Life in the Victorian Asylum: The World of Nineteenth Century Mental Health Care

by Mark Stevens

  Happily, within a metal bookcase near the old committee room at Moulsford were almost all the asylum’s casebooks, from the very first through to the 1920s. When the bookcase doors were opened several rows of white spines peered out, as polished and as smooth as the bones of any skeleton. In gold leaf capitals, each one proclaims ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ with a volume number. Every page is headed by a patient’s name, an age – aet, in abbreviated medical Latin – and the date of admission. Beneath are the notes, written up by the asylum’s junior doctor.

  After the initial listing of ‘factors indicating insanity’ on admission, there is a description of the patient’s mental and physical states. ‘Answers reluctantly and in a very low voice’; ‘conversation is incoherent and utterly senseless’; ‘markedly deficient in knowledge of even the most ordinary and common things’; such were the verdicts meted out on Moulsford’s new arrivals. Beneath that description come further notes, added weekly at first and then monthly or quarterly. These notes show the patient’s progress through the system.

  The notes often tell of stasis; ‘No change’ is a common refrain, with ‘bodily health fair, still irrational’ a slight variation. Such notes add credence to the suggestion that patients ended up forgotten, on the chronic wards for decades. If any recovery was under way, then there was a chance that no one ever noticed. However, to dismiss the notes as unenlightening would be to do them a disservice. They include details of outbursts or accidents and also describe delusions or fears. They amplify each case, giving you a sense of whether a patient was at peace with themselves or perpetually troubled, angry or resigned.

  Each time I browse one of the Moulsford or Broadmoor records I am distracted by someone new, whom I have not met before. I want to find out about them and to try and understand them. I feel that I ought to rescue them from obscurity because their stories should be heard, but perhaps I am simply projecting a new paternalism on to these patients; one that is just as judgemental as anything the Victorians offered. Like James Murdoch, I believe that I am labouring for my fellows.

  If so, then I am not alone. In celebrating the people who spent time in the Victorian asylum, the truth is that I have arrived somewhat late upon the scene. For while we argue over the benefits of the residential home or the benefits of community care, while we debate the stigma that is attached to mental illness, an entirely unexpected challenge to our stereotypes has come about through the efforts of Britain’s large band of family historians. They have taken up asylum archives without a thought for the politics of the institution.

  Every day, up and down the country, these personal detectives search excitedly for ancestors whose names they have found secreted in the records of asylum care, wishing to add them to their lists of forebears. Extensive access to historic resources like the census has opened up the remnants of Victorian communities previously hidden to all but the most dedicated researcher. Anyone can look for names of patients and then find out more about them. So people do. After a century as outcasts, a quiet revolution of rehabilitation is currently at hand, as many unknown pauper lunatics have their graves marked by genealogists and their experience resurrected.

  There is something that we can all learn from this. Like the patients before them, family historians are mostly ordinary men and women from across the walks of life. They have no received knowledge about the asylum, they pursue no set agenda. In the absence of these encumbrances, they have sought out those moonstruck souls who form part of their flesh and blood; more than that, they have embraced them willingly and without prejudice, crafting a supportive branch for them onto many a family tree.

  So here are the true friends of the Victorian asylum. The heirs of patients have brought us back to the values of William Tuke and the Retreat, back to the virtues of moral treatment. Those who suffer from mental illness are only people just like all of us. We treat them no differently to anyone else. We respect them, we value them and we join with them. We spent the past together, and we go forward together.

  Chapter 5

  Before You Go: Moulsford Patient Portraits

  One thing that this book has not been able to do is dwell in depth on the life stories of individual Moulsford patients. The hero of a tale entitled ‘Life in the Victorian Asylum’ has to be the institution, rather than the people within it and so, although patients often appear in the preceding chapters, they are principally defined by their illness.

  Nonetheless, that illness is only a part of their story, and it does not reflect the fact that every patient also had a life outside the asylum. They were not solely mental health patients; they were everyday Victorian people whose misfortune was simply to fall sick at some point during their lives.

  In this spirit, here are some brief pen portraits of Moulsford patients. Each was a real person. England’s county asylum network was set up to treat people like them.

  John James Lee, John Runciman and Duncan McPhee

  The public asylum was obliged to take any patient in its catchment who required relief. They were usually local people who had lived in the area all their lives, but not entirely: anyone who could establish (or have established for them) a legal right of settlement, or who simply could not be allocated to another poor law union, might end up falling onto the accounts of the ratepayers. The result is that various tramps and travellers can be found in the Moulsford admissions registers.

  These travellers were often attracted by some local feature that drew in residents from further afield – agricultural work, fairs, army camps – but they could also be inspired to travel by their illness. In Berkshire, the royal residence at Windsor Castle was an attraction for lunatics who had incorporated the monarchy into their delusions. Over the years a handful were admitted to Moulsford; though what makes John James Lee, John Runciman and Duncan McPhee stand out is that they all decided to make the journey within a few months of each other in 1877.

  John James Lee was a wealthy timber merchant from Bury St Edmunds, who arrived in Windsor by train that spring. He walked through the town to the Castle gate, ran straight through it and was picked up in the quadrangle by a suspicious constable, who had witnessed Lee’s hasty dash and went in pursuit of him. Under questioning, Lee iterated his descent from the house of Stuart and said he had been twice married to Queen Victoria. After a few weeks in Moulsford he was removed to the Ipswich Asylum and ended up in a private madhouse, close to his wife and children, where he died in 1910.

  McPhee and Runciman had trekked even further. They both believed that they had important messages to deliver to the Queen. Runciman, a short young man with jet black hair and dark eyes, was an Edinburgh carpenter who had quit his job and then walked all the way to Balmoral. Having been turned away, he took the train south to Windsor, whereupon he was arrested at the Castle gate, taken first to the workhouse and then onto Moulsford. His fate was similar to Lee’s: the asylum medical officers made contact with Runciman’s father and he was discharged to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum on the same day that Lee went back to Suffolk.

  McPhee faired slightly differently. A pale, fair-haired Scot, he was a 36-year-old, highly educated law clerk, who had also left his employment to pursue an unusual fantasy. McPhee believed he had uncovered a Jesuit plot to destroy the Protestant religion and agents of that league had begun to put poison in his food. McPhee then became convinced that the Jesuits had moved to persecute his friends, so he avowed to tell the monarch of the plot before any more people came to harm.

  Like Runciman, McPhee started his odyssey at Balmoral, then camped out near Buckingham Palace and Osborne House, before eventually arriving in Windsor. He presented himself at the Castle and stated his intention both to warn the Queen of a conspiracy and also to marry Princess Beatrice. He was immediately placed in custody. Yet, unlike his fellow countryman, McPhee arrived at the asylum without any information about his friends or family, and no attempt was made to send him home.

  McPhee’s fate was to stay at Moulsford. His was a classic case o
f monomania. McPhee could hold an intelligent conversation on many subjects, but if the topic moved towards religion then his illness showed itself. He comes across in his notes as an unhappy man. Though he was put to work in the asylum garden – a convalescing task – and helped the clerk with his office duties, McPhee’s constant paranoia about the Jesuits made him troublesome and sometimes violent. On occasions he refused his food and was force-fed with the pump. He also expressed his disapproval of the asylum’s entertainments, refusing to help write the programmes for events, and once standing up mid-performance to castigate the staff for the earthy humour of their songs.

  Perhaps due to his greater education, McPhee never quite fitted in with the other patients. ‘Fond of showing his superiority of language and thoughts’ was one note; ‘wishes to regulate the arrangement of the asylum’ was another. He continued to believe that his food was poisoned, while he also developed the fear that electricity was used to torture him. He claimed that Dr Gilland kept an iron instrument under his patients’ beds through which currents could be passed.

  McPhee was in Moulsford for nine years. He had contracted tuberculosis before his admission and the disease eventually killed him in 1886.

  Thomas Ashton

  As I have previously hinted, a proportion of public asylum patients had some sort of military background. The percentages in Moulsford were not as high as in Broadmoor – where approximately one in ten of the early male patients had served in the forces – but ex-soldiers were a persistent feature in the annual admissions tables.

  Thomas Ashton was one of these. He was born in 1833 in Huddersfield. As a teenager he moved to Dublin and subsequently enlisted in the army. He served for fifteen years, mostly in the Royal Scots Greys. Ashton cannot have been an easy colleague: he was branded with the letters ‘B C’ (meaning of ‘Bad Character’) on his chest, before he was given a dishonourable discharge. The army clearly had a point, because shortly after he left his regiment Ashton was picked up in Oxford for attempting to pass on stolen goods. In January 1867 he was convicted in Abingdon and given six months’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.

  While he was in gaol Ashton’s excitable behaviour caught the attention of the medical officer. He was certified as suffering from mental illness, classified as a criminal lunatic and admitted to Littlemore Asylum. He was also boarded out at Fisherton House in Salisbury, then brought back to Berkshire as one of the first men transferred to Moulsford when it opened.

  Ashton was diagnosed by Dr Gilland and his team as suffering from mania. He was an elated character who believed himself to have been blessed with superhuman skills, a champion prize fighter and the cleverest man in the world, capable of earning one pound every minute. His constant chatter sounded very positive, though his mood in the asylum was somewhat bullying, and he alternated between extreme courtesy and outright abuse.

  Like Broadmoor, Moulsford also found that the convicted criminals were the patients who were prone to escape. Ashton fitted this description and he became something of a serial escaper, though none of his attempts were very successful. During his first in 1874, he ran away while he was supposed to be cleaning corridors. He reached a house in North Moreton, where a friend of his lived, but he was less welcome than he had anticipated and ended up detained while help was sent for.

  The following year he made off from an airing court, intending to walk along the railway line from Moulsford to London. On that occasion he made it as far as the adjacent bridge over the Thames, then spotted the Beetle and Wedge Inn and decided to stop for a pint. The landlord sent a messenger up the road for help. In 1880, Ashton ran away during a game of cricket and was retrieved from the nearby town of Wallingford. His last foray came in 1885, when he simply walked across the asylum fields, first to the main road and then a further six miles across the Berkshire Downs, where he was spotted at the railway station in the village of Compton.

  Despite this tendency, Ashton became something of a reformed character at Moulsford. Though he continued to shout and curse, his sporting prowess was indeed marked and he excelled at tennis and at cricket, becoming the institution’s finest fast bowler (for which he received a brief mention in Part One). This did not help with his delusions of grandeur: ‘still the most conceited man in the asylum’ read one exasperated note. Ashton was also a dedicated worker. A big, burly man, for years he helped out chopping logs for firewood (which might have been thought a risky move) and also cleaning his ward. He was noted for the exceptionally high standards he brought to his work.

  This was the contradiction in Ashton: at times intimidating and threatening, he spared no effort at making sure all was in order around him. He was known to care deeply for the wellbeing of his fellow patients; when he became severely ill with diarrhoea in 1883 he simply took himself off to the billiard room to avoid bothering anyone else. Realising that he was settled, the staff left him there to follow a diet of milk and opium until he recovered. Shortly afterwards, Ashton gained his highest asylum accolade when he was appointed as a volunteer nurse to the sick. The gentle giant spent many hours in the Moulsford infirmary caring for his fellow patients. When he died in 1906 superintendent James Murdoch attended his funeral.

  Emily Parham

  Emily Parham’s story is one that is repeated many times throughout the Moulsford records: that of a young mother in need of help. What makes Emily’s tale a suitable one on which to close is because she links the two asylums whose histories have informed this book. Hers is a Broadmoor story as well as a Moulsford one.

  She was born Emily Deller, the daughter of a carter, in Shoreditch in 1840. After working for some years in a London goods office, in her late twenties Emily joined the staff at Broadmoor as a seamstress. It was here that she met Henry Parham, the asylum’s Sussex-born stableman. The two courted, and with the permission of the asylum authorities they wed in 1871, before moving into married quarters on the Crowthorne estate.

  Emily quickly fell pregnant, but seven months into her term she began to exhibit unusual behaviour. She was feverish in manner, rambling in conversation, and she believed that she had been possessed by the devil, who was attempting to influence her with destructive thoughts. For two months Henry nursed her at home until the baby was born: a daughter, also called Emily. There was a brief period of respite when Emily nursed her child, yet before long her delusions returned with a vengeance. She started breaking things around the house and then threatened to kill herself and the baby.

  Broadmoor’s medical officers stepped in. Their asylum was home to many mothers who had murdered their children, and they did not wish to receive another from amongst their own community. David Cassidy, Broadmoor’s deputy superintendent, spoke at length to Henry Parham before the doctor signed the form required to admit Emily to Moulsford. She arrived on the female wards in November 1872.

  Shortly afterwards her baby grew sick, and Henry fought desperately to save his daughter to no avail. She died at home. Henry was now in married quarters on his own, while his wife remained at Moulsford, where she suffered a fit so severe that it left her screaming, convulsing and bedridden. Her health continued to decline until she too died in October 1874, aged 34. Her death certificate records the cause as ‘general paralysis of the insane’: which we now know was syphilis, and this infection may have also accounted for the death of her child.

  Devastated, Henry Parham resigned from Broadmoor and moved to Reading, where he looked after the horses at a brewery. A few years later he took a new wife, Annie, and they went on to have nine children together. When his work as a stableman dried up, Henry became a house painter, and soon after, the now elderly couple moved back to Crowthorne. For the last twenty years of his life Henry lived once more within a half-hour walk of Broadmoor. He died in 1921 at the grand old age of 80.

  Emily’s short life illustrates the sudden change in fortunes that a crisis can bring about; Henry’s rather longer span illustrates the choices facing families of asylum patients. After his young wife was rem
oved from him, Henry had no option but to make the best he could of the situation. If Emily had not died so young, Henry would have joined the pool of visitors who came month after month, year after year to Moulsford to sit in the panelled waiting room, staring at the printed regulations while their partners were fetched from the wards. In many ways, the lives of those visitors were just as static as those of the patients. Chronic illness was – and remains – the cruellest sentence.

  Sources

  The Broadmoor and Fair Mile Archives

  I am very fortunate to look after two Victorian mental health archives in my day job, and both of these have been invaluable sources in the writing of this book.

  The Berkshire Record Office took custody of the Broadmoor archive in 2004. My book Broadmoor Revealed is based on its contents and how they can be used. For Life in the Victorian Asylum, more information came from the Broadmoor management and staff records. Of particular interest were the Victorian annual reports (Berkshire Record Office reference D/H14/A2/1/1/1-13), Council of Supervision minutes (D/H14/A1/2/1-3) and Commissioners in Lunacy reports (D/H14/A1/1/1/1-2), as well as staff instructions (D/H14/B1/2/2/1), order books (D/H14/A2/1/5/1, A2/1/7/1) and defaulters books (D/H14/B1/3/1/1-3).

  The Fair Mile archive came into the Berkshire Record Office during 2001 and 2002, just before the hospital closed. Fair Mile, in its guise as the Moulsford Asylum, has provided the bulk of the archive material that has inspired this book.

  There are various relevant collections to point you towards in Berkshire Record Office. There are annual reports to the justices (Q/AL12/1-5) and monthly reports to the Committee of Visitors (D/H10/A4/1-7). The patient casebooks, from which much of the anecdotal case details comes, are in two series for males (D/H10/D2/1/1-13) and females (D/H10/D2/2/1-17). There is also a series of chaplain’s journals for the period (D/H10/E1/1-6).