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
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
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
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 underwent 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.
The poorer nature of the female class is perhaps reflected in the fact that while around two-thirds of the men were married, fewer than half the women were. These were workers more often than homemakers. There was a disparity in education too: most of the men could read and write, but only a third of the women could.
Attempts were made to categorise the patients, much as diagnoses might be made today. One of the tasks that befell the Victorian doctor in lunacy was to ascribe a ‘cause of insanity’ to each case. Sometimes these were what were termed as moral circumstances, such as: intemperance and vice; religious excitement; being unlucky in love; anxiety; and poverty. Yet even with the Victorians’ fondness for morality, most causes were assigned to physical conditions, even if these were not fully understood, such as fever, head injuries and childbirth. Patients were also categorised by the activity that they undertook as part of their treatment. And, although the popular conception is that the Victorian asylum was a house of raving madmen, in reality around a third of the patients were well enough either to be employed in the Asylum or in its farm.
***
If that serves to give a flavour of who was within the walls, it does not answer the question of how they came to be there. In keeping with the nature of Broadmoor, this question has both a legal and a medical side to the response. These twin tacks are reflected in the separate elements both of the name given to the Asylum, and the epithet given to the patients: ‘criminal’ and ‘lunatic’.
That the patients were all criminals is down to their judicial history. Every patient had been arrested for a crime, and then dealt with by the courts. Most of these had been found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ (at least until 1883, when the standard form became ‘guilty, but insane’, in a vain hope to deter lunatics from their actions by denying them innocence), just as James Hadfield had been so found in 1800. These were the ‘pleasure’ men and women, destined to remain in Crowthorne until what was now Her Majesty’s Pleasure was known. Although the balance varied, roughly two-thirds of the patient population at any time were ‘pleasure’. These patients had been declared insane usually at their trial or before it. Some patients did not even get as far as making a plea, while others were found insane on arraignment, when they came to stand in the dock, but before any evidence was heard. If a case went to full hearing, the jury would have delivered a verdict of insanity based on the evidence put forward, usually by the defence.
The yin to this yang were the ‘time’ patients. These criminals were all guilty, but not initially insane. After their conviction, they had been given a custodial sentence by the courts, and became prisoners. Sentence length varied: most convicts at Broadmoor were serving somewhere between five and ten years, though their number included murderers who were serving a life sentence, commuted from their appointment with the gallows. The usual passage into Broadmoor for the convict patient was that during their sentence they had become insane, and therefore in need of treatment in an asylum. Those with lesser sentences tended to be farmed out to the county asylum network, with Broadmoor reserved only for the more truculent types. The second way in, somewhat rarer, was that they faced the death penalty, and the Home Secretary had ordered a special inquiry into their sanity. A number of murderers were respited to Broadmoor’s care in this way. Usually they retained the guilty verdict, such as Mary Ann Parr; exceptionally they might become an innocent ‘pleasure’ patient instead, such as Christiana Edmunds. This escape route from the clutch of death (or even incarceration) might beg the question of whether any fake lunatics were to be found within the walls. Evidence exists that suggests the possibility arose, though also that an attempt to feign mental illness was often without success. Broadmoor’s staff were wise to the possibility of malingerers, and there was a revolving door that returned as many convicts to the prison system as it received; quite apart from which, a sane convict soon discovered that sharing space with the lunatics was not necessarily preferable to the greater rationalities of jail. The more intriguing question to consider is whether any sane murderers cheated the noose. This is an investigation that also reveals a time when mental illness was understood rather differently to how it is today.
For the lunatics were, by definition, insane. Though they were no longer diagnosed as being affected by the moon, they were affected by things that did not so affect the other, non-lunatic people. There was an element of mystery about their disease, something intangible about how it made effect upon their bodies. The word ‘lunatic’ has itself become a somewhat guilty word of late, an incorrect way of describing a sufferer from mental illness. This seems a shame: the word is ripe for reclaiming by those afflicted by the moon. It is a word of great power, and potentially empowerment. It aptly conveys the loss of control and influence over one’s actions to forces both outside our control, and not fully understood.
The Victorian definitions of insanity were different to our own, though they recognised the same phenomena. I have already written about the idea of ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes, something which only began to die out as the nineteenth century drew to a close. As far as the doctors were concerned, these causes then manifested themselves in defined diseases, each of which might be inferred by observing the patient’s habits, as well as through interview.
These diseases are still recognisable today: mania, melancholia, dementia. Monomania was an obsession with a single subject; amentia, absence of mind, would be described as learning disabilities, now recognised as something completely separate from mental illness. To these cognitive deficiencies, the Victorians added the concept of moral insanity. This was a disease free of delusions, but where the mind was unable to think and behave properly as it should. Although it did not fit the modern term of psychopath, itself a rather overworked word, it is perhaps the nearest to it that the Victorians acknowledged. Of course, for all these diseases, it was not sufficient to merely be a sufferer for a plea of insanity to succeed: the defendant’s legal team also had to show that the disease had led to the action, and that consequently any mens rea was absent.
So it was these patients who were given the ‘pleasure’ sentence. They either stood in court, or did not even make it that far, while legal argument was had as to whether or not they were culpable for their actions. The basic rules covering the insanity defence were laid down by the McNaughten Rules in 1843. Daniel McNaughten had killed the private secretary of Sir Robert Peel, almost certainly in mistake for the Prime Minister, and then, far worse, upset the popular press by being found not guilty for the crime by reason of insanity. It took the entire House of Lords to deliver guidance that effectively confirmed the correctness of McNaughten’s verdict, and guaranteed that he was spared the noose. McNaughten ended up first in Bethlem and then in Broadmoor while his Rules lived on.
The most-quoted premise from McNaughten was that the defendant was unable to reason right from wrong, and so did not understand the nature or the quality of his or her actions. It was a fine judicial statement, at once precise and yet still leaving plenty of room for legal argument, so the lawyers undertook their increased scope for discourse with enthusiasm. Various approaches became popular: showing that your client suffered from particular delusions was one, often linked to some sort of traumatic event, past or present. A destitute man may believe his family better off in heaven, or a new mother that her child was permanently blighted by sin. Similarly, the insane actor may be driven to his crime by an irresistible impulse, at the mercy of forces beyond his control. Drink, if taken to addiction, could effectively cauterise choice.
The casual observer might well conclude that the law was drawn more generously than it is today. An alcoholic is unlikely to be found not guilty, and the perpetrator of crimes that we find it difficult to understand is no longer likely to be given any benefit of mental doubt. Yet many of the celebrated insanity cases concerned murder, and the law of the Victorian court had a heavier weight to balance on its scales of justices: that of the condemned’s feet upon the gallows trapdoor. Perhaps the law is only human, after all.
***
Having been defined by the courts, or a prison doctor, as suffering from one of these diseases, a patient was transferred to Broadmoor to begin their ‘moral treatment’. As mentioned before, the routine of patient life was an integral part of their care, and it is worthy of further exploration. Routine would be a feature of every life within the institution, though the nature of the routine was itself subdivided. This division began when a patient was assigned to one of the Blocks, as each block was quite separate, and segregated.
On the female side, the initial Block housed all the patients. There was a divide between three wards: one ward for the more aggressive or noisy patients, one ward for those who were low risk, and one ward for those in-between. When the further block was opened in 1867, the more aggressive females were siphoned off into that.
This picture was mirrored on the male side on a grander scale. By 1868, the full complement of six blocks was complete. Blocks 1 and 6 were known as the ‘back’ or ‘refractory’ blocks, for dangerous and violent patients. The men here had their own separate airing courts, bricked in and hidden from the rest of the site, and the attendants who tended them wore uniforms with padding and with hidden buttons. The name ‘back Blocks’ came from their position, which was on the north side of the site and away from the beautiful views across the southern Terrace.
The back Blocks contrasted with those nearest to the terrace and the wider grounds, which were Blocks 5 and 2. Patients in these blocks were considered the lowest risk, and enjoyed greater access around the site. Block 2 in particular became known as the privilege block, where patients had the most freedom to plan their day. Their insanity did not affect their daily lives, and they could be trusted to spend their time fruitfully at work, in their rooms, in the communal rooms in their block, or on the terrace. Block 2 was where VIPs and the press were brought if a bit of Victorian PR work was required. Oxford, Dadd and Minor were all sometime residents of Block 2.
Block 3 housed the infirmary, and Block 4 included the admissions ward, but both these blocks also housed those in-between patients who did not fit into the categories of being either dangerous or trustworthy. These were the biggest blocks, housing one hundred patients each, and also had the most communal dormitories on the site.
Dormitories were gradually reduced in number during the Victorian period, with the result that the majority of patients had a single room to themselves. Such rooms measured twelve feet long by eight feet wide, and were equipped with a single bed, or a mattress only in the back blocks, and a desk. The linen was changed twice a week. Patients were also allowed personal possessions if it was safe to have them, which would vary from patient to patient and block to block. A set of cufflinks proudly worn in Block 2 would become a potential weapon in Block 1.
Once assigned a block, a patient could settle into his or her routine. That would mean a day which started at 6am (or 7am in the winter), when the day shift attendants came on duty, and ended at 7 o’clock at night when the night shift came on. In between those fixed hours, the day was punctuated by segments of time filled by meals, work and leisure.
The bulk of the day would be spent at work, if a patient was able to do so. For those capable of only basic labour, work consisted of ward cleaning, the endless washing, scrubbing and polishing required to keep the Asylum and its contents clean. For the more able, women were employed as seamstresses or in the laundry, and men as tailors, shoemakers, upholsterers, tinsmiths or carpenters, or on the Asylum farm, garden or wider estate, tending crops in the fields. Victorian Broadmoor was a largely self-sufficient community, and much of the patients’ work benefited directly their quality of life.
Such leisure time as there was might be spent reading or playing games in the day rooms in each block, walking in the airing court attached to the block or, for the more trusted patients, playing outdoor sports such as croquet or bowls or even walking (accompanied, of course) around the local area. Evening entertainments were regular, though not frequent, and cricket was played in the summer months. Special interests were encouraged, such as Dadd’s painting or Minor’s research work.
Despite these spiritual comforts, physical comfort could be hard to come by. A patient’s life could be cold and dark. At first there was no heating in any of the bedrooms, with only open fires and hot air grates in the day rooms to provide any warmth. Central heating was slowly introduced to the blocks from 1884, first through solid fuel and then by gas, though it was still a while before the individual rooms all felt the benefit. Similarly, oil and gas lamps were used for lighting the communal rooms and corridors until the end of the nineteenth century, but there was no artificial lighting in the patients’ bedrooms. In the winter months, patients spent half the day in darkness.
Patients changed their clothes at least twice a week, were washed daily, and bathed once a week in the block’s bathroom, under the careful eye of an attendant. The male patients were also shaved by an attendant, if they wished to be. Such was the risk attached to this operation that while one attendant worked the razor, another attendant was always present to keep an eye on proceedings.
Patients were fed four times a day. Everyone was returned to their block to be fed, as each block had a dining room for its own use. Before each meal, every item of cutlery was counted out by one of the attendants, and then counted back again at the end of it. Although diets varied, it is possible to describe a basic pattern of food. For breakfast, patients generally had tea, and bread and butter. Lunch was bread and cheese. In the early evening, a typical meal would be mutton, beef or pork with potatoes (or vegetables if in season), followed by a steamed pudding. Three-quarters of a pint of weak beer might be given with the evening meal, though further rations of beer were usually given to workers during the day, and brandy or other fortified drinks might be offered to those suffering from physical debility. The final meal was supper, which saw the offer of a further helping of bread and butter with tea.
***
Charged with implementing this routine was a staff of around one hundred Asylum employees. Two men were there at the start: Medical Superintendent John Meyer, and his Deputy, William Orange. They recruited a third doctor as well as the much greater number of male and female attendants, who were the bulk of their employees, and provided the nursing staff in Victorian Broadmoor.
The attendants often had little or no previous medical background, and physical presence was considered as important an attribute as any other. Many of the male staff had either served in the forces or come from the prison service to join Broadmoor’s establishment. The early years, in particular, saw a mixed success with this recruitment strategy, as in the 1860s the annual rate of turnover approached 50%. It was expected that female attendants would resign upon marriage, but discipline was also a significant problem. The Asylum archive includes staff ‘defaulters’ books’ that list dishonesty, incompetence and drunkenness amongst the attendants’ sins.
It would be wrong though, to conclude that this was an inhumane regime, where brutality and immorality were commonplace. On the contrary, there were a number of rules in place which provided attendants with both a moral compass and with procedures for physical restraint. The latter was seen as a last resort and all incidents tended to be noted in one record or another. The large turnover of staff gradually decreased as well in the period after 1870, when Orange succeeded Meyer. The Asylum appears to have been a happier place under Orange, and amongst other things he made small improvements to the terms and conditions of the attendants’ employment. Perhaps he also leant a different touch to recruitment.
The personality of Broadmoor’s chief doctors was bound to leave an impression on the institution that they ran. There is a little more about Meyer and Orange in the Escape from Broadmoor chapter to give you an outline of each doctor’s character. It is possible to cast Meyer in a slightly more villainous role: a man who seems to have fought with most of his senior staff at one time or another; a man who had the most violent male patients segregated in caged areas of their blocks; a man who perhaps was not the most enlightened brain doctor of the Victorian age. Nevertheless, Meyer had the unenviable task of trying to find a blueprint for a new type of institution, and also dealing with the inevitable flaws in the design and fabric of the building he inherited. He was nearly fifty when he took charge of Broadmoor, having previously run the Convict Lunatic Asylum in Tasmania, served in the battle hospitals of the Crimea, and then led the Surrey County Asylum for a period before he was charged with mastering Broadmoor. He also suffered from ill health. He was attacked by a patient called John Hughes in the Asylum Chapel in March 1866, struck a severe blow on the temple by a large stone, and never fully recovered. Hughes, a despoiler of holy images in a north London church, stated that Meyer had accused him of ‘murdering the Queen of Heaven’, and that he was obliged to avenge that insult. He was put in solitary confinement for his trouble.
Attacks would form a part of each of the first three Medical Superintendents’ careers, and were an occupational hazard. Orange was attacked by an insane cleric called Henry Dodwell in 1882, who argued that attacking the Superintendent was the only way to draw attention to his wrongful detention, much like he had argued a few years before that shooting at the Master of the Rolls was the only way to draw attention to the injustices of a legal action he was pursuing. Orange’s successor, David Nicolson, was similarly attacked by Henry Forrester in 1884 while employed as Deputy Super. Nicolson was well enough to return to work and take promotion in due course, though he was also the only Superintendent to suffer two attacks, after James Lyons went on to throw a stone at his head in 1889. Despite these twin assaults, Nicolson might still consider his to be a more fortunate outcome than that of the Deputy he had in turn succeeded: William Douglas lasted all of four months at Broadmoor in 1871 before patient Henry Leest injured him so badly that he never returned to work.
When Meyer died suddenly in Exeter in May 1870, while returning from a visit to his dying brother-in-law, it was his thirty-seven year-old assistant who succeeded him, and spent the next sixteen years in charge. William Orange is a fascinating character, and it is no surprise that the fine portrait of Richard Dadd’s ‘Broadmoor officer’, which hung in the Superintendent’s office at the Hospital until the turn of the twenty-first century, has been historically attributed as Orange. In terms of this brief introduction to Broadmoor, Orange’s importance is the cultural mark that he imprinted onto the Asylum, echoes of which are still apparent today in the twin pillars of rehabilitation and public protection that Broadmoor represents. In that any long-running institution bears a received memory and received values from those who have trod its corridors along the years, it is to Orange, and to Nicolson, that I feel the modern hospital still owes a debt. Orange’s care for his staff has been mentioned; from his patients, comes testimony of genuine warmth that still litters the archive. Two personal items might serve to illustrate that: that he received spontaneous letters of goodwill after Dodwell’s attack on him; and that Henry Leest, the beater of poor Dr Douglas, felt able to write asking Orange for a little money many years after his discharge. Orange usually obliged his ex-charges with a small sum to tide them over, and there is no reason to suppose that Leest was an exception.
Orange was severely incapacitated after Dodwell’s attack, with the result that Nicolson gradually assumed more control after summer 1882. When Orange finally retired in 1886, as for the end of Meyer’s reign in 1870, it was his Deputy who took over. The third Medical Superintendent had been on the staff since 1876, and remained a personal friend of Orange as the latter enjoyed a long retirement. Indeed, Orange even returned to the Asylum as a member of its scrutiny body, the Council of Supervision. Nicolson provided continuity, as well as a more strategic approach to management than Orange, only ever criticising his friend and former boss for his micro-management, feeling that at times Orange’s attention to detail was not appropriate.
However, although my impression of the Orange and Nicolson years is one of great success in their enterprise, when the time came for Nicolson to retire in 1895, his Deputy was not selected to succeed him. The doctor in question, John Isaac, was as old as Nicolson and not quite the high-flyer that his bosses had been, having pre-dated Nicolson at Broadmoor. Instead, the post was given to the suitably-named Richard Brayn, the last of the Victorian Superintendents. Brayn came from the prison service, rather than a medical background, and despite his popularity with the politicians outside the walls (he gained the knighthood which would never come to Nicolson), his period in charge was one of greater tension inside them. Brayn was a great believer in running a tight, disciplinary ship, which occasionally put him in conflict with other professionals around him. The result was that the pillar of rehabilitation was perhaps slightly shorter than the pillar of public protection during Brayn’s time in charge: the positives in the lopsided emphasis being a lack of successful escapes, coupled with Brayn’s success in becoming the first Superintendent not to suffer personal injury. He was a competent leader who brought Victorian Broadmoor into the twentieth century, and was well-respected by his peers, even if perhaps the same affection for Orange and Nicolson did not extend to him.
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By the time that Queen Victoria finally relinquished her grip on the British throne, Broadmoor had become a recognised part of the medical, judicial and social landscape. It was a bigger place than it had been in 1863, though the wide range of needs for which it catered remained roughly the same.
What remained of the Victorian Asylum in 1901 still remains today. This is not just the bricks and mortar, but the records from that time, and it is these records that have been used to draw together the stories that follow. This short collection does not pretend to be a complete history of the hospital during the Victorian period, and rather is meant to encourage other researchers to focus on particular aspects of that time. One of the incredible features of the archive is that there is something for everyone. The stories are true, the people are real, and the history is there to be discovered. So enjoy your brief tour round Victorian Broadmoor.
Edward Oxford was a young man who became famous, or more properly infamous, in Victorian Britain. It was a state that he said he had aimed for, and to that end took aim at Her Majesty Queen Victoria in a probably not very serious assassination attempt. His actions led both to his notoriety and to over twenty-five years detention at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
He was born in Birmingham on 19th April 1822, the third of seven children to Edward and Hannah Oxford. His childhood was spent in both Birmingham and Lambeth. Although his father died when Oxford was seven, his mother was always able to work, and he was sent to school in both places. Oxford and his mother remained close, despite their occasional parting due to her working habits.
After Oxford completed his schooling he took bar work, first from his aunt in Hounslow and then later at other public houses. By the age of eighteen he had grown up to be a pale youth, with brown eyes and auburn hair, around five foot six inches tall. At the start of 1840, he was working as a pot boy (barman) in The Hog in the Pound along Oxford Street in London, and living with his mother and sister in lodgings in Camberwell. He quit this job at the start of May 1840 without having further work to go to.
A week after he quit his job, his mother returned to Birmingham on a regular trip to see family, and Oxford was largely left to his own devices. Some five weeks later, on the late spring evening of 10th June 1840, he took up a position on a footpath at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. It was 6pm. He waited for the young Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to be driven out from the Palace in an open carriage, and when they drew level with him, he fired two shots in succession from separate pistols at the Queen. She was four months pregnant at the time with her first child, Victoria, the Princess Royal.
Immediately, various members of the public seized Oxford and disarmed him. Oxford was quite open about what he had done, exclaiming ‘It was I, it was me that did it.’ What was not clear was exactly what he had done: he had certainly fired two pistols at their Majesties, but whether those pistols could have harmed anyone was never resolved. No bullets were ever found, and the Crown was unable to prove that the pistols were armed when Oxford discharged them. Once sentenced, Oxford always maintained that the pistols contained only gunpowder.
Oxford was arrested and charged with treason. After his arrest, his lodgings were searched and a box found, which amongst other fragments of his life contained the intricate rules he had constructed of a fictitious military society called Young England, complete with imaginary officers and correspondence. Members were to be armed with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle and a dagger.
Inevitably, his trial attracted much attention, and it was postponed until a thorough investigation had been made into both his background and his possible motives. Insanity was used as his defence. On Thursday 9th July, the Old Bailey was packed with those citizens fortunate enough to have obtained a ticket for admission. Oxford appeared largely oblivious to proceedings. The prosecution presented a large amount of witness evidence before various family members and friends testified that Oxford had always seemed of unsound mind, and that both his grandfather and father had exhibited signs of mental illness and were alcoholics. This was important to the Victorians, for whom both drink and hereditary influence were strong causal factors for insanity. His mother, in particular, told a sorry tale of domestic violence and intimidating behaviour from Oxford’s father, which was rich in detail and must have had quite an impact at the trial. Oxford himself, she said, had always cried without apparent cause, and been prone to fits of hysterical laughter. When she had worked in a shop he would annoy the customers by laughing or making strange noises, and had been obsessed with firearms since he was a child.
Oxford’s principal medical witnesses were Dr Thomas Hodgkin, who considered that he had a ‘lesion of the will’ – that he could not control his impulses – and Dr John Conolly, Head of the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum (now St Bernard’s Hospital, Ealing), who believed that Oxford had suffered a disease of the brain, as evidenced by the shape of his head. Conolly had asked Oxford why he shot at the Queen, and Oxford replied ‘Oh, I may as well shoot at her as any body else.’ The defence called other medics too - Dr William Dingle Chowne agreed that Oxford could not control his will; while Dr James Fernandez Clarke thought Oxford was a hysterical imbecile. All agreed that Oxford was of unsound mind.
These were significant names in Victorian medicine. Conolly was the man who had destroyed every form of restraint used at Hanwell and promoted a new ‘moral’ regime of mental health care through routine and responsibility. At the time of Oxford’s trial the controversy surrounding his new ideas was in full swing. Clarke was an acclaimed medical author and a major contributor to The Lancet, while Hodgkin was an eminent pathologist who gave his name to Hodgkin’s disease. Chowne was a respected manager at Charing Cross Hospital and a leading advocate of sanitary reform.
The next day, the jury returned to acquit Oxford on the grounds of insanity. He received the sentence of all such lunatics – to be detained until Her Majesty’s pleasure be known, effectively an indefinite sentence, and one which gave rise to the Broadmoor term of ‘pleasure men’.
Within weeks, Oxford had been removed to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Bethlem, then in Southwark, to begin his sentence. Some notes from Bethlem were copied up into his Broadmoor case notes. The entry for 16th February 1854 stated that ‘No note has ever been made of this case, and no record kept of the state of his mind at the time of his admission, but from the statements of the attendants and those associated with him he appears to have conducted himself with great propriety at all times.’ Indeed, he seems to have become a model patient, industrious and studious. He spent much time drawing, reading and in study, learnt French, German and Italian to a standard of virtual fluency, while obtaining some knowledge of Spanish, Greek and Latin, as well as learning the violin. The Bethlem doctors also reported that he could play draughts and chess better than any other patient. He also became a painter and decorator, and was gainfully employed within the Hospital. Of his crime, the notes stated that ‘He now laments the act which probably originated in a feeling of excess vanity and a desire to become notorious if he could not be celebrated.’
Presumably his positive influence on the ward was missed by the Bethlem authorities when he was moved to Broadmoor on 30th April 1864, even if in general the London hospital was happy to be rid of the criminal lunatic class.
Oxford’s health on arrival in Broadmoor was stated to be good, though he suffered from constipation and some oedema (swelling) in his lower legs. By this date he was forty-two years old, and had been confined for nearly twenty-four years.
His notes on arrival in Broadmoor record: ‘A well conducted industrious man apparently sane, has been rather out of health since last Christmas and has suffered from urethritis since his admission here – this he attributes to his having taken various unusual things to drink just before leaving Bethlem. He is now in better general health. He states that he fired a pistol charged with powder only at the Queen on June 10th 1840. That he did it under the impression that he should thereby become a noted person and that he had not the smallest intention of injuring Her Majesty.’
He carried on his diligent application to hard work at Broadmoor, working daily as a wood grainer and a painter and being very well-behaved. It was increasingly obvious that Oxford no longer posed a risk to anyone, and that he was also completely sane. Sir William Hayter, the Chair of Broadmoor’s scrutiny body, the Council of Supervision, wrote to Home Secretary Sir George Grey in November 1864 stating that Oxford was of sound mind. Not only did John Meyer, Broadmoor’s Medical Superintendent, testify to this, but also Charles Hood, a member of the Council and Oxford’s previous physician at Bethlem. Hood said that Oxford had been sane since at least 1854, when the patient was first in his care. Hayter suggested that Oxford was perfectly capable of being allowed to make his own way in the world.
Grey ignored the request. He had been Judge Advocate General in the Government in 1840, and perhaps he was uncomfortable with allowing the discharge of a case in which he probably had an interest. Instead, Oxford stayed on in the Asylum until September 1867, when new Home Secretary Gathorne Hardy began the process of agreeing to Oxford’s discharge when he asked Hayter to provide an up-to-date report on Oxford’s mental condition. Subsequently, Hardy offered Oxford release on condition that he went overseas to one of the colonies, and never returned to the United Kingdom. Oxford indicated that he was willing to accept the terms.
Meyer proposed that he arrange a passage to Australia for Oxford. Before Oxford’s discharge, the patient was visited by twelve officers from the Metropolitan Police, who took notes about his appearance and photographed him, should he attempt to return. It was made clear to him that if he ever set foot again on the British Isles, he would be locked up for good. Sadly, no copy of the photograph survives in the Broadmoor archives.
The warrant for Oxford’s release arrived at Broadmoor towards the end of October. His passage was arranged for a month later. Accompanied by Charles Phelps, the Steward at Broadmoor, Oxford travelled to Plymouth on 26th November 1867. The next day he boarded HMS Suffolk for Melbourne. He remained on board for several days, waiting as the ship was detained in port, until she finally left on 3rd December. Phelps was made to sign an affidavit that ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief Oxford was on board when she sailed.’
Oxford certainly sailed to Australia, though the rest of his life is less well documented. In the Broadmoor archive, the only subsequent intelligence about Oxford comes from a letter from George Haydon, one time Steward at Bethlem, to Dr David Nicolson at Broadmoor in 1883. Haydon quoted an article from The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, of which he had been made aware. The article, included with the letter, is about a man called John Oxford, and is dated 4th May 1880. John Oxford was named as the man who shot at the Queen many years ago, and had subsequently been a patient in an asylum before he was discharged to Australia. He had recently been convicted of stealing a shirt and spent a week in jail. Upon his release, the prison governor had asked the police to keep an eye on him, ‘in consequence of the old man’s eccentric conduct’. To that end the police had arrested Oxford for vagrancy, and the article reported that he was up before the bench again. He was remanded for further medical examination. Haydon’s update ended there.
Sources indicate that there is further correspondence from Haydon elsewhere to suggest that Oxford later changed his name to John Freeman, and published a book called Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life in 1888. Certainly the book exists, but there is nothing in the Broadmoor archive which confirms that he was its author. These other sources quote Haydon as reporting that Oxford was a house painter by trade (carrying on the skills he learnt in hospital) and had married at some point before 1888. Oxford’s suggested date of death is 1900.
Queen Victoria suffered several other assassination attempts during her reign, mostly from subjects who, if not legally insane, were certainly considered by the general population to be mad. One of those was another Broadmoor patient, Roderick MacLean, who shot at her at Windsor Railway Station on 2nd March 1882. MacLean was sent to Broadmoor after his trial, but unlike Oxford he did not recover, and remained there until his death in 1921. It was MacLean’s case that resulted in a change in sentence for those found to be criminal lunatics, from the traditional ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, to the more condemnatory ‘guilty, but insane’. The motivation for the law change is always levelled at the Queen’s response to MacLean’s not guilty verdict: ‘Insane he may have been, but not guilty he most certainly was not, as I saw him fire the pistol myself.’ This is not entirely true: the Queen did not see MacLean shoot, though she did hear the report of his pistol. However, her displeasure at MacLean’s innocence was real, and she pressurised Prime Minister Gladstone to change the law. It is unclear exactly what Victoria hoped to achieve by this, though she alluded to the view that if Edward Oxford had been hanged all those years ago, it might have deterred those potential regicides who came after him. Forty years of being shot at had not mellowed Her Majesty.
For many years, Dadd has been perhaps the most celebrated Victorian resident of Broadmoor. An artist of some repute, the quality of his fairy paintings was acknowledged during his lifetime, and he continued to paint remarkable works during his time in asylums. Many of these works survive, and quite apart from any sensational interest in Dadd’s circumstances, it is acknowledged that Dadd possessed a rare talent.
His artistic endeavours had benefitted from conducive surroundings. Dadd’s father, Robert, was an intellectual man, a chemist and the first curator of the Chatham and Rochester Literary and Philosophical Institution’s museum, and Dadd himself attended The King’s School at Rochester. When he was seventeen, the family moved to London, and at nineteen he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools where he completed his training as an artist.
Dadd had been born on 1st August 1817 in Chatham. He was the fourth of seven children borne by his mother Mary, a total of four of whom would eventually die insane. The young Dadd was influenced by both literary and classical themes, and by the early 1840s had begun to create the fairy paintings for which he would become best known. In due course, his work attracted the patronage of Sir Thomas Phillips, a solicitor from South Wales who had been knighted for his part in ending a Chartist riot, and who had money to burn. Phillips decided that he wished to undertake the Grand Tour of classical sites across Europe, and he recruited Dadd to accompany him as his personal artist, and draw what they saw.
They began their journey in July 1842, travelling first through Belgium, Germany and Switzerland before reaching Italy, then moving on to Greece, Turkey and Palestine. Dadd seemed to enjoy the tour, and wrote various letters home detailing his wonderful experiences. He was fascinated both by the scenery he encountered and the people he met, and an internal record of these compositions appears to have remained locked within him during his years of treatment. Decades later he would bring it out to influence the works he completed in Bethlem and Broadmoor.
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