on the ironwork. What they did discover, though, was a pile of
clothing readied for the escape, which Heaps had managed to hide
together with the knife under materials that he used for painting.
He was a talented artist, and had been allowed to paint in his room
during the day. His requests to the attendants not to disturb his
materials or finished works had been used as cover to conceal his
contraband underneath them. Attendant Samuel Rawson – later to
become Broadmoor’s Chief Attendant – was cautioned for his
judgement and his lack of vigilance.

Heaps was
twenty-four, of no fixed abode, and had been in and out of
institutions since he was a child. Sentenced to five years for
housebreaking near Gloucester, he had self-harmed in prison and
come to Broadmoor a little earlier in 1871. He was a painter by
trade, and so in the Asylum he had been set to work retouching the
decoration. Despite his new surroundings, he continued to
self-harm, and was also destructive, so when the Broadmoor doctors
discovered that he was calmed by painting with oils on canvas, he
was encouraged to spend more time at his hobby. After he was
discharged in 1874, he maintained a rootless life, spending as much
time in prisons or asylums as he did in wider society, and it was
perhaps of little surprise when he arrived back at Broadmoor in
1888, five years into a ten year stretch for theft. This time he
stayed for three years before he was discharged, apparently sane,
to finish his sentence in Parkhurst. It was another false dawn:
Heaps’s die had long been cast. The last time that Broadmoor heard
of him, in 1897, he was back in a county asylum.

The escape
attempts of 1871 had proved that any weaknesses in supervision by
the staff might still be punished, even inside the more secure
institution that Broadmoor had become. Orange appears to have
placed little blame on his staff for these occasional incidents.
The only edict issued from the Superintendent during the year was
to remind his attendants of a regulation decreeing that whenever a
patient had been granted more than one set of clothes, all but that
in use should be locked away. This regulation had been introduced
after David McLane’s flight in 1868; the only exception to it was
within Block 2, the privilege block. No Block 2 patient ever
troubled Victorian Broadmoor with an attempt to escape. There were
systems in place to ensure constant supervision otherwise, and
Orange obviously felt that the other escapes of the year had been
down to unforeseen cunning rather than bad practice. A similar view
would have been formed about the next example, some fifteen months
after Heaps, when Thomas Cathie Wheeler succeeded in eluding the
attendants.

Wheeler would
become the last pleasure man in this story to try and escape. Born
in 1824, as a young man he had shown no signs of mental illness.
This changed when he was in his twenties, after he had travelled to
South America and returned to England showing signs of profound
character change. His family sent him first to Bethlem and then to
the Surrey Asylum at Springfield as a voluntary patient.
Discharged, one day in April 1852 he knocked his mother over with a
flat iron, then took up a hatchet and beheaded her. He had been
sent once again to Bethlem, this time to the criminal wing, and was
in one of the first male intakes transferred to Broadmoor in early
1864. He was also one of the first patients to have modern
delusions about electricity being used on him, as well as suffering
from the more ancient delusion that his food was impure.

On the
afternoon of 10th December 1872, Wheeler, now aged forty-eight, was
amongst a group of patients from Block 4 who were strolling around
the Terrace to the south of the Asylum as part of their exercise
routine. As it began to rain, the attendants in charge of the group
started to marshal their troops back inside the Block, via its
airing court. The patients massed at the gate, and filed past an
attendant who was detailed to count the marchers as they went back
in. His concentration, however, was broken when he noticed that a
patient was attempting to smuggle in a stone inside a handkerchief,
undoubtedly for use as a weapon at some later point. With the
attendant focused on searching the patient, Wheeler acted on an
impulse to conceal himself behind some large shrubs on the Terrace.
He squatted down amongst the evergreens and waited in the wintry
rain. Remarkably, he was not omitted from the initial head count
when the gate was locked. Instead, he was able to wait until it was
dark, whereupon he walked to a point where the boundary wall was
lowest, found something to stand on, and climbed over.

Two hours
later, he was eventually missed. It was enough of a delay to afford
Wheeler a head start, and by now, he had begun to walk to the
village of Blackwater, some three miles away. Unfortunately for
Wheeler, the experience proved overwhelming. Frightened of losing
himself in the pine woods along the route, he began to walk back
towards the Asylum, intending to find and follow a different route
away. Of course, moving back from whence he had come was associated
with its own risks. As he approached Broadmoor, he was spotted by
the Asylum’s messenger, who managed to detain Wheeler in
conversation for time enough until the duty attendants looked out
of the Gatehouse and realised what was going on. Wheeler had
endured, rather than enjoyed a confused four hours of freedom, and
he would not repeat his action. He reverted to his Block, and died
in Broadmoor in 1907, having spent fifty-five years in hospital
care.

Wheeler’s
escape was of no long-term consequence. There was no soul-searching
or grand inquiry after it. Rather, the greater impact to strategic
direction had been felt after the escapes and attacks of 1871.
Orange was convinced that the convicts were a positive harm to his
community of generally peaceful lunatics, their influence far
outweighing their constitution of only a third of the patient
population. During 1872, although their had been fewer serious
incidents, he had taken the most drastic action available to him,
and increased the number of patients, mostly convicts, who had been
forced to spend time isolated in seclusion. It was not the
solution. Whatever his own views on its success, his harsher regime
had incurred the criticism of the Commissioners in Lunacy after
their annual inspection.

Orange
concluded that the only way to properly manage the pleasure and the
time patients was to separate them entirely. His basic starting
premise was that the pleasure men were innocents who had no wish to
cause him trouble. None of them had ever been guilty of a crime,
and had no propensity to wickedness. Orange wanted new
accommodation to be built, so that he could relieve the blameless
residents from the convicts, whose bad and unlawful behaviour was
part of their everyday lives. Delivering his annual report for
1872, he questioned ‘whether it is just or expedient to permit
those other inmates whose lives have not previously exposed them to
such evil influences to be contaminated by the degraded habits and
conversation of the convict class.’ Over the coming years, he would
try to achieve this separation where he could, but without any
extra resources to do so.