Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  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.

  Margaret had already given birth to four children, including two daughters. These were all now deceased. The two boys had died from natural causes while in infancy; her younger daughter, also Elizabeth, was twenty-two months old, and elder daughter Margaret, six, when in June 1872 their mother had held their heads under water in a pan mug until they drowned. Margaret Davenport had then attempted to drown herself in the tub, then to hang herself, and finally to cut her wrists but had been unsuccessful in all these tasks. So she washed the children, laid them out in her bed and then made dinner for her husband.

  She had been found insane when she was due to plead at her trial at the Liverpool Assizes. The supposed cause of her illness was given on her admissions statement to Broadmoor as ‘family troubles’. She had married Joseph Davenport in 1862, after they met while working as servants for a landed Cheshire family. Joseph worked long hours as a delivery man, and the family lived a basic existence in the centre of an industrial town. Margaret had apparently been taken ill after the birth of the first Elizabeth, becoming depressed and twice being found wandering the streets at night. The local Police felt that she was the victim of domestic neglect, and that it was her isolation as the homemaker which had led to her depression. She was advised to return to her native Shropshire for a break, and the effect of this was beneficial. A cheerier woman returned to Warrington, and life for the Davenports carried on much as before. There had been no recovery, though, and Margaret was still thinking irrationally. At her first committal hearing after the murders she had stated that ‘I was very much provoked before I did it. I was made in hell.’

  Now that she was resident in Crowthorne, her mental state continued to be a cause for concern. Like Catherine Dawson, the Broadmoor doctors did not let her nurse her baby. They considered it unsafe for her to do so. Instead, little Elizabeth was taken from her mother at birth, and reared on cow’s milk elsewhere in the Asylum. It is unclear who decided to name the girl, and to create the arguably morbid situation where she was named after her dead sisters. It is possible that it was Margaret, for she was a little mo
re reliable than Mrs Dawson. She saw the baby frequently, though under supervision, and this bonding did not include any unfortunate incidents. Nevertheless, the doctors noted that on more than one occasion, Margaret expressed the hope that her new daughter would die. It would never be safe to let her have the connection enjoyed by Mary Meller or Margaret Crimmings.

  In line with previous practice, the Broadmoor authorities busied themselves organising who would take in the child. As Margaret was married, Dr Orange’s first correspondence was with her husband, Joseph Davenport. He wrote to Davenport in early April, but the working man refused point blank to have his baby daughter, saying, like Henry Dawson, that he was too poor to be able to take charge of a child and provide care for it. His circumstances were different to those of Mr Dawson, however, who was already looking after his other children in reduced accommodation. Nevertheless, for the time being, Orange changed his line of enquiry. Instead, his next move also echoed that of the Dawsons’ case. He wrote to the Poor Law Guardians for Warrington Union and asked them to take charge of the child instead.

  Unlike the Chorley Guardians in the earlier case, the Warrington Guardians did not see their acceptance of the child as the logical outcome. Replying to Broadmoor in May 1873, they stated that they saw no reason why the able-bodied Joseph Davenport could excuse himself from the care of his only living child, and no reason why the burden of her care should fall upon the parish ratepayers. They dared Orange to provide a legal authority upon which he could base his request.

  Dr Orange did not give up easily. He saw no benefit to anyone in having the child remain at Broadmoor longer than necessary, and felt that the Guardians of the Union were being unnecessarily difficult. He gathered together what precedent he could find, and wrote again to them suggesting that under statute, the child’s legal place of settlement was Warrington; that the father was destitute; and that the mother might destroy her child. The Guardians did not dispute the need for safety, but they did dispute the extent to which Broadmoor could rely on laws created many years before its own invention, and they also disputed whether Joseph Davenport was truly destitute. It was known that he was a working man of working age, employed as a carter, and the Guardians stated confidently that a man in this position would be turned away from their own workhouse, should he fall upon it for relief. By extension, they did not see why there was a need for them to provide poor relief to his child. The Guardians finished off their financial reasoning with an attempt to reclaim the moral high ground, arguing against the harm that could be caused by the removal of such a young child from its parents.

  The Home Office was compelled to make a decision in the matter. In July, it instructed Broadmoor’s Council of Supervision, and by default, Dr Orange, to send the girl to Joseph Davenport. Orange wrote to him again. This time Davenport sent a long reply in September, once again pleading poverty, and also saying that he had a bad leg which meant that he was currently out of work. No sooner had the situation appeared clear than it was muddied again. Orange forwarded Davenport’s response to the Warrington authorities, saying that as ordered, he would still send the child to its father but would be grateful if the Union could stand by if Joseph Davenport refused to take custody of his daughter. The last thing that he wanted was to send an attendant and the baby all the way to Warrington, only to find no room at any inn. He also threatened Joseph Davenport with legal proceedings if he did not agree voluntarily to the arrangement. This threat seems to have finally done the trick. In late October 1873, when she was eight months old, one of the female attendants took Elizabeth on the long journey to Warrington and delivered her to her father.

  But this was not to be a happy ending, like the Mellers’ tale. Elizabeth Davenport the second was another sickly child, and she would only live for another two years, dying as a toddler at the end of 1875. Joseph Davenport lived on, alone, though he remained in regular contact with his wife down south. He died fourteen years later, in June 1889.

  Margaret continued to be a Broadmoor patient while her family’s story was played out Warrington. She remained delusional and persecuted. She stated that the other patients threw knives at her, and that she was visited and tormented by them at night, with one particular patient taking the form of a serpent. She evidently lived in fear and tried to hide. Dr David Nicolson, Deputy Superintendent, wrote that ‘when spoken to she covers her face with her hand, shuts her eyes and looks downwards and away from the speaker, with an air of intense timidity and shyness’.

  By January 1890 Dr Nicolson, then Superintendent, was of the view that Margaret could be discharged to an ordinary asylum. For several years she had been withdrawn and uncommunicative but otherwise well behaved. The official description of her was ‘demented’ but ‘harmless’. It was decided to move her to the Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool, where Catherine Dawson had stayed some three decades before. By now, her husband was dead, and the move north would not bring her closer to any family connections. But perhaps that was irrelevant, as she continued to write to Joseph and to talk to him long after his death. So on 10th February 1890, she was transferred to what became her final home.

  At Rainhill, Margaret carried on much as she had done at Broadmoor. She wrote to Joseph and worked a little on the wards until her health failed. For the last seven years of her life, she was effectively immobile. She died on 3rd February 1912, choking on her own vomit as she tried to digest her lunch.

  Those four cases in nine years constituted the initial glut of Broadmoor babies. Afterwards, there were fewer cases, and as these drift later towards the twentieth century, a number of the Victorian babies become part of case files which will remain closed for some years to come. There is one more baby to include at present, and this one came after a gap of nearly six years from the birth of Margaret Davenport’s child.

  This time, the labour was long, despite it being the mother’s fourth child. The new baby entered the world at eight o’clock on the morning of 14th January 1879. A third Broadmoor boy, William, he was born to Catherine Jones, a thirty-three year-old farmer’s wife from Llanllyfni, Caernarvonshire. Catherine was described by Dr Orange on her admission notes as ‘of respectable appearance but with a decided air of melancholy’. She had been brought from Carnarvon Prison the previous September, where she had been in custody since May. She had been aware of her own pregnancy while in prison, and when her transfer was arranged she had informed the authorities that she was pregnant, so they had been prepared for the birth since her arrival.

  Catherine’s case was yet another of infanticide. She had killed the youngest of her children, her eighteen month-old daughter Sarah. Catherine’s was considered by the medical men to be a classic case of ‘puerperal mania’, or of dangerous postnatal psychosis. She had already attempted to cut her daughter’s throat at the family farmhouse in North Wales, when on 9th May 1878 her husband William left her alone with the child in the kitchen for a few minutes. On his return, the child was dead, with blood trickling from its nose and ears. Catherine said that the little girl had fallen from a chair, but her past history meant that this story was challenged. Later the same day she confessed to one of her servants that she had placed her hand over the toddler’s mouth until she had suffocated. Her case proceeded to a full trial at the local Assizes, where the jury acquitted her on the grounds of insanity.

  Catherine brought an additional complication to Broadmoor as well as her pregnancy. For she could not speak, read or write a word of English. She was a native Welsh speaker, with no other languages. This was a comparatively unusual situation for the Asylum. There were a few patients in Victorian Broadmoor for whom English was not their first language, but many of these spoke French or German instead, and the medical staff, not least Orange, were able to converse in these other tongues. This would not be so with Catherine. When she arrived at Broadmoor, she could not communicate with any of the staff, and so some other method was required. As luck would have it, there was another Welsh female patient who could speak a little o
f the language, and so she was drafted in to act as Catherine’s translator. This was just as well, as Catherine quickly fell ill, showing signs of pleurisy, and was confined to bed.

  William Jones was informed of his wife’s dangerous condition, and visited her for a brief spell in late October 1878. He too spoke no English and arrived with a handwritten note prepared by friends. This note introduced him to the Broadmoor staff, and asked whether they could recommend him lodgings during his visit. Of course, they obliged.

  The fact that no one could understand Catherine was a source of concern to both the Broadmoor doctors and the Home Office. It was not safe to have a patient sick in bed, yet unable to communicate their needs. Orange soon began agitating for his patient’s transfer back to a Welsh-speaking asylum, as quickly as her health was up to it. Even when she rallied, after December 1878, Orange still sought to transfer her to an asylum nearer her home before she gave birth.

  The Home Office took a different view, possibly as it was so soon after her verdict and sentence had been delivered, and instead asked Orange to find ‘some respectable woman, who can speak the Welsh language’ to act as a dedicated attendant to Catherine. Orange retorted that employing a dedicated member of staff to act as translator was not seen as practical. So the other Welsh patient, who came from Glamorganshire, continued to act as Catherine’s official interpreter during her time at Broadmoor.

  Perhaps because of the inability to communicate with her, the staff at Broadmoor did not feel able to let her nurse her child, and the baby boy was removed from her immediately after birth. Without the possibility of a thorough interview, and given her previous medical history, it was felt too risky to leave little William in the sole care of his mother. One of the female attendants, Harriet Hunt, took charge of him instead. The suggestion, though, is that Catherine was recovering from her mental illness, even if her physical health continued to be poor. She was allowed to see her baby on the infirmary, and bond with him while the usual arrangements were made for his removal. This case was a simple one, as William Jones was very eager to take care of his infant namesake. He visited both mother and child regularly before he took the three-month old baby home on 16th April 1879, with Harriet Hunt, the nursemaid, accompanying him on the journey.