Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  Both Burke and Biglands were convicted thieves, which added fuel to Orange’s gently burning, convict fire. Burke, forty-one, was serving seven years for stealing potatoes in Lincolnshire; Biglands, thirty-six, had a similar sentence for the theft of three shirts in County Durham. More heavily secured within his block, Burke begged to be returned to prison: he said that he had faked delusions so that he could get to Broadmoor, under the mistaken belief that not only would he prefer it to prison but also that he would be able to miraculously recover and walk free. He got his initial wish and was back in Millbank only six weeks later. Biglands remained habitually destructive, of both his bedding and his clothing, for the remainder of his term until he was discharged to the Durham Asylum in 1873.

  Another convict made a bid for freedom on 5th August 1871, though it was probably unplanned and certainly poorly executed. Forty year-old robber William Watkinson was a spectator at a match when he tried to run off over the cricket field. He was caught by two attendants before he made it to deep midwicket. A quarrelsome man, Watkinson served out his time at Broadmoor before being moved to Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool.

  The two remaining attempts of 1871 also came from convict patients. The first came from a man who had arrived at Broadmoor from Millbank in October 1869. Henry Leest was a thirty year-old shoemaker from Pimlico who had been found guilty of theft in 1867, and was suffering from tertiary syphilis, which had caused him to become insane. In Broadmoor, he had already attempted suicide, endured hours of lonely seclusion due to his destructive nature, and attacked the Principal Attendant of his Block. Most disruptively of all, in April 1871 he had beaten Orange’s new Deputy, Dr William Douglas so badly that the poor man had been forced to resign through ill-health only six months after joining the staff.

  Leest had already packed a lot into his time at the Asylum, when on 14th August 1871 he was working with a party in the kitchen garden. Recently better behaved, he had spent the day digging up potatoes as part of a small group of patients helping with the harvest. Elsewhere in the garden, an attendant and another group of patients were shelling peas into baskets, while another attendant sat on a box nearby and kept a close eye on proceedings. Leest asked if he could go to the toilet, and was given permission to do so. Taking an empty basket with him, he made off towards the closets. The attendant watched him till he entered the building, seemingly thinking nothing of the basket’s transport, and then turned his gaze back to the remaining workers. Leest was also keeping a close watch on things. When the attendant turned away, the patient used the opportunity to come back out immediately of the closets and to make his way to the edge of the kitchen garden. Placing his basket lengthways against the wall, Leest, a small man, was light enough for it to take his weight. He stood on the end of it and was high enough to grip the top of the bricks of the external wall. He was quickly over it and then away into the woods, leaving only the basket behind him as evidence. A pursuit followed within minutes, but came to nothing.

  The Asylum had the address of Leest’s brother in London, and they wrote to this gentleman to ask him for information. His brother was only too pleased to co-operate. The second Mr Leest told the authorities that he had just received a letter from his escaped brother, and that it came with a Winchester postmark. Orange received this intelligence keenly, and at once supposed that Leest would make from Winchester for one of the southern ports. Attendants were despatched to Southampton and Portsmouth to hunt down the fugitive. Orange was correct, and it was at Southampton docks that Leest was found, six days after his escape, waiting to board a ship to New York. He had managed to find work in the interim and had a week’s wages on him.

  It seemed quite clear to Orange that if Leest was employable and could operate a clear strategy for living, then he should be considered sane. Leest was sent back to Millbank as soon as the paperwork could be arranged. Eventually, we know that he was able to follow his American dream: a letter, probably written in the 1870s, survives on his file which was written to Orange from the distant shores of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leest reported that he had been shuttling between Rhode Island and Boston on the Atlantic coast. Now he was writing to the Asylum to ask for money, because he was broke. No copy survives of the Asylum’s reply, but if Orange obliged, then it would not be the first time that such an informal grant had been made to one of his ex-parishioners.

  The last attempted escape of the year was wholly unsuccessful. In the early morning of 18th September 1871, William Heaps followed Patrick Burke’s methodology. He had managed to secret a small knife in his single room. He used it to saw first through a window bar in his room in Block 3, and then to take off the end of his wooden bedstead, using that as a lever to try and bend aside the weakened bar. The noise of wood splintering against iron alerted the attendants, who found that Heaps had failed to make much impression on the ironwork. What they did discover, though, was a pile of clothing readied for the escape, which Heaps had managed to hide together with the knife under materials that he used for painting. He was a talented artist, and had been allowed to paint in his room during the day. His requests to the attendants not to disturb his materials or finished works had been used as cover to conceal his contraband underneath them. Attendant Samuel Rawson – later to become Broadmoor’s Chief Attendant – was cautioned for his judgement and his lack of vigilance.

  Heaps was twenty-four, of no fixed abode, and had been in and out of institutions since he was a child. Sentenced to five years for housebreaking near Gloucester, he had self-harmed in prison and come to Broadmoor a little earlier in 1871. He was a painter by trade, and so in the Asylum he had been set to work retouching the decoration. Despite his new surroundings, he continued to self-harm, and was also destructive, so when the Broadmoor doctors discovered that he was calmed by painting with oils on canvas, he was encouraged to spend more time at his hobby. After he was discharged in 1874, he maintained a rootless life, spending as much time in prisons or asylums as he did in wider society, and it was perhaps of little surprise when he arrived back at Broadmoor in 1888, five years into a ten year stretch for theft. This time he stayed for three years before he was discharged, apparently sane, to finish his sentence in Parkhurst. It was another false dawn: Heaps’s die had long been cast. The last time that Broadmoor heard of him, in 1897, he was back in a county asylum.

  The escape attempts of 1871 had proved that any weaknesses in supervision by the staff might still be punished, even inside the more secure institution that Broadmoor had become. Orange appears to have placed little blame on his staff for these occasional incidents. The only edict issued from the Superintendent during the year was to remind his attendants of a regulation decreeing that whenever a patient had been granted more than one set of clothes, all but that in use should be locked away. This regulation had been introduced after David McLane’s flight in 1868; the only exception to it was within Block 2, the privilege block. No Block 2 patient ever troubled Victorian Broadmoor with an attempt to escape. There were systems in place to ensure constant supervision otherwise, and Orange obviously felt that the other escapes of the year had been down to unforeseen cunning rather than bad practice. A similar view would have been formed about the next example, some fifteen months after Heaps, when Thomas Cathie Wheeler succeeded in eluding the attendants.

  Wheeler would become the last pleasure man in this story to try and escape. Born in 1824, as a young man he had shown no signs of mental illness. This changed when he was in his twenties, after he had travelled to South America and returned to England showing signs of profound character change. His family sent him first to Bethlem and then to the Surrey Asylum at Springfield as a voluntary patient. Discharged, one day in April 1852 he knocked his mother over with a flat iron, then took up a hatchet and beheaded her. He had been sent once again to Bethlem, this time to the criminal wing, and was in one of the first male intakes transferred to Broadmoor in early 1864. He was also one of the first patients to have modern delusions about electricity being used o
n him, as well as suffering from the more ancient delusion that his food was impure.

  On the afternoon of 10th December 1872, Wheeler, now aged forty-eight, was amongst a group of patients from Block 4 who were strolling around the Terrace to the south of the Asylum as part of their exercise routine. As it began to rain, the attendants in charge of the group started to marshal their troops back inside the Block, via its airing court. The patients massed at the gate, and filed past an attendant who was detailed to count the marchers as they went back in. His concentration, however, was broken when he noticed that a patient was attempting to smuggle in a stone inside a handkerchief, undoubtedly for use as a weapon at some later point. With the attendant focused on searching the patient, Wheeler acted on an impulse to conceal himself behind some large shrubs on the Terrace. He squatted down amongst the evergreens and waited in the wintry rain. Remarkably, he was not omitted from the initial head count when the gate was locked. Instead, he was able to wait until it was dark, whereupon he walked to a point where the boundary wall was lowest, found something to stand on, and climbed over.

  Two hours later, he was eventually missed. It was enough of a delay to afford Wheeler a head start, and by now, he had begun to walk to the village of Blackwater, some three miles away. Unfortunately for Wheeler, the experience proved overwhelming. Frightened of losing himself in the pine woods along the route, he began to walk back towards the Asylum, intending to find and follow a different route away. Of course, moving back from whence he had come was associated with its own risks. As he approached Broadmoor, he was spotted by the Asylum’s messenger, who managed to detain Wheeler in conversation for time enough until the duty attendants looked out of the Gatehouse and realised what was going on. Wheeler had endured, rather than enjoyed a confused four hours of freedom, and he would not repeat his action. He reverted to his Block, and died in Broadmoor in 1907, having spent fifty-five years in hospital care.

  Wheeler’s escape was of no long-term consequence. There was no soul-searching or grand inquiry after it. Rather, the greater impact to strategic direction had been felt after the escapes and attacks of 1871. Orange was convinced that the convicts were a positive harm to his community of generally peaceful lunatics, their influence far outweighing their constitution of only a third of the patient population. During 1872, although their had been fewer serious incidents, he had taken the most drastic action available to him, and increased the number of patients, mostly convicts, who had been forced to spend time isolated in seclusion. It was not the solution. Whatever his own views on its success, his harsher regime had incurred the criticism of the Commissioners in Lunacy after their annual inspection.

  Orange concluded that the only way to properly manage the pleasure and the time patients was to separate them entirely. His basic starting premise was that the pleasure men were innocents who had no wish to cause him trouble. None of them had ever been guilty of a crime, and had no propensity to wickedness. Orange wanted new accommodation to be built, so that he could relieve the blameless residents from the convicts, whose bad and unlawful behaviour was part of their everyday lives. Delivering his annual report for 1872, he questioned ‘whether it is just or expedient to permit those other inmates whose lives have not previously exposed them to such evil influences to be contaminated by the degraded habits and conversation of the convict class.’ Over the coming years, he would try to achieve this separation where he could, but without any extra resources to do so.

  Meanwhile, Orange was about to have his annus horribilis in terms of escapes. It was as if all the charges he levelled at the convicts were about to be proved. It started on 27th May 1873, when John Batts, a thirty-two year-old, suicidal thief was out walking with an attendant and two other patients in the Asylum grounds. During this gentle stroll, Batts suddenly took off from the path and made for the woods. The attendant in charge of the group quickly deposited the other two patients with a working party nearby and then took off himself in pursuit of Batts. The alarm was raised and a number of other attendants soon joined the search. Batts was found by one of them a short while later in the neighbouring parish of Sandhurst. He put up no resistance, and the attendant enlisted the help of a passing labourer to escort Batts to the village centre, where he was retrieved to the Asylum by cart. Batts was sent back to Millbank, the labourer was given a one pound reward, and there was the opportunity for all to feel that lessons had obviously been learnt from 1871, and that systems were now in place that made it unlikely any patient could escape the estate.

  Regrettably, any hint of self-satisfaction would be found misplaced, and sooner than they might have imagined. For it was Orange’s misfortune that the next flight of the year would lead to a third patient vanishing without trace, and the only such loss under Orange’s direct command. The fact that the subject was also the only murderer in Broadmoor’s history to never be recaptured only doubled Orange’s embarrassment.

  It was Saturday 12th July 1873, and patient William Bisgrove was exercising in the Asylum grounds, accompanied by Attendant Allan Mason. It was not the first time that Bisgrove had been allowed outside the walls: he had been exercising in this fashion for about 18 months before. On this particular outing, Bisgrove and Mason strolled around the southern fields of the estate before turning, and making their way back towards the Asylum farm, pausing only to talk about the chickens that were running around their enclosure. As they moved on, Bisgrove pointed out some rabbit burrows adjacent to the footpath, and Mason, a big man, bent down to look at one of the burrows. Now that he was off guard, Bisgrove hit him hard on the back of the head with a stone in a sling, in the traditional patient manner. While the attendant reeled from the blow, Bisgrove attempted to throttle him, and then the two men grappled each other, before Bisgrove threw off his custodian and made his way, like previous runners, into the pine woods of Bracknell Forest.

  Mason was temporarily incapacitated, but recovered and quickly made his way back to the farm. He raised the alarm, and then set off again in the direction Bisgrove had run. A thorough combing was made of the woods, but with no success. There were no leads until, as the searches were going on, word was received that someone fitting Bisgrove’s description – a man with thick black curly hair and beard, and wearing the plain blue Asylum jacket and waistcoat with fustian trousers – had been spotted in the grounds of Sandhurst Military College. A search party spent the night there. Bisgrove was not found.

  On the Sunday morning, a message reached the Asylum that Bisgrove had been seen in Aldershot on Saturday night. So throughout Sunday, a team of constables and attendants visited every lodging house and outbuilding in Aldershot, only to report back empty-handed once again. Then on Monday, a local woman told the Police that she had seen a man jump into the Basingstoke Canal two miles from Aldershot. The Canal was dredged, yet nothing was brought up that was connected to the fugitive. The Police back in Somerset were alerted, and the search closer to home was widened to Basingstoke, Winchester, Southampton and Portsmouth. Twelve days later, Orange called off the chase. In the back of his mind was the fourteen day rule of the Lunacy Act 1845, that once a certified lunatic was away for a fortnight, all the paperwork that committed him to an asylum became redundant. Though this was a minor issue, the deadline served to concentrate the mind. By the time the period had elapsed, it was probably sensible to stop wasting unnecessary effort: Bisgrove could be anywhere.

  The fourteen day window was usually, of course, enough to cause escaped patients to turn up. When Bisgrove did not, then as with other runners before there was little choice but to wait until something happened. So Orange waited, as nothing happened, and the murderer on the run was quietly forgotten. Bisgrove’s description remained in circulation for a long time. Years later, in 1891, the Metropolitan Police asked Broadmoor whether they thought Bisgrove could be a man called James Sadler, who they had arrested for the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute – and who has occasionally been mentioned in connection with the Ripper murders – but the
authorities were not convinced. It is an inconclusive end to the story, and Bisgrove’s disappearance remains without a satisfactory coda.

  Orange, a diligent and dedicated man, must have worried at the time that his errant charge was capable of committing an act that would lead to their eventual reunion. At the age of nineteen, Bisgrove, an epileptic coal miner from Wells, had spent a long August evening drinking with another youth and his girlfriend. Staggering towards home, they had reached a cornfield where they stopped. Bisgrove offered the girl two shillings if she would have sex with him, and she was inclined to accept. They laid down a short distance from an older man, George Cornish, who was asleep under the stars. As the other boy sat on a stile beside the byway, Bisgrove took the girl, then got up, walked across the field and picked up a large and heavy stone. He carried it over to Cornish, the sleeping stranger, and dropped the stone on his head. Cornish was mortally wounded, and died where he lay.