Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  Edmunds: How am I looking?

  A: Fairly well.

  Edmunds: Are my eyebrows alright?

  A: Yes.

  Edmunds: I think I am improving. I hope I shall be better in a fortnight. If so, I shall astonish them; I shall get up and dance – I was a Venus before and I shall be a Venus again!

  She died nine months later on 19th September 1907, aged 78. The cause of death was given as senile decay, or old age.

  Edmunds had a lasting effect on many of the professionals around her. Her case had been notable, and Dr George Blandford used it to illustrate his book Insanity and its Treatment, quoting Dr Orange’s original report on Edmunds. In 1892, Blandford was preparing a new edition of his book, and wrote to Nicolson, Orange’s successor, asking if he could have an update on how Edmunds had changed during her twenty years at Broadmoor. Dr Nicolson replied that he had seen no change in Edmunds during the fifteen and a half years that he had known her.

  Most significantly, hers was apparently the first capital trial witnessed by the great English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Marshall Hall would later make a name for himself by taking on the defence case in a number of high profile English murder trials, earning himself the title of ‘The Great Defender’. Another Brighton resident, he was only thirteen at the time of Edmunds’s trial, but it is generally accepted that he joined other spectators at the Brighton Police Court hearings, and perhaps he was captivated by the undoubted sense of legal theatre which surrounded Edmunds and her woman in black persona.

  This sense of performance was something that attached itself to Edmunds, and as a result her case has leant itself to dramatisation. She was the subject of an ITV Saturday Night Theatre film as part of its Wicked Women season in 1970, where Anna Massey starred as Edmunds. The story has also been broadcast as The Great Chocolate Murders on BBC Radio 4 in 2006, and recently become part of Steve Hennessy’s series of Broadmoor plays.

  In Brighton, Christiana and the other characters in her story are still well-known and used regularly in written or dramatic works. The facts of the case have become a popular path travelled by those interested in Victorian true crime. The facts have told a story, though still an incomplete one, for Edmunds leaves behind a sense of mystery in terms of her motivation. She is a character who always seems within grasp and then disappears beyond reach. She never denied her actions, nor offered up an explanation of what she was trying to achieve.

  She was certainly a slave to adulation, and must have thrived on the publicity that her criminal actions generated. She must also have enjoyed the secrecy attached to affair on which she embarked with her doctor neighbour. Perhaps her motive was no more than to enjoy all these experiences. It is unclear whether she wanted to have Dr Beard or to ruin him, and there is no firm evidence that she ever sought to correspond with him again after August 1871. It is, though, too neat an ending to conclude simply that all was vanity with her: that this unusual woman can be reduced to a female stereotype, a frustrated spinster whose desires eventually destroyed her. Not enough of her survives in the records to be able to see the true Christiana, and she has left us with only shards of the mirror containing her reflection. The search to discover the Venus of Broadmoor goes on.

  Broadmoor Babies

  Broadmoor was no different to any other institution which housed women of childbearing age. Like a workhouse, a prison or a charitable refuge, it admitted women on a series of set criteria, regardless of their physical condition. The same was true equally of the county and city asylums which had sprung up during the nineteenth century, though with one notable difference. Although the average local asylum would have plenty of patients who had just experienced childbirth, those asylums very rarely received women who were pregnant, and who went on to have their babies within the institution. Generally, asylums were seen as somewhere to be avoided during pregnancy. Broadmoor, by comparison, showed its judicial side in these circumstances. As its patients had been deprived of choice in this matter in favour of direction, it had a small, if irregular number of confinements to manage. That these events were dealt with in-house, as just another part of ward life, was entirely in keeping with the ethos of the self-contained community that was Victorian Broadmoor.

  To a large extent, the female side of the Asylum operated as an independent unit. The initial women’s Block and its later companion were separated from the male side to the west by a high dividing wall. There was a dedicated body of staff of around twenty female attendants to nurse the residents of these blocks, with a female operational head, although the medical staff remained stubbornly male well beyond the Victorian period. The doctors’ offices also remained on the male side, and in their charge, notionally at least, were the clinical interventions designed to remedy around one hundred lunatic women.

  Male and female patients were barely aware of each other’s existence. Work and entertainment were both provided separately. The result was that there was a parallel, segregated life going on for patients either side of Broadmoor’s great divide. The women sewed and looked after the laundry, they promenaded along their Terrace or the wider grounds; they read in the day room and conversed; or, if they were in the female back Block, they were minded and managed as their aggressive counterparts were in the other half of the site. Even at the centrepiece annual events, such as the flower show or annual ball, the women were permitted only to mix with male staff, and not male patients. It provided both what was considered a safe environment for initial recovery, and also one where refuge could be given to help a patient to progress. It was into this single-sex regime that the women who arrived pregnant would find themselves.

  The first patient to give birth in the Asylum was Catherine Dawson, who did so on 26th December 1866, a little more than two and half years after Broadmoor opened. That Boxing Day, at one o’clock in the morning, she was delivered of a baby boy in the infirmary ward in the female block. Her labour lasted only half an hour.

  Catherine was in many ways a typical Broadmoor female patient. She was thirty-one years old, and a working class housewife from the industrial north west: Liverpool, in this case. The new baby was her fourth child. The older children had also been her victims. On 27th October 1864, she had cut the throat of her middle child, twenty-two month old Matilda, at the family’s basic rooms in Toxteth Park, close to the Liverpool docks where her husband worked. She had also tried to kill her eldest daughter and had then attempted suicide. She was found insane before her trial, and given the pleasure sentence.

  Although Broadmoor had opened eighteen months previously, Catherine was transferred initially from Kirkdale Prison to Rainhill Asylum (the Lancaster County Asylum) in Liverpool on 30th November 1864. It is unclear from her case notes why she was not immediately transferred to Broadmoor, as by that date the hospital had cleared its backlog of patients requiring admission from the older criminal lunatic accommodation at Bethlem, Fisherton House and other institutions. After Broadmoor’s opening, it was unusual for a pleasure man or woman to be placed elsewhere, with incidents linked usually to the suffering of a temporary accommodation crisis; rarely, it might be because a patient was considered exceptionally harmless. Catherine evidently did not fit into the latter category, because she remained at Rainhill for fifteen months, until March 1866, when she managed to escape from the asylum. It took a month to track her down, though it was not difficult to find her. She was eventually discovered living once more with her husband, Henry, and the remaining two girls. She was brought back to Rainhill at once, and this time moved quickly to Broadmoor, on 15th May 1866.

  On her arrival at Broadmoor she was instantly sick in the waiting room, and after her details were taken and her handover complete, she was confined to bed in the female infirmary, dosed up on beef tea and effervescing salts. The initial diagnosis was that her sickness had most likely been caused by a dose of morphine, administered to her to keep her calm on the train during the long journey south. That view held good for a few days, but when the sickne
ss did not subside, the Broadmoor doctors concluded the true cause. During her month at large she had resumed entirely her marital duties, and had managed to become pregnant.

  Catherine was probably not high up on the list of patients whose expectant condition would be easy to manage. She was an aggressive patient while she was in Broadmoor. She was quarrelsome and paranoid, imagining that tricks were being played deliberately on her. When her sickness eventually subsided she was moved to the Block’s number two ward, then the ward for the more disturbed patients on the female side, and occupied her time with needlework and suspicion until she gave birth. The event itself was almost entirely unremarkable; in fact, the only remark Catherine made at the time of birth ‘was that there was a nasty smell in the room’. Her baby boy was immediately removed from her after his birth and handed over to a dedicated attendant, who looked after him but reared him artificially on cow’s milk. As Catherine was in no state to name her child, and the boy had been born on St Stephen’s Day, the Broadmoor chaplain christened him Stephen. His baptism is recorded in the parish register for St Michael’s, Sandhurst, presumably from a piece of paper supplied to the incumbent, as his mother’s name was incorrectly recorded as Caroline.

  The mother did not ask to see her child until a week after the birth, and it was not until two months had passed that she was finally allowed to see him. Their first, and almost certainly only meeting was not a success. Catherine behaved strangely with little Stephen, placing him on his legs to see if he would walk already and otherwise acting that he was older than a newborn, and the boy was taken away from her again on the same day, this time for good. It was clear that mother and child would never bond, but then it had never been intended that they should. As soon as Stephen had been born, Dr John Meyer, Broadmoor’s first Medical Superintendent, had begun to plan arrangements for the baby’s life away from his mother.

  Meyer’s plan was to ask either Catherine’s local workhouse, or her husband Henry to take the child. He wrote to both. Henry Dawson replied most clearly: he was reluctant to accept his newborn son on the grounds of his own poverty. Now lodging in Birkenhead, he was continuing to work while trying to feed the two surviving girls. He had a duty to the family that was in sight, not to that out of it. Meyer had more success with the Union. They had a series of questions for him as to their liability, but at no point did they refuse his request. After a little further correspondence, Broadmoor managed to persuade the officers of the Chorley Union Workhouse to take on the child of ‘their’ patient. A date for his removal was fixed, and Stephen was collected from Broadmoor on 25th February 1867 by the master and matron of the workhouse, and taken back to Merseyside.

  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 chemis
t 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.