Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

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.

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

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.