by Mark Stevens
Just as Meyer was beginning to fear that Bennett had been lost forever, another two patients disappeared from his radar. On 9th November, Thomas Douglas – he of Carr’s caper the previous year, the ‘mass breakout’ of 1864, and Richard Walker’s 3rd escape of 1865 – and John Thompson, another survivor of the 1864 gang, broke a similar iron cross bar to Bennett in a single room in Block 4. The Block’s patients had just had tea, and the attendants were engaged in tidying away the crockery and cutlery. Douglas’s and Thompson’s escape was slightly more complicated than Bennett’s in that they were on the first floor, but using their experience of escapes, they had ripped up the bedding in their rooms and tied the pieces together to form a rope. Throwing it out of the broken window, they both shimmied down into the yard, and then up another blanket rope that they had dropped previously from a room nearby. This second rope brought them close enough to the top of the external wall that they could swing over and onto it. Once on the wall, they were down the other side and away. For Douglas in particular, this must have felt like the completion of a long-held dream. Like Bennett, both men enjoyed a prolonged respite from Asylum care and ended up elsewhere in England. That evening, Meyer was facing the loss of three patients within a week.
Douglas is arguably Victorian Broadmoor’s most persistent escaper, not only for his four separate attempts but also because he never seemed to lose the habit throughout his time in the retreat. He was a soldier, a native of Cumberland, who struck a Corporal on Corfu and was given ten years at a Court Martial. He believed that the Corporal was persecuting him, and continued to believe the man had influence over him during his sentence. Between 1860 and 1864 he shuttled between Millbank and Dartmoor, before ending up in Broadmoor at the age of twenty-three. After three failed attempts to escape, he intended to make the most of his achievement in November 1868, and so he walked to Southampton with the aim of securing a passage to America. He had been a sailor before he joined the Army, and still wore an anchor tattoo on his left arm. But sailor Douglas could not get his ship at port, so he then decided to walk the length of England and return to his native home. Eventually, exhausted and starving after nearly three weeks on the road, he gave up at Lancaster and surrendered to the Police on 30th November.
He returned to the Asylum a reformed man. Biddable and co-operative, he worked in the garden and asked to be returned to prison. His wish was granted in 1870, and he served the short remainder of his sentence in Millbank once again. This was not, though, to be Douglas’s last experience of Broadmoor. A little over a decade later, he was had up for assaulting a police officer in Portsmouth and given six months hard labour. Though he called himself Kelly, he was identified as Douglas and sent back to the Asylum, where William Orange, Meyer’s successor, suggested he might be happier to remain. Douglas spent the last twenty years of his life back in Broadmoor’s care and died there in 1903 from heart disease.
Meyer’s luck continued to hold when Thompson was arrested by the Police in Garstang, Lancashire on 7th January 1869. He was identified and sent back down south. Thompson was also removed to prison soon after his recapture, now considered sane. He was thirty-one when he escaped, some four years after he had been among the first intake to Broadmoor from Bethlem. He was convicted of burglary in 1862 at the Appleby Sessions in Westmoreland. A swarthy man, with auburn hair and blue eyes, he hailed from Plymouth and had first travelled north to work in a factory. He had often tried to escape after his admission to Bethlem, and apart from his membership of Grundy’s gang, he had also had another go at Broadmoor in September 1865, when he was overheard removing bolts from his window and immediately removed to another room. Despite his transfer from the Asylum, like Douglas, he would be back again at Broadmoor after his release from jail: in March 1871 he was given five years by the Plymouth Sessions for theft, and returned to Broadmoor in September 1873, staying for the rest of his sentence before being repatriated to the Devon County Asylum.
This sudden increase in activity was a warning sign for what was to come. As Christmas 1868 approached, two patients were still missing after their escapes, and their loss would have begun to make the Broadmoor hierarchy uncomfortable. At the time, it was obvious to those in charge that they had made the wrong choice back in 1865. After the escapes of Bennett, Douglas and Thompson, Meyer summed up the situation: ‘The Council have long been aware that the cast iron bars and window frames which existed 6 years ago throughout the buildings were most insecure, and the evil has been remedied in Blocks 1 and 6 in which the windows have all been secured with wrought iron bars...there remain however 784 windows not yet secured...Mr Jarvis, the clerk of works, estimates the expense at £1100 and believes that the work might be completed in 2 months’. He asked the Council of Supervision for permission to carry it out immediately. The Council agreed, but the price was a significant sum, and they had to ask the Home Office for the money. It was forthcoming in December 1868.
Inevitably, there would be a period of time before the works could be completed. This delay in rectifying a design fault was about to cause the Asylum what became, in retrospect, its first real embarrassment. Another patient was about to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the defective bars. On Christmas Eve 1868, David McLane became the first Broadmoor patient to escape, and to never be heard from again.
As last time, the escape was from a single room on the first floor of Block 4. To remove his cross bar, McLane used two pieces of metal from old locks, and a piece of wood to steady the pressure. Correctly applied, he had managed to turn the bolt in the window frame; taking additional advantage of the fact that one of the retaining screws in the frame was later found to be faulty. Nobody was sure exactly what route once he was out of the window, but it seems probable that he managed to follow the roof line round the lower level of the admin block, reach the Gatehouse and then drop down outside. McLane had gone to bed at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and was not missed until twenty-five to eight on Christmas morning, by which time he was, presumably, long gone. There were no inspection windows in the doors of Block 4 at the time, and as far as the attendants were concerned, all the lunatics were sleeping peacefully on Christmas night.
McLane was a violent offender, a rapist, convicted at Durham in 1863 and sentenced to eight years in jail. Moved from Wakefield Prison to Millbank, he had begun to hear voices in his cell, and also believed that he was under the power of electricity, used upon him by forces unknown. The development of technology is felt in delusions just as much as in the real world, and McLane was an early sufferer from the same electric currents that would affect many other Victorian patients. Despite his delusions, McLane was first placed in the privilege Block 5, where he was well behaved and industrious. It was only when he attacked a fellow patient in 1866 that he was moved to Block 4.
It seems that in the days leading up to his escape, McLane had been the fortunate beneficiary of a lapse in good practice: he had obtained clothing and boots without these being checked out to him properly, and had stored them in his room for when the time came. If the rules had been followed, then McLane would have escaped in only his nightshirt, like Richard Walker before. A half-naked man in the depths of winter may well have given himself up if he had been unable to find clothing outside. A fully clothed lunatic had already gained an important advantage. The Block’s senior member of staff was severely reprimanded for his lack of oversight.
Delusional or not, McLane had evidently well-planned his escape: apart from the clothes, he had been spotted the previous two mornings removing himself early from breakfast to go and look out of his window – presumably to survey his route - but no relevance had been attached to his actions. McLane’s fate remains a mystery: his sentence expired in the summer of 1871, and he was written off the Asylum books the following year.
The horse had gone, but the stable door was bolted when the ironworks on the windows in Blocks 2, 3, 4 and 5 were replaced in early 1869. This removed one of the principal methods of escape entirely, a
nd henceforth, any attempt to escape from inside a block would have to be considerably more complex. There remained, though, another small window of opportunity within the fabric of the complex, that of the Asylum’s boundary wall, and it would be from here that the only woman to be lost for good made her way out on 27th July 1869.
Alice Kaye (alternatively known as Ellen Cook) was a thirty year-old factory worker from Bolton, with a partner and three children. Existing close to the poverty line, she had been convicted of stealing clothing in 1864 when living in Salford and given four months imprisonment; then, when she was caught stealing a pair of boots and two gold rings in 1866, she was given seven years inside. Sent from Salford jail to Brixton, alleged to be feigning insanity, she was removed to Broadmoor in March 1868 suffering from delusions that she was the Queen. In the Asylum, she had generally worked hard in the laundry and on the ward, and not presented many problems.
At seven o’clock on the evening in question, Alice and roughly twenty-five other women were in the airing court of the new, additional female block. In the old block, the Asylum band was playing, and the female attendants in the new one were listening, some of them dancing with the patients. Sensing an opportunity, Kaye and another patient made their way towards the north boundary wall of the Asylum. This wall had rather been neglected while security had been improved on the male side. There had not been an attempted escape from the female wing since Mary McBride, five years ago. Now Kaye did what McBride had done. She got a leg up and a push, and she was over the wall and away. She was only noticed missing when the band had finished playing, and it was time to go back in. Like in McLane’s case, this was too late, and the vital minutes had given her ample opportunity to secret herself in rural East Berkshire.
Her description – brown hair, brown eyes, five foot one – was circulated to the Metropolitan and the Bolton police, and unlike McLane, there was also a lead to follow up. Kaye had developed a close friendship with an attendant, who had briefly worked in Broadmoor a few months earlier, called Isabella Saby. Saby had, apparently, given Kaye an address in London and asked her to come and see her ‘on the outside’. Saby was tracked, visited and interviewed, but neither she, nor Kaye’s family, provided information that they had seen the fugitive. Like McLane, Kaye was also written off the Asylum’s books when her sentence expired.
The north boundary wall on the female side was raised later on in 1869, and the ground also lowered on the patients’ side. John Meyer had finally achieved the basic levels of security that would have prevented most of the escape attempts so far. Though improvements were still required, never again would there be a lack of basic confidence in the accommodation provided to Her Majesty’s lunatics. Unfortunately, Meyer himself would not have a chance to re-establish the Asylum’s reputation for public safety. His sudden death, in May 1870, brought to an end his time as Broadmoor’s first chief of staff. With Orange promoted from deputy, the new Medical Superintendent immediately began agitating against the convict ‘time’ patients who he saw as the main source of disruptive behaviour, including escapes. Statistically, he was correct: of the sixteen patients who had made serious attempts to escape under Meyer’s tenure, only four were pleasure men. In this second phase of security development in the Victorian Asylum, then, the spotlight fell on another element: the lunatics themselves.
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Dr William Orange, Broadmoor’s second Medical Superintendent, had been a member of the staff since the Asylum opened. He had been part of the establishment that experienced the escape attempts of the early years, had directly witnessed some of them, and also knew the history of the protracted improvements to the window bars and external walls. On John Meyer’s death in May 1870, he inherited an institution that had passed through an inevitable period of teething troubles in terms of managing difficult behaviour.
Nevertheless, it would only be in 1875 that Orange finally felt confident that he had stemmed what was, admittedly, a gentle trickle of patients seeping out through the bricks and mortar. Until then, he would also suffer the indignity of reporting briefly successful escapes to his superiors on the Asylum’s Council of Supervision and in the Home Office. That Orange continued initially to fight against turbulence in flight was partly down to the building, again, and partly down to Orange’s more mature regime, with greater responsibilities and privileges placed upon both his patients and his staff.
During the early 1870s, though, Orange also strongly believed that many of his institutional ills could be attributed to the lack of segregation between his different classes of patient. Orange argued that the convict class of patient – the ‘time’ patient - was far more destructive than Her Majesty’s lunatics, the ‘HMPs’ or ‘pleasure men’ who were detained at Her Pleasure.
Broadmoor had always taken convicted patients with defined time sentences, and as we have seen in Part One, statistical evidence from Meyer’s time suggested that there might be some truth in the proposition that such patients were more prone to making escape attempts. Orange also believed that their disruptive influence ran wider than this narrow problem, with the convicts liable either to wreak havoc on their own in myriad ways or to corrupt the mostly harmless HMPs. On top of that, the numbers of both classes of lunatic had grown since the Asylum opened. By the time that Orange took over, the patient population at Broadmoor numbered over four hundred and fifty, which meant that his nursing staff of fewer than one hundred were significantly outnumbered by those who they were meant to watch. Around a third of these patients were ‘time’ sentenced, though the ratio was slightly higher on the male side. As the numbers continued to grow, Orange’s view was that the potential for convicts to cause trouble was not diminishing.
Though Orange felt he had identified the building bricks of trouble, the potential escapees continued to come from both sides of the lunatics’ dividing wall. So it was that the first escapee with whom Orange had to deal was a pleasure man. On a frozen winter’s day, 11th January 1871, a working party of seven patients and two attendants were labouring to break up the heavy soil in one of the fields on the Asylum estate, outside the walls. Isaac Finch, a thirty-one year old farm labourer from rural Essex, was a member of the group. Just before lunchtime, having finished his work and by now bitterly cold, Finch asked to be allowed to leave the party to return to his Block inside. He was given permission to cross a small bridge which divided the field from the enclosed part of the estate. Rather than make his way back through the gate, he seized his opportunity to run, and instead took off into the woods. The attendant in charge of the party was severely reprimanded. Orange was frustrated by this further proof that higher security in the compound could always be circumvented by poor working practices.
Finch had entered the Asylum as a married man with five children. Family life was poor, and the Finches lived only just above the poverty line. As Finch searched for hope and meaning in his struggle, he had become captivated by the form of evangelical Christianity preached by the Peculiar People. Their ministry was an Essex phenomenon, an offshoot from Wesleyan Methodism that promulgated a literal interpretation of the King James Bible, including the rejection of medicine in favour of prayer. The name of the sect was interpreted as ‘chosen’ rather than ‘odd’.
A religiously conservative man, one summer day Finch had been found clutching his Bible - ‘with the leaves turned down at the death of Solomon and David’, the son and father who, amongst other things, incurred divine displeasure through their sexual behaviour - and covered in blood, shortly after his wife’s body was found at their home with her throat cut. He was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity and arrived in Broadmoor in September 1870.
Now, Orange had a murderer on the run, and it was only Finch’s lack of organisation that spared the doctor’s blushes. A pleasure man was, almost by definition, unaware of the consequences of his actions, and Finch’s inability to act rationally was to be his undoing. Walking first to Windsor, then back westwards to Reading, Finch had turned once
more and eventually decided to make for home in Essex. He tore off some of the Broadmoor labels from his clothing but did not complete the job, either forgetting to remove the rest or not identifying the need. Reaching the Capital, and without food or shelter, an exhausted and hungry Finch asked to be admitted to the Fulham Workhouse in Hammersmith, where his remaining markers were noticed by the staff. He was returned to the Asylum only five days after he left, and the superintendent of the Workhouse’s male ward for casual paupers found himself one pound better off.
Finch would enjoy no further change of scene, apart from a regular oscillation between the blocks at Broadmoor, from refractory to privilege then back again. He remained industrious, only indoors rather than out, spending most of his working time in the Asylum cleaning the wards, even when he was in the ‘back Blocks’. His children remained in constant contact with him, writing and visiting, until he died from a brain haemorrhage in March 1900.
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.
