by Mark Stevens
Bisgrove and his male friend were arrested and sentenced to death at the Somerset Assizes in December 1868. Both would have hanged, but Bisgrove confessed that he alone had committed the crime, though he had no recollection of it. His companion was set free and Bisgrove’s own sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. The west country adolescent had then been admitted as a convict to Broadmoor in early 1869, where he became one of those patients who broke the windows and made threats to the staff. During the last couple of years he had become calmer, hence his strolls around the grounds, though as Orange noted, Bisgrove was ‘always a morose and sullen man...inclined to recklessness partly from natural disposition and partly from there being so little apparently to be either hoped for or feared by him in this world’. Bisgrove’s character was such that it seems incredible that he might have kept himself out of trouble for any great length of time after his escape, so perhaps this occasionally suicidal young man did end up at the bottom of the Basingstoke Canal in 1873 after all.
Less than a month after this unscheduled decrease in the lunatic population, and while Orange was away on a long weekend, the Asylum lost another patient. This would prove to be another long-term loss, and at the time, his departure was considered to be as permanent as Bisgrove’s. On this occasion it was the turn of John Walker, a thirty-five year old stonemason from Birmingham, to breach the staff’s defences. Walker was known to be a difficult patient. When he was ten years old, he had taken his older brother’s breakfast to the factory where he worked, seen a mouse, chased it, and been struck on the head by the fly wheel of some industrial machine. He had suffered from learning disabilities ever since, and had been convicted of burglary in 1866 and given ten years inside. While in prison, he had begun to sense that he was controlled by witchcraft, hence his removal to Broadmoor in 1867.
The circumstances of the case were similar to that of Bisgrove, in that Walker was being supervised outside the walls. On 7th August 1873, he was in a working party of eight patients in an oat field to the north west of the Asylum. The morning had passed without incident, and after lunch, the group returned to their labours. By 4pm, the party had been at work for several hours, and they stopped for a break. The patients lined up, and the two attendants in charge poured out beakers of oatmeal and water for the men to drink. Walker was one of the first to receive his refreshment. By the time the attendants had reached the end of the line, they looked up to see Walker making his way towards the edge of the field. This was not unusual: they were some distance from the Asylum facilities, and if a man wished to spend a penny, the field edge was as good a place as any to do so.
As they watched, Walker reached the edge of the field, where he halted. Expecting to see him undo his trousers, their casual observation turned to alarm as Walker proceeded to vault the fence and, like so many before him, make off into the woods. One of the attendants immediately began to run after Walker, but caught his foot in a ploughed rut in the field and fell over. This gave the patient enough time to make good his sylvan flight.
It was a case of déjà vu. The usual searches were conducted of the woods and surrounding estates, the local police and the Met were informed, the railway stations were watched. He could be found nowhere. Walker was considered to be a low risk patient – Orange suggested, perhaps sheepishly, that ‘his liberation at no distant period would probably have taken place’ – but this was a further failing all the same. To lose one lunatic might be considered a misfortune, but to lose two most definitely had the whiff of carelessness about it.
Fortuitously, this missing patient did turn up again, a little over five years later, and two years after his prison sentence had expired. It was a chance meeting between two old acquaintances. On 28th September 1878, one of the Broadmoor attendants was visiting Birmingham when he spotted Walker about the city. A personable conversation ensued, and the attendant suggested that it might be better for Walker to accompany him, in order to remove officially the cloud still hanging over his freedom. Even more fortuitously perhaps, Walker agreed, put up no resistance to returning to Crowthorne, and travelled back with the attendant the next day. Perhaps he felt that he had nothing to fear, as he had made a success of his time outside. After his escape, and as the summer of 1873 continued, he had taken seasonal work as a harvester, crossing England on a path from Berkshire to Liverpool. When winter arrived on Merseyside, he had gone back to his old job as a stonemason, moving back to his native Birmingham in 1874. At the time of his voluntary apprehension, he was earning two pounds per week and getting on well. It was quite apparent that Walker was sane and was also a productive member of society. It was in no-one’s interest to stop his contribution. Orange discharged Walker absolutely three weeks later, gave him five shillings for his trouble and also paid his train fare back to Birmingham.
Orange could afford to be relaxed about escapees by the autumn of 1878. In 1873, the year still had another sting for him in its tail. The final escape of 1873 took place on 12th November. It had its roots back in August too, when there had been a theft from the Principal Attendant’s room in Block 1, one of the ‘back Blocks’ with higher security. Nearly fifteen pounds had been stolen – a large sum of money – and although searches had been made throughout the Asylum, the money had not been recovered. The reason was that a conspiracy was in progress. Despite a one pound reward on offer for information, the money was being hidden, quite possibly in turn, by two patients: Timothy Grundy (who may be remembered from Escape from Broadmoor: Part One) and John Brown. Using the money they had thieved, both men also managed to bribe a corrupt attendant, William Phillips, into providing them with a skeleton key.
Brown was known as ‘a very powerful man’. Stout, twenty-six years old, and serving a fifteen year sentence for wounding, he had attacked both staff and patients at Broadmoor since his admission in April 1871. He was another convict who had outgrown the cells at Millbank, and he did not find the regime at Broadmoor to his liking: ‘I am weary of life in this cursed Bastille of misery and destruction’, he wrote. He was often secluded in the Block, and for the two months before his escape he had embarked on a daily destruction of both fixtures and fittings on his ward. His behaviour improved in the few days before he escaped, almost certainly because now he had his key and wished to make use of it, and as a consequence he had been allowed around the Block again.
Shortly before 6pm on the day in question, he made out of the scullery on his ward in Block 1, opened the door to the Block with his key and went outside. He unlocked the airing court door, walked onto the Terrace, through another door and then into the yard where the wood was stored. He took two sets of steps, and placed a trestle over them. Then he climbed up, and over the wall, and made his way to Bagshot, where he spent the night in a cattle shed.
The staff were lucky. The next day, Brown used his money to make for an obvious destination that was being watched. He bought a ticket from Bagshot to Waterloo Station, and was retaken as he stepped onto the concourse in London. Giving a detailed, if varied account of his actions, it soon became apparent that Phillips was indirectly responsible for Brown’s escape and the attendant was dismissed immediately. A little over five pounds of the stolen money was recovered from the inside of Brown’s backside, and the patient was moved onto Millbank again the following year.
Eighteen seventy-three had been a bad year, the worst since Orange took over. Brown’s case may have been dealt with, but the Medical Superintendent held an internal enquiry at the Asylum, directed by the Council of Supervision, to rake over the coals of Bisgrove and Walker, and to conclude with a report to the Home Office. The result was largely factual about the nature of each escape, and Orange found little worthy of blame: the attendants in both cases might perhaps have been more vigilant, but in neither case were they negligent, and the principle that patients of good behaviour should be allowed to go at large was not one that anyone who understood the subject wished to change. Furthermore, Orange did some research to show that the rate of
escape at Broadmoor was around seven times less than for that body of criminal lunatics housed in county asylums.
Perhaps predictably, in the light of his previous comments, Orange focused his recommendations on the mixing of time and pleasure patients in blocks together; suggesting implicitly (though none too subtly) that the matter of escape was related. The pleasure man’s only chance of discharge rested on his good behaviour, whereas the time man’s reward for good behaviour was to end up back in prison, which Orange considered to be a dubious incentive. He suggested that the pleasure patients be allowed to continue as they were, and that money be spent to provide a separate, more secure outdoors environment for the convicts. There was no mention of any changes to procedures that might have led his staff to improve their performance.
Orange’s argument found support from the Commissioners in Lunacy, who agreed with Orange that his two classes of patient should be separated wherever possible. Alternative accommodation was provided at Woking Invalid Prison, Knaphill, and the next year saw an informal moratorium on time patients admitted to Broadmoor, with a result that their population diminished. Orange felt vindicated by the comparatively quiet year he enjoyed. There was only one attempted escape during 1874, right at the close of the year, and by the standards of its predecessors, it used an entirely unique method.
A storm was raging around the Asylum on the night of 6th December 1874. The wind was swirling in between the blocks, buffeting the buildings on the forest ridge. The open gaps between the window frames and wooden doors were howling lowly with each forceful gust. In Block 6, patient Thomas Hart was busy worrying away at the wall of his room, inching ever closer to the other side. The catalyst for Hart’s labours had been an unexpected discovery: that at the point where his bedroom wall abutted the bricks of a chimney flue, there was a much thinner skin of brick between him and the outside world, only nine inches thick instead of eighteen. Furthermore, after a little over a decade of weathering, the mortar joints had perished in parts of the outer course. Lying in his room, Hart could see daylight.
He was a destructive patient, and his bedstead had been long removed from his room. Instead, he slept on two mattresses, and it was this arrangement that afforded him the chance to begin to deconstruct the wall at its weakest point. Scraping away manually at the mortar, he managed to work first one brick loose, and then another. The noise of the gale ensured that no one heard Hart as he was working during the night. By placing his mattresses in front of his growing shaft, Hart could cover up his operations but also place the bricks that he removed between the two pieces of bedding. At the same time, throughout the night he listened out for the attendants, for by now each room had an observation hole in the door. He would be checked on roughly every hour; in between, he could execute his plan.
The patient was a twenty-two year old hawker, married with one child, who like many Broadmoor convicts before had come from the central London prison at Millbank. Hart was a thief who was serving seven years. At Broadmoor he had been found to be difficult to employ, but had taken to feeding the birds in the grounds of the Block 6 airing court, and to flying a kite for exercise. As a result, Hart had been allowed to keep both a bag in his room containing bird food and a ball of twine for his kite wire. These items were about to be put to alternative use.
Hart worked throughout the night at his painstaking task. Then, shortly before 6am, he had pulled out enough bricks from the wall to create an aperture large enough for him to squeeze through. He gathered up all the pieces of discarded brick and put them into his bag of bird food. He dressed in a jacket and trousers that he had previously managed to secret in his room. He knotted his blankets together, and moved his bedding away from the hole. Then he took up the blanket rope, the twine and the bag and manoeuvred himself through and down into the airing court.
If that was not ingenious enough, Hart’s next moves were unsurpassed by previous escape attempts. Pawing away at the ground of the airing court, he scooped up earth and sand and added this to the contents of his bag, which by now contained a considerable amount of weight. He took a length of the kite twine and tied one end to the bag, and the other to his plaited blankets. Then he took hold of the other end of the blankets, picked up the bag, and swung the latter backwards and forwards until he had gathered enough momentum to throw it over the wall. It landed on the other side, still attached to the kite twine. This produced a cantilever effect, using the wall as the fulcrum. Hart had secured the heavy bag sufficiently to bear his own weight as he began to climb the boundary wall, gripping onto the blanket rope and easing himself one step at a time to the top.
He was missed at the hourly check at six, and search parties were immediately dispatched. Hart had begun to walk south, towards Blackwater, and he was spotted at half past nine in the morning begging for bread. A local labourer raised three friends, including the Asylum’s coal man, and the four of them detained Hart that evening on the road from Blackwater to Fleet. The one item of clothing that Hart had not been able to hide in his room were his shoes, and once chased, the barefoot patient was soon caught. He was back in Block 6 again by 11pm, asked to be returned to prison, and was removed to Pentonville in September the following year.
Pleased with the improved level of control subsequent to the decrease in number of time patients, Orange continued the moratorium, and trimmed the numbers further the following year. He also began purposefully to divide each Block into wards which contained convicts, and wards which did not. If nothing else, this efficiency does seem to have made it easier for him to deploy staff resources where they were more likely to be needed, and by 1876, he declared confidently that the management of the time patients was no longer a problem.
The presumption in favour of sending time patients to Woking Invalid Prison would continue until 1886, the year of Orange’s retirement. Never again would he have to deal with as many admissions from the prison population. It was only when the decision was taken to close that prison that Broadmoor became the principal recipient of such patients once again. Orange’s successor, David Nicolson, was given what Orange had asked for: funds to extend Blocks 2 and 5, and undertake sundry other improvements for better security, before the accumulation of convict lunatics in Woking made their way to Crowthorne in autumn 1888.
In consequence of Hart’s escape, the Office of Works was instructed to examine the condition of all the other flues in the Asylum and rebuild them where necessary. During 1875, Orange also began the task of raising both the external and internal boundary walls, which divided the airing courts, to a height of between fourteen and fifteen feet, a protracted piece of work which continued into 1876. The inner compound was now over-engineered for safety, and the staff enjoyed a much higher level of confidence in the accommodation provided to Her Majesty’s lunatics.
This was the end of the great escape period in the Asylum’s history. It was not the end of escapes: that day never came. The patients continued to make efforts to remove themselves, but the successful conclusion of such plans became a more rare thing. In the remaining period of Orange’s leadership, only one further patient managed to escape successfully, Charles Weldrick, in 1878, and even then he was recaptured the next day.
Since 1863, a total of eighteen patients had been able to help themselves to forbidden liberty, mostly for just a few hours, though with three evading re-admission in perpetuity. Most of these escapes had resulted in some direct alteration being made to the Asylum or the way it worked, and the level of public protection was increased continuously. Both Meyer and Orange learnt from the eighteen mishaps, and the result was, by 1875, a much more secure hospital. It was now twelve years old, more adult and fully-formed than when it had opened. Victorian Broadmoor was ready to receive greater numbers of patients, and to ensure that their discharge came about only via the due process of the law.
Only Passing Through
Broadmoor was not what I expected. When I came to visit, I had prepared myself for something fortified and fright
ening. Indeed, when you enter into the reception block at the modern boundary to the Hospital, this view is reinforced. Security is abundant and invasive before you pass through it, to find yourself in an irregularly shaped and anonymous waiting room, with various standard NHS notices fixed upon the wall. Then you are collected and cross over to the other side. Your host can only take you through each coming door once its predecessor is locked behind you, and you begin to feel the claustrophobic sense of what it must be like to experience this, possibly forever.
The entrance these days is different to that experienced by the Victorian patients, and it is difficult to recreate the journey of their own reception. The original Gatehouse sits marooned within the site, bereft of its former function and now an exit to nowhere. But soon after you are through the modern frontispiece, a sense of the original Asylum does open up before you. There are the original male blocks, for now at least before they too are redeveloped: the blocks where Oxford, Dadd and Minor stayed; the blocks from which all those escapes were launched so many years ago. And then before you have digested that fact there is the Terrace, sweeping wide and down before you, and it is glorious. Imagine the most fantastic view of landscape that it is possible to have in South East England, for this must be a contender. Can you imagine such a place being built with such a view today? The designer of that view was not afraid of tabloid censure. Where is the punishment in that view, where is the retribution?
The first time I visited, a colleague and I were there to scout out the archive, which at the time was stored in the old Medical Superintendent’s office in the original admin block. Here was the room where Meyer, Orange and Nicolson sat, writing their draft reports and letters to pass to the clerks to send to the Home Office. Here is where Meyer received the warrant discharging Edward Oxford. Here is where Nicolson presumably entertained Sir James Murray before leading him off to Block 2 to see Minor. Here is probably not where Orange sat while Dadd painted his portrait – Orange looks too young to be the Superintendent in that artwork – though it is certainly the room where Orange edited his and William Gull’s report on Christiana Edmunds. All the furniture has gone from the room, of course, but the panelling is still there, as well as the view out onto the Terrace. Then along the corridor is the central hall, which Dadd certainly painted in situ, and up from that is the chapel, where Meyer was downed by John Hughes. The chapel is as calm and spiritual a Victorian church as you might expect to find in any nineteenth century parish. It offers a helping hand to tranquillity, if you wish to take it.
