Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  Bunch took Walker round to the village postman, with the initial intention of getting Walker a lift to Blackwater Station. The three men sat in the postman’s stables, where a jacket and trousers were found for Walker and some bread and cheese supplied for breakfast. However, their new companion’s appearance and behaviour had immediately given them cause for alarm, and they kept Walker talking while separately, a messenger was sent to the Asylum. A party of attendants headed for Yateley, and Walker was back inside Block 1 in time for lunch.

  Walker’s third attempt of the year was made with Thomas Douglas, who was making his own second bid to abscond. Both men managed to gain access to one of the wards in Block 1, then broke through the window of a single room much like Walker had done previously in May. From there, they made out first into the Block 1 airing court, and then over its dividing wall into the airing court of Block 3. The alarm was raised at once, and the pair were found hiding in the coalhole of the admin block. It was clear by now that Walker owed his successes to more than just good planning. ‘Walker has long been supposed to have had a key and this alone can account for his being enabled to pass through the doors’, reported Meyer. He was quite right. Three months later, it was discovered: an intricate piece of ironwork, probably based on an impression made of a Broadmoor key by Walker or another and then worked up for the patient by a criminal associate outside. An attendant, suspected of helping Walker to hide the key, though not of being party to the escapes, was dismissed.

  This third attempt was both the least effective, and the last of Walker’s efforts, and it landed him in a form of solitary confinement for most of the next few years. ‘Seclusion’ was the principal method of containing unruly patients, and now Walker found himself secluded as a matter of course. His management became a great challenge, as almost uniquely amongst Broadmoor patients, the medical staff found Walker impossible to control. He was an insubordinate extrovert, and at times, he had an attack on sight policy. He would prowl around in Block 1, naked apart from a strip of cloth around one arm or leg, covering his room in faeces or using them as missiles with which to javelin the doctors when they visited. This made him into something of a cause célèbre for the Commissioners in Lunacy, as Walker was in consequence kept alone in one end of the first floor gallery of Block 1, away from the other patients and with an attendant beside him at all times. The Commissioners lobbied Meyer to allow Walker greater freedom, believing this situation to be unpalatable, and, depending on his behaviour, Walker was sometimes permitted to exercise in the airing court, also alone, where he had a collection of pigeons that he fed. Dr Orange later succeeded at integrating Walker a little more, though it was probably with some relief that Walker was discharged to the Middlesex Asylum at Colney Hatch in 1874, when his prison sentence expired.

  Walker’s and Douglas’s escape in 1865 led to the replacement of the cast iron bars in Block 1 with wrought iron bars and window shutters. This replacement would prove to be an effective deterrent, though the original bars were retained in the other Blocks for the time being, where the patients were felt to be less likely to attempt to destroy them. With the benefit of hindsight, that budget restriction would turn out to be a mistake, something that would be acknowledged only three years later. Meanwhile, the following two years witnessed a series of minor escape-related incidents, which were all successfully thwarted.

  William Smith was first, when he attempted to escape from a walking party on Wednesday 2nd May 1866. This method would become increasingly popular once the building security was improved. It had always been intended that the Broadmoor estate should consist of a walled compound, but that outside that there would be much ground left for cultivation, and that this could be used for patients’ work and leisure. With a walking party, a small group of patients would enjoy a long stroll around the fields, watched over, typically, by a couple of attendants. Smith’s approach was simple: he made a sudden and unexpected run for the woods which bordered the estate, as several patients would in the years ahead. His particular effort did not get very far, and he was quickly caught and retaken before he could disappear from sight. Although it was largely uneventful, the whole event unsettled him, and with tragic consequences.

  Smith was a career criminal, who had been transported to Australia at a young age. When his sentence expired, he obtained a passage back to Britain, and ended up in Scotland. He was sentenced to another twenty-one years’ transportation for theft at Glasgow in 1856, but after arriving en route at Dartmoor Prison, he had become delusional and so was transferred to the state asylum at Fisherton House. He was moved to Broadmoor in 1865. A pale man, with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, he had been a diligent employee in the shoemaker’s workshop throughout the past year. Returning to work after his failed bid for freedom, on the morning of 23rd May, he took himself and one of the workshop knives into the toilets, knelt in front of the bowl and cut his own throat. By the time he was discovered, he was dead. His was only the second suicide at Broadmoor, following that of a female patient earlier the same year. Smith had appeared in good humour on the fateful morning, volunteering to sweep the shop floor and also discussing the previous night’s play put on by the patients. The event shocked the staff, as they had not considered him to be suicidal. Perhaps, having failed to get away, Smith could see no future beyond his own, long-term custody.

  A few days after Smith’s attempt, patient Peter O’Donnell tried to escape on 8th May by an established method. He mounted the internal wall which divided the Terrace from Block 5’s individual airing court. It was daylight, and it was his height on the wall that gave him away. He was spotted walking along the top, and though he ran and jumped onto the external wall, he was soon retaken on ground adjacent to the Deputy Superintendent’s house, just outside the boundary.

  O’Donnell had previously tried to make off through the Asylum’s kitchen garden in March and had been stopped before he reached the wall. He was another convict, but of a slightly different kind. He was part of the significant forces population in Broadmoor, which formed roughly 10% of the male population during the Asylum’s early years. A twenty-two year old soldier, he had faced Court Martial at Aldershot in 1863 for desertion and shooting at an officer. He had subsequently been branded with a ‘D’. After his escape, he was moved from Block 5, one of the privilege blocks, to Block 4. Here he was more restricted in his movement, though he continued to cause a nuisance through breaking windows and furniture until he was discharged to the Hampshire Asylum in December 1867, when his four-year sentence was complete.

  His escape had highlighted a simple truth to the Broadmoor management. ‘It is obvious that the walls dividing the different airing courts must be raised’, wrote Dr Meyer; separately, he noted that ‘in the present state of the walls escaping is very easy’. These walls were not the external boundary, but they did afford a patient the means to move from one part of the Asylum to another without impediment. He was allotted the sum of £50 to raise all these walls by three feet, so that their full height became between seven and eight feet, and some mechanical help would be required to climb them beyond a patient’s own means. No further action was yet taken to raise the height of the boundary wall.

  It was still felt that any patient allowed outside an airing court was either lower risk, or being invigilated to such an extent that making it over the boundary wall was not an option. Any failings in this area were likely to be through human error. That hypothesis was strengthened on 20th August 1866, when it was the turn of Patrick Lyndon, a trusted patient, to make an unsuccessful attempt to discharge himself from the Asylum.

  Lyndon was the first pleasure man since Grundy to try and get away. He had always been keen to remove himself, whether by orthodox means or not. He regularly petitioned the Home Secretary for his discharge, and sought to place himself in situations where he might escape. He had been given his indefinite sentence in 1838, at the age of twenty-six, and had now spent twenty-eight years awaiting a word from Her Majesty.
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br />   In Lyndon’s case, it was his motivations for Her Majesty’s pleasure that had indirectly contributed to his present position. A native of Liverpool, Lyndon made the journey south to Buckingham Palace, where he presented himself as a divine messenger who had been instructed to marry the young Queen Victoria. It was not necessary to treat him as a king, he said, and he was taken at his word. Declaring that he had ‘no earthly residence, not even an earthly name’, he fought with the sentry on duty at the Palace Lodge and was charged with assault. Found not guilty through insanity, he became a Bethlemite for seventeen years and was then moved onto Fisherton, where he was considered to be ‘an industrious man’, albeit one who had also escaped on more than one occasion there. Now, he was in his mid fifties. He was first put into the shoemaker’s shop at Broadmoor, where he was not considered to be good at his work, and had been moved into the garden. It was the decision to place him in the garden that led to his temptation.

  Usually the staff were vigilant of Lyndon, as his auto-removal tendencies were well known. Now though, when sending Lyndon on his way to the Asylum garden from its kitchen, attendant Henry Franklin did not bother with the normal handover of his charge to another employee. Lyndon had never presented him directly with any trouble, and the attendant was relaxed about the oversight required of him. It was not long before Franklin realised that he had made a misjudgement: rather than saunter down the path to gather vegetables, as was intended, Lyndon upended a wheelbarrow at rest in the garden, stepped onto it and jumped astride the boundary wall. A supple youngster might have vaulted straight over the wall and made for the woods, but for Lyndon, making it over the wall had been exertion enough, and he was spotted progressing at low speed by another attendant at work in his own garden, and wrestled to the ground. Franklin was admonished, and Meyer pointed out to him that were similar circumstances to arise in the future, it would be quite clear where the blame would lie.

  Lyndon was quite open about his behaviour, saying that he could find many ways to get out of Block 5, the privilege block that was his domicile, and suggesting that he be moved to a more secure block. Meyer obliged. Given Lyndon’s previous actions, it was clear that his escape might prove highly embarrassing. The move worked: Lyndon was no trouble, even if he was implicated in abetting another patient’s escape attempt in 1871. He became a quiet old man, and was finally discharged to the Hanwell Asylum at the age of seventy.

  By the end of 1866, then, some remedial work had been undertaken to greater secure the Asylum, and better practice was beginning to result from the experience of staffing Broadmoor. There was a brief respite in the frequency of patients trying to absent themselves from care. In 1867, there was only one serious effort to get away, on 22nd June. It did not amount to much, but it came from the sort of patient that a modern tabloid would squeal about. Cuthbert Rodham Carr, a youth of nineteen and newly arrived to Broadmoor, had been found insane at his trial for the murder of a five year-old girl in Gateshead. It was a particular unpleasant crime, a stranger killing with paedophile overtones, and with suggestions that Carr may have attacked another young girl too. He had been determined to plead guilty at his trial but had the matter taken out of his hands by his lawyers. He came from a well-to-do background – his family home was at Carr’s Hill in the town, overlooking the Tyne Valley and in whose stables the murder was committed.

  Although he had been determined to face the gallows, Carr now appeared to have rediscovered his lust for life. On that day in June, he made his move to leave when on the way up the stairs of the central block to the Chapel. As a group of patients trooped to the first floor for a service, where the entrance door to the Chapel could be found, he manoeuvred himself out of the landing window and then made off over the roof of the Asylum stores. He navigated one complete side of this roof until he was at the entrance to the Asylum. Here, he stood on top of the Gatehouse, beside the clock tower, then leapt down onto the outside road. Various staff and workmen were already in pursuit and he was surrounded in the stables building a short distance from the gate. Outnumbered, he tried to resist but was held firm.

  At first sight, the decrease in the rate of escapes implied that the security systems, particularly the buildings, had been shorn of defects. The events of 1868 would demonstrate that this was not the case, and Meyer and his staff would shortly find out how much work there was still to do. Before that, the first attempt of the year came, by coincidence, from Carr once more. He was joined on this occasion by Thomas Douglas, who had been party to two previous escape conspiracies. Now, on the evening of 6th May 1868, the two men broke a window on the first floor of Block 4 using a piece of metal, and then followed the route that Carr took across the roof the previous year. Both men were quickly missed in a head count and found hiding behind a chimney. There was a standoff. Douglas scurried away as Carr confronted his captors. He had managed to find an old piece of metal which he had sharpened into a weapon, and he used this to stab one of the attendants who cornered him. Fortunately, the man was not badly hurt, and Carr was retaken by other staff who were part of the search party. Douglas, meanwhile, had managed to creep along the roof towards the gatehouse from where he proceeded to shout a number of explicit phrases at an unfortunate young woman who was passing along the road outside. When he finally jumped down he was taken by staff waiting on the road. The attendant who was stabbed was given the maximum reward of five pounds, while three other staff also received a token for their efforts.

  Carr remained a troublesome patient to care for. Though he now found himself in the back Blocks, he turned his frustrations onto the fabric of the building, damaging bedding, windows and even bricks and mortar. He harboured many persecutory ideas, like a lot of Broadmoor patients, and considered the medical officers to be part of the conspiracy. Although he had enemies amongst his cohort, he also had friends, including William Bisgrove, who will be found in Escape from Broadmoor: Part Two. Carr died at the age of forty, in 1888, from a subarachnoid haemorrhage.

  Carr and Douglas’s escape was put down to a lack of supervision rather than any wider matter. This failure of the staff was also blamed for the second escape of the year. Another pleasure patient, George Turner, successfully evaded the attentions of his custodians on 29th September. A young Berkshire man, he had been accused of arson but was completely mute when asked to plead, and spent ten years in the Wiltshire Asylum before being transferred to Broadmoor shortly after it opened for male patients in 1864. On this particular day, he had been instructed to clean out the ash pits adjacent to the female block, just outside the boundary wall. It was the sort of job given to a patient who could be relied upon, and who had worked his way into a trusted position. But while he was shovelling a pile of ash into a cart, Turner suddenly downed tools and jumped through a nearby hedge on the estate. He headed for the woods, outrunning an attendant who was in close pursuit.

  Initially, it was thought that Turner had made a clean getaway. Then, two days later, a message was received from Inspector Herbert Reece of the Clewer Police, near Windsor. Turner had been picked up wandering aimlessly around Windsor Great Park on the day after his escape. He must have stood out easily, as he was a florid-looking man, over six feet tall and still wearing the blue Asylum uniform with its Broadmoor markings. He put up no resistance, gave his name to the Police and was sent back to Crowthorne on 2nd October.

  Turner remained well behaved on his return, and was employed inside as a ward cleaner. Meyer had previously described Turner as ‘an exceedingly quiet harmless man’, so he was surprised to receive a letter from a Windsor resident alleging that Turner had assaulted the correspondent’s maid during his brief sojourn outside. Meyer questioned Turner, but the latter denied the offence, and Meyer decided to side with his patient. The matter was closed, and Turner continued to live a quiet life until he died on 9th April 1874.

  By the autumn of 1868, it had been two years since Meyer and the Council of Supervision had spent any sums on making changes to the buildings as a resu
lt of escapes. All that was about to change, as Broadmoor was about to encounter the most successful period for escapes of Meyer’s entire reign. It would be the window bars in Blocks 3 and 4 that were the Medical Superintendent’s undoing. Identified as a weakness in 1865, the decision to retain the cast ironwork in the less secure blocks would become a risk that the Asylum could no longer afford to bear.

  On the evening of 4th November, James Bennett, a youth of eighteen, removed a cast iron cross bar from the window of the ground floor gallery in Block 3 and made his way over the still-deficient boundary wall. Bennett became the first patient since George Hage to get away for a considerable period of time, and, despite the obvious blame that could be attached to the window bars, his escape led to the resignation of the attendant who was on duty at the time.

  Bennett had come to Broadmoor in March 1867 as a depressed and suicidal young man. He had an unenviable start in life: suffering from mild learning disabilities, and evidently prone to anti-social behaviour, he had spent three years in a reformatory school between the ages of nine and twelve. The sharp shock did not work: subsequently given seven years for theft in London, he had been sent to Portland Prison. In the month before he ran from Broadmoor, he had been fighting intermittently with another patient on the ward. When he escaped from the Asylum, he quickly returned to his old stamping ground in Chelsea.

  Bennett had a full three months of freedom before he managed to get himself arrested again, this time caught exiting someone else’s property with a quantity of linen. Although he gave his name as ‘William Watson’, he also owned up to the fact that he was wanted back in Crowthorne. The Westminster Police Court officials sent a message to Broadmoor and asked someone to attend court to identify him, which they did. He was returned to Broadmoor on 10th February 1869. Meyer subsequently concluded that like Hage, Bennett had only been faking his insanity, and so he had his patient removed to Millbank Prison, whereupon Bennett’s involvement with Broadmoor was over.