by Mark Stevens
Broadmoor Revealed:
Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum
Mark Stevens
Smashwords Edition
Copyright Mark Stevens 2011
This edition was published electronically in summer 2011. Most of the stories can also be read on the Berkshire Record Office website, www.berkshirerecordoffice.org.uk/albums/broadmoor. Comments and corrections are welcome: visit the Berkshire Record Office website and click on ‘Contact Us’.
Mark Stevens
c/o The Berkshire Record Office
9 Coley Avenue
Reading
RG1 6AF
Mark Stevens has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Front and rear covers show a photograph of the male staff at Broadmoor, taken to commemorate the retirement of Dr William Orange, 1886. Orange is in the top hat in the centre of the front cover, flanked by his medical staff. Berkshire Record Office reference D/H14/B6/1.
Contents
Preface
Broadmoor Hospital: By Way of Introduction
Edward Oxford: Shooting at Royalty
Richard Dadd: Artist of Repute
William Chester Minor: Man of Words and Letters
Christiana Edmunds: The Venus of Broadmoor
Broadmoor Babies
Escape from Broadmoor
Only Passing Through
Sources
About the Author
Preface
This short collection of stories grew from work to advertise the many personal tales contained in the archive of Broadmoor Hospital. When, in November 2008, the Berkshire Record Office made the archive available for research, it was the first time that the general public could access the historic collections of what was England’s first Criminal Lunatic Asylum. As the person responsible for promoting use of the archive, it fell to me to piece together some stories of the more well-known patients, with the idea that this would raise awareness of the fact that the archive existed, and give researchers an idea of what they could discover about the people who spent time in the Hospital.
This was and is not always a straightforward task. As you might expect, a lot of restrictions for access remain on the archive. Particularly, patients’ medical records are closed for a considerable time. This meant that any publicity had to focus on the Victorian period, and so I began to put together brief biographies of those nineteenth century patients who are already part of public consciousness. Their stories are here: Edward Oxford, Richard Dadd, William Chester Minor and Christiana Edmunds.
However, those are only four patients out of over two thousand admitted before 1901. They are also four patients about whom others have written, and about whom others are more qualified than me to write. So for me, the more interesting thing became how to tell some stories that were not well-known. There is no shortage of such material. You could choose virtually any patient and manage to bring something new to our understanding both of Victorian England, and also about the care and management of the mentally ill.
I chose a couple of things to write about as part of the Berkshire Record Office publicity. Firstly, I felt that the women of Broadmoor needed to be heard, and that Christiana Edmunds was too unusual a case to be representative of that group. On the other hand, a representative female case would have to be a child murderer, and this would potentially lack the redemptive element of the male stories of Oxford, Dadd and Minor, who were all remembered for achieving something despite their illnesses. Being a man, and therefore impressed with all things maternal, I thought that a great achievement of some female patients had been to give birth while they were in Broadmoor, so I decided that I could balance my infanticide narrative by writing about the babies who came into the world through the Asylum, as well as those who had left it. Secondly, I considered that I should not shy away from the non-medical aim of the Asylum, that of being a place of public protection. Rather than dwell on tales of violence and rage, I thought that a more entertaining way to highlight this would be through the concept of escapes. By writing about those that were successful or otherwise, I thought that I might also be able to dispel some of the preconceptions there might be about the dangers of an escaped lunatic.
So that this book has been put together from these individual pieces. As such, it is a tasting rather than a full bottle. In the longer term, it is my intention to complete another book about Victorian Broadmoor, which is planned as something different from a narrative history. The reaction to this short collection will give me an idea whether such a pursuit is worthwhile. There is so much I could tell you about the place: but, for now, perhaps I had best let you read on.
Mark Stevens
Reading, Berkshire
2011
Broadmoor Hospital:
By Way of Introduction
On 27th May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a recently-built national institution, which had been set amongst the tall, dense pines of Bracknell Forest. Inside these three coaches were eight women and their escorts from Bethlem Hospital in London, the ancient hospital for the treatment of the insane. It was now early afternoon, and that morning, the little party had left the Bethlem buildings in Southwark, boarded a train at Waterloo and been taken by steam through the capital’s suburbs and out to the little market town of Wokingham in Berkshire. Their destination was Broadmoor, England’s first Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
At half past twelve, they had alighted from the train at Wokingham’s simple railway station and found the three coaches waiting for them: a larger one, grandly-titled the Broadmoor Omnibus, together with two smaller vehicles. These carriages would take them on the last leg of their journey. The eight women and their accompanying paperwork were loaded into the seats, before the steps were removed and the horses started. Then the wheels of the coaches spun down winding earthy lanes and finally up a gentle incline as the passengers were driven the five miles to Crowthorne. Broadmoor’s first patients had arrived.
Who were these women? As befitted a group thrown together without friendship, they had different backgrounds. One was a petty thief, for example, while another had stabbed her husband when they were out poaching. Then there were the other six, who had all shared a single life event. They had killed or wounded their own children: either strangling them, drowning them, or cutting their throats with a razor.
It was one of this last group who was the first patient to be listed in the new Asylum’s admissions register. Her name was Mary Ann Parr. She was about thirty-five years of age, and a labourer from Nottingham. She had lived in poverty all her life, almost certainly suffered from congenital syphilis, and had what we would now call learning disabilities. Mary might have been just another member of the industrial poor, except that when she was twenty-five years old, she had given birth to an illegitimate child and then suffocated it against her breast. She had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but her sentence was commuted first to transportation for life, and then, after a medical examination, to treatment instead in Bethlem.
When Mary Ann Parr arrived at Broadmoor, as with every patient who would come after her, her details were first recorded from the forms that had accompanied her, and then she underw
ent a medical examination and an interview with one of the doctors. All the while, notes were taken, and these notes were then written up into a large case book, and added to over the years. This is an extract from the notes made about Mary Ann Parr on admission: ‘A woman of weak intellect, complains of pains in the forehead, short stature, cataract of the left and right eyes – can see a little with the left eye only. Teeth irregular and notched…Of very irritable temper.’
Mary Ann Parr and the other new patients were given the best treatment that was available at the time. This was rather different to how we might understand mental health treatment today. There were no drug therapies available for the mentally ill during Victorian times, nor psychiatric analysis. Instead, Her Majesty’s lunatics were subject to a regime known as ‘moral treatment’. This was a recognisable Victorian concept. Mary was given a regular daily routine of exercise and occupation (which for her meant working in the laundry); regular meals of fairly bland food; and plenty of fresh air. She was also given relief from her poor and harsh surroundings. Her quality of life was probably significantly better than that she had enjoyed outside: she had a roof over her head, and she did not have to worry about food or money. This removal of a patient from their usual society was another aspect of Victorian treatment. By giving a patient refuge in the Asylum, the Victorians believed they would be able to neuter the immediate causes of insanity in their day-to-day life, leading to beneficial results. It was a recognition that community living could create problems as well as solutions.
Mary Ann Parr was a reasonably typical recipient of this treatment regime, in that she experienced it for the next thirty-seven years, until she died in 1900, aged seventy-one, from kidney disease. Many patients spent decades on site, and became institutionalised in the process. It was by no means a given, though, that this outcome would prevail. The discharge rate on the male side was around one in ten, and even greater on the female side, with slightly more than one in three patients being discharged. This was, in part, due to the patient make up. While the ‘pleasure’ men and women’s fate lay ultimately with the Home Secretary of the day, a significant proportion of patients arrived from the prison system with a fixed sentence. Once that sentence was complete, they were usually discharged to a local asylum for care.
***
The fact of Broadmoor’s opening does not explain the fact of Broadmoor’s creation. Every story has a beginning, and in Broadmoor’s case this is usually traced back to a spring day in 1800. It was on the evening of 15th May that year that King George III chose to attend the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, London, only to feel the whistle of two shots pass near him before he had taken his seat in the royal box.
The assailant was a member of the audience. James Hadfield was a young father from London convinced that he needed to secure his own death at the hands of the state. By suffering the same fate as Christ, Hadfield believed that his personal sacrifice would benefit all mankind by ushering in the Second Coming, and the Day of Judgement. This was a fact that would emerge later. For now, Hadfield was restrained in the orchestra pit of the Theatre as pandemonium raged around him.
It was clear that Hadfield was mad. Legally, though, he presented a problem. While he might be found not guilty by reason of insanity, this verdict was reserved historically for those described as ‘brutes’ or ‘infants’. The usual result was a discharge, sometimes to Bethlem, London’s historic hospital for the mad, more often to family or the local community for care, but certainly with no further oversight from the state. Such a discharge would have been extremely risky in Hadfield’s case, as it seemed entirely plausible that if let go, he might try something similar again.
Besides, Hadfield was neither brute nor infant. He was married, in regular employment in the silver trade, a war hero, as well as a family man. His case bore some similarities to those of two previous assailants on the Royal person, Margaret Nicholson and John Frith, neither of which had been resolved satisfactorily from a legal point of view. The memory of Nicholson and Frith would have been fresh in the minds of the lawyers brought in to deal with Hadfield. Now, the law was presented with another opportunity to find a way of managing the dangerous lunatic, and the English legal system was helped out of its difficulties to no small extent by the success of Hadfield’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine. Today we would consider a defence lawyer to be an automatic right, but they were a bit of an oddity in court until the 1830s, and it was only because Hadfield had been charged with treason that the ancient statutes granted him a right to counsel. Erskine took advantage of this position to argue a revolutionary defence: that the law actually allowed for partial insanity; that is, it included recognition of those people who suffered from bouts of periodic mental illness, and otherwise enjoyed periods of lucidity. Hadfield was such a person. He was diligent and rational when he was not in a religious frenzy. He was found not guilty, and remanded to Bethlem while Parliament regulated the judge-made law. The result was the passing of the Criminal Lunatics Act 1800. This Act gave Hadfield his new status, and the law the power to detain him until ‘His Majesty’s pleasure be known’, the legal form for an indefinite sentence. Duly sentenced, and despite a brief escape from Newgate Prison, Hadfield remained a guest of His Majesty until his death in 1841.
Of course, with the new sentence there quickly came further Hadfields, all similarly afflicted and all requiring some form of secure accommodation. As luck would have it, Bethlem had outgrown its city space and was on the verge of moving to larger premises, so the Government negotiated the first dedicated space for criminal lunatics when the new Bethlem opened in St George’s Fields in 1816. Two new wings were built as what became known as the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It was an opportunist move, rather than a long-term one. When space at Bethlem reached capacity a few decades later, further space was purchased at Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury, though this also only bought a little more time. As the national population mushroomed during the nineteenth century, so too did the small subset that comprised the criminal lunatics.
The Home Office, under Secretary Sir George Grey, decided in the late 1850s to identify a piece of land on which to build a dedicated special hospital. The site at Crowthorne, part of the Crown estate of Windsor Forest, was chosen for being reasonably isolated, yet also easily accessible from London. Crowthorne itself barely existed at the time, but Wellington College was being built nearby and was due to gain a station on the London and South East Railway, so the area was ripe for development. Broadmoor itself was to be perched high-up on a ridge within the forest, commanding a magnificent and suitably healthy view across the countryside below.
Plans were shelved briefly when the Whig Government fell, and Grey removed from office, but as a result of Parliamentary enquiries into lunacy, it was not long before the Criminal Lunatic Asylums Act 1860 was passed. This allowed the Government to act on its plan and fund construction of its own asylum. Sir George Grey was back in post by the time building had begun, and under his instruction the Home Office’s prison architect, Sir Joshua Jebb, was given the task of designing the structure. Within three years, an army of convicts had supplied their forced labour, the woods had been cleared, several brick boxes reached up to the sky, Jebb was on his death bed, and Broadmoor was open for business.
***
For the first nine months of its existence, Broadmoor was a female only hospital. This was because the site design included fewer buildings on the female side, and they were finished first. The one female block was in a separate compound to the five male blocks that made up the initial building phase (a further block for each sex was finished within the next few years). It was only when these five blocks were ready, and the remaining convict labour retrenched to what would become Block 6 that coaches of men from Bethlem and Fisherton began replicating the women’s arrival. That process began on 27th February 1864. Patients like Oxford and Dadd were amongst those transferred.
By the end of 1864, there were two hundred men and one hundred women
in the Asylum, though the numbers would swell further until there were around five hundred patients at any time, in a ratio of roughly four men to one woman. Of course, the social mix within the walls varied from month to month and year to year over the duration of the Victorian period. However, some statistics from the first year’s intake of patients serve to give a flavour of the typical make up of this unique community, and how they had ended up there.
Around a quarter of the men and 40% of the women were murderers; many others had attempted to kill. Otherwise, the average patient had probably been caught stealing, or, if he was male, setting fire to something. There were sex offenders too amongst the men, including paedophiles and those who had committed bestial acts. Those were all demonstrably serious offences. The law though, could pass a pleasure sentence for any crime, with the result that a relatively few patients were also treated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure on what appear to be more trivial matters, such as vagrancy, sending threatening letters or even attempting suicide.
Most of the men had been labourers or tradesmen in their previous lives, though around one in ten had served in the forces. The latter figure included soldiers and sailors who had seen actions in the campaigns of Empire across the globe. The professional class was represented too, including by patients such as Dadd, with his intellectual and artistic background. In contrast, most of the women were housewives or labourers, with comparatively few women coming from more privileged backgrounds. The suggestion has been made that, since many women had attacked their own children, the middle class Victorian lady was not likely to be found at Broadmoor. Any murderous tendencies such a lady might have had would have been deflected by her distant relationship with her offspring, and thus thwarted by the presence of the nanny.