Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (13 page)

This was the
first proper alteration made to the original specifications for the
building which had been brought about by an escape attempt. More
would follow after the attempts of 1865. This next year belonged to
a serial escape essayer, when Richard Walker tried his luck a grand
total of three times, on 8th April, 21st May and 3rd October. As
might be concluded, he was unsuccessful on every occasion. Walker
was not an exceptional man: he was five foot eight inches tall and
of normal, if robust build. A thirty-six year old postman, who had
stolen two letters in 1864, he had been sentenced to ten years in
prison. Ending up in Millbank, he too believed that he was poisoned
and had recently arrived at Broadmoor.

On 8th April,
he and another patient, a Scotsman called Peter Waldie, managed to
slip away from the attendants in Block 3 at twenty to eight in the
evening. The only logical explanation at the time was that Walker
had somehow managed to obtain a skeleton key, and then bided his
time before taking his chance. Waldie was an opportunist
collaborator, who had been smoking near the ward doorway beside the
ground floor day room when Walker made his move. They exited
through the day room’s external door and onto the Terrace, scaling
the still man-size boundary wall.

Waldie shared
a similar disposition to Walker. A fellow convict, found guilty of
robbery with violence and given eight years, he also had delusions
of poisoning and wished to be free from incarceration. He was a
little younger, aged thirty-one, and had been both in Bethlem and
Fisherton House Asylum, near Salisbury, before coming to Broadmoor
in September 1864. Originally from Falkirk, Waldie had a broad
accent and was also partially paralysed in one arm.

The pair,
still in their Asylum clothes, managed to walk as far as Bracknell,
where they enjoyed a pub meal at The Bull Inn using some money that
Waldie had procured. The landlord either failed to notice their
attire or raised the alarm after they had left him. Instead, the
pair were spotted the next day, lying down on the benches at
Bracknell Station, by Broadmoor’s gardener, who promptly went to
get the nearest Constable. Walker and Waldie had enjoyed a little
over twenty-four hours freedom before their return to
Crowthorne.

Waldie was
considered to be the junior party in this venture, and found
himself back in Block 3, though no longer with Walker. He never
tried to escape again. He was an increasing sick man, and he died
from tuberculosis only a couple of years later, on 18th August
1867.

Walker was
readmitted not to the more genteel surroundings of Block 3, but to
the back Block 1, in theory at least a more secure part of the
Hospital. Not that Walker paid any heed to theory: he had developed
a taste for freedom, and after lights out on 21st May he began to
put a new plan into action, which was both detailed in its cunning
and also not wholly thought through. This time it began with
pebbles. Stuffing the lock to his door full of small stones that he
had garnered from the Block’s airing court, he then turned his
bedstead on its end and placed it under his window. He stood on it,
reached towards the high, small window in his room and broke the
glass. Next, he passed his hand outside, whereupon he was able to
unscrew the retaining nut and bolt of the centre circle of the
window frame. He removed this and used it to smash the rest of the
glass, until before him was left only a window-shaped hole. It was
just large enough to squeeze through. Dropping into a yard adjacent
to the block, he was able to scale the six-foot wall he was faced
by, and then made for the Asylum stables, where he found a horse,
clambered up onto it, and rode off to Yateley.

So far, so
good, yet in all this planning Walker had overlooked one small, but
significant detail. Throughout his escape, he was wearing nothing
except his nightshirt. When he duly arrived in the nearby village,
it was half past four in the morning and he was naked from the
waist down. Whichever way you looked at him, Walker must have stood
out in at least one crucial area. What was a man on the run to do?
He sought assistance. He came across a local carpenter, William
Bunch, also up early in the morning, and told the tradesman that
his unfortunate state could be explained by the occasion of his
drinking with friends in London. Walker maintained that he was
drunk, had missed his train and then been walking all night towards
home.

Bunch took
Walker round to the village postman, with the initial intention of
getting Walker a lift to Blackwater Station. The three men sat in
the postman’s stables, where a jacket and trousers were found for
Walker and some bread and cheese supplied for breakfast. However,
their new companion’s appearance and behaviour had immediately
given them cause for alarm, and they kept Walker talking while
separately, a messenger was sent to the Asylum. A party of
attendants headed for Yateley, and Walker was back inside Block 1
in time for lunch.

Walker’s third
attempt of the year was made with Thomas Douglas, who was making
his own second bid to abscond. Both men managed to gain access to
one of the wards in Block 1, then broke through the window of a
single room much like Walker had done previously in May. From
there, they made out first into the Block 1 airing court, and then
over its dividing wall into the airing court of Block 3. The alarm
was raised at once, and the pair were found hiding in the coalhole
of the admin block. It was clear by now that Walker owed his
successes to more than just good planning. ‘Walker has long been
supposed to have had a key and this alone can account for his being
enabled to pass through the doors’, reported Meyer. He was quite
right. Three months later, it was discovered: an intricate piece of
ironwork, probably based on an impression made of a Broadmoor key
by Walker or another and then worked up for the patient by a
criminal associate outside. An attendant, suspected of helping
Walker to hide the key, though not of being party to the escapes,
was dismissed.

This third
attempt was both the least effective, and the last of Walker’s
efforts, and it landed him in a form of solitary confinement for
most of the next few years. ‘Seclusion’ was the principal method of
containing unruly patients, and now Walker found himself secluded
as a matter of course. His management became a great challenge, as
almost uniquely amongst Broadmoor patients, the medical staff found
Walker impossible to control. He was an insubordinate extrovert,
and at times, he had an attack on sight policy. He would prowl
around in Block 1, naked apart from a strip of cloth around one arm
or leg, covering his room in faeces or using them as missiles with
which to javelin the doctors when they visited. This made him into
something of a cause célèbre for the Commissioners in Lunacy, as
Walker was in consequence kept alone in one end of the first floor
gallery of Block 1, away from the other patients and with an
attendant beside him at all times. The Commissioners lobbied Meyer
to allow Walker greater freedom, believing this situation to be
unpalatable, and, depending on his behaviour, Walker was sometimes
permitted to exercise in the airing court, also alone, where he had
a collection of pigeons that he fed. Dr Orange later succeeded at
integrating Walker a little more, though it was probably with some
relief that Walker was discharged to the Middlesex Asylum at Colney
Hatch in 1874, when his prison sentence expired.

Walker’s and
Douglas’s escape in 1865 led to the replacement of the cast iron
bars in Block 1 with wrought iron bars and window shutters. This
replacement would prove to be an effective deterrent, though the
original bars were retained in the other Blocks for the time being,
where the patients were felt to be less likely to attempt to
destroy them. With the benefit of hindsight, that budget
restriction would turn out to be a mistake, something that would be
acknowledged only three years later. Meanwhile, the following two
years witnessed a series of minor escape-related incidents, which
were all successfully thwarted.

William Smith
was first, when he attempted to escape from a walking party on
Wednesday 2nd May 1866. This method would become increasingly
popular once the building security was improved. It had always been
intended that the Broadmoor estate should consist of a walled
compound, but that outside that there would be much ground left for
cultivation, and that this could be used for patients’ work and
leisure. With a walking party, a small group of patients would
enjoy a long stroll around the fields, watched over, typically, by
a couple of attendants. Smith’s approach was simple: he made a
sudden and unexpected run for the woods which bordered the estate,
as several patients would in the years ahead. His particular effort
did not get very far, and he was quickly caught and retaken before
he could disappear from sight. Although it was largely uneventful,
the whole event unsettled him, and with tragic consequences.

Smith was a
career criminal, who had been transported to Australia at a young
age. When his sentence expired, he obtained a passage back to
Britain, and ended up in Scotland. He was sentenced to another
twenty-one years’ transportation for theft at Glasgow in 1856, but
after arriving en route at Dartmoor Prison, he had become
delusional and so was transferred to the state asylum at Fisherton
House. He was moved to Broadmoor in 1865. A pale man, with
jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, he had been a diligent employee
in the shoemaker’s workshop throughout the past year. Returning to
work after his failed bid for freedom, on the morning of 23rd May,
he took himself and one of the workshop knives into the toilets,
knelt in front of the bowl and cut his own throat. By the time he
was discovered, he was dead. His was only the second suicide at
Broadmoor, following that of a female patient earlier the same
year. Smith had appeared in good humour on the fateful morning,
volunteering to sweep the shop floor and also discussing the
previous night’s play put on by the patients. The event shocked the
staff, as they had not considered him to be suicidal. Perhaps,
having failed to get away, Smith could see no future beyond his
own, long-term custody.

A few days
after Smith’s attempt, patient Peter O’Donnell tried to escape on
8th May by an established method. He mounted the internal wall
which divided the Terrace from Block 5’s individual airing court.
It was daylight, and it was his height on the wall that gave him
away. He was spotted walking along the top, and though he ran and
jumped onto the external wall, he was soon retaken on ground
adjacent to the Deputy Superintendent’s house, just outside the
boundary.

O’Donnell had
previously tried to make off through the Asylum’s kitchen garden in
March and had been stopped before he reached the wall. He was
another convict, but of a slightly different kind. He was part of
the significant forces population in Broadmoor, which formed
roughly 10% of the male population during the Asylum’s early years.
A twenty-two year old soldier, he had faced Court Martial at
Aldershot in 1863 for desertion and shooting at an officer. He had
subsequently been branded with a ‘D’. After his escape, he was
moved from Block 5, one of the privilege blocks, to Block 4. Here
he was more restricted in his movement, though he continued to
cause a nuisance through breaking windows and furniture until he
was discharged to the Hampshire Asylum in December 1867, when his
four-year sentence was complete.

His escape had
highlighted a simple truth to the Broadmoor management. ‘It is
obvious that the walls dividing the different airing courts must be
raised’, wrote Dr Meyer; separately, he noted that ‘in the present
state of the walls escaping is very easy’. These walls were not the
external boundary, but they did afford a patient the means to move
from one part of the Asylum to another without impediment. He was
allotted the sum of £50 to raise all these walls by three feet, so
that their full height became between seven and eight feet, and
some mechanical help would be required to climb them beyond a
patient’s own means. No further action was yet taken to raise the
height of the boundary wall.

It was still
felt that any patient allowed outside an airing court was either
lower risk, or being invigilated to such an extent that making it
over the boundary wall was not an option. Any failings in this area
were likely to be through human error. That hypothesis was
strengthened on 20th August 1866, when it was the turn of Patrick
Lyndon, a trusted patient, to make an unsuccessful attempt to
discharge himself from the Asylum.

Lyndon was the
first pleasure man since Grundy to try and get away. He had always
been keen to remove himself, whether by orthodox means or not. He
regularly petitioned the Home Secretary for his discharge, and
sought to place himself in situations where he might escape. He had
been given his indefinite sentence in 1838, at the age of
twenty-six, and had now spent twenty-eight years awaiting a word
from Her Majesty.

In Lyndon’s
case, it was his motivations for Her Majesty’s pleasure that had
indirectly contributed to his present position. A native of
Liverpool, Lyndon made the journey south to Buckingham Palace,
where he presented himself as a divine messenger who had been
instructed to marry the young Queen Victoria. It was not necessary
to treat him as a king, he said, and he was taken at his word.
Declaring that he had ‘no earthly residence, not even an earthly
name’, he fought with the sentry on duty at the Palace Lodge and
was charged with assault. Found not guilty through insanity, he
became a Bethlemite for seventeen years and was then moved onto
Fisherton, where he was considered to be ‘an industrious man’,
albeit one who had also escaped on more than one occasion there.
Now, he was in his mid fifties. He was first put into the
shoemaker’s shop at Broadmoor, where he was not considered to be
good at his work, and had been moved into the garden. It was the
decision to place him in the garden that led to his temptation.