Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  At roughly the same time, the Home Office finally acquiesced regarding Catherine’s transfer. They delivered the warrant that Dr Orange had requested to remove Catherine to the Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum at Denbigh in North Wales. Yet Orange’s satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Catherine’s health took another turn for the worse. She was bedridden again, and her transfer was postponed. Over the spring, she remained in Broadmoor’s infirmary while her husband and child were at home.

  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

  ‘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 thro
ugh 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.

  This was the first proper alteration made to the original specifications for the building which had been brought about by an escape attempt. More would follow after the attempts of 1865. This next year belonged to a serial escape essayer, when Richard Walker tried his luck a grand total of three times, on 8th April, 21st May and 3rd October. As might be concluded, he was unsuccessful on every occasion. Walker was not an exceptional man: he was five foot eight inches tall and of normal, if robust build. A thirty-six year old postman, who had stolen two letters in 1864, he had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Ending up in Millbank, he too believed that he was poisoned and had recently arrived at Broadmoor.

  On 8th April, he and another patient, a Scotsman called Peter Waldie, managed to slip away from the attendants in Block 3 at twenty to eight in the evening. The only logical explanation at the time was that Walker had somehow managed to obtain a skeleton key, and then bided his time before taking his chance. Waldie was an opportunist collaborator, who had been smoking near the ward doorway beside the ground floor day room when Walker made his move. They exited through the day room’s external door and onto the Terrace, scaling the still man-size boundary wall.

  Waldie shared a similar disposition to Walker. A fellow convict, found guilty of robbery with violence and given eight years, he also had delusions of poisoning and wished to be free from incarceration. He was a little younger, aged thirty-one, and had been both in Bethlem and Fisherton House Asylum, near Salisbury, before coming to Broadmoor in September 1864. Originally from Falkirk, Waldie had a broad accent and was also partially paralysed in one arm.

  The pair, still in their Asylum clothes, managed to walk as far as Bracknell, where they enjoyed a pub meal at The Bull Inn using some money that Waldie had procured. The landlord either failed to notice their attire or raised the alarm after they had left him. Instead, the pair were spotted the next day, lying down on the benches at Bracknell Station, by Broadmoor’s gardener, who promptly went to get the nearest Constable. Walker and Waldie had enjoyed a little over twenty-four hours freedom before their return to Crowthorne.

  Waldie was considered to be the junior party in this venture, and found himself back in Block 3, though no longer with Walker. He never tried to escape again. He was an increasing sick man, and he died from tuberculosis only a couple of years later, on 18th August 1867.

  Walker was readmitted not to the more genteel surroundings of Block 3, but to the back Block 1, in theory at least a more secure part of the Hospital. Not that Walker paid any heed to theory: he had developed a taste for freedom, and after lights out on 21st May he began to put a new
plan into action, which was both detailed in its cunning and also not wholly thought through. This time it began with pebbles. Stuffing the lock to his door full of small stones that he had garnered from the Block’s airing court, he then turned his bedstead on its end and placed it under his window. He stood on it, reached towards the high, small window in his room and broke the glass. Next, he passed his hand outside, whereupon he was able to unscrew the retaining nut and bolt of the centre circle of the window frame. He removed this and used it to smash the rest of the glass, until before him was left only a window-shaped hole. It was just large enough to squeeze through. Dropping into a yard adjacent to the block, he was able to scale the six-foot wall he was faced by, and then made for the Asylum stables, where he found a horse, clambered up onto it, and rode off to Yateley.

  So far, so good, yet in all this planning Walker had overlooked one small, but significant detail. Throughout his escape, he was wearing nothing except his nightshirt. When he duly arrived in the nearby village, it was half past four in the morning and he was naked from the waist down. Whichever way you looked at him, Walker must have stood out in at least one crucial area. What was a man on the run to do? He sought assistance. He came across a local carpenter, William Bunch, also up early in the morning, and told the tradesman that his unfortunate state could be explained by the occasion of his drinking with friends in London. Walker maintained that he was drunk, had missed his train and then been walking all night towards home.