Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (14 page)

Usually the
staff were vigilant of Lyndon, as his auto-removal tendencies were
well known. Now though, when sending Lyndon on his way to the
Asylum garden from its kitchen, attendant Henry Franklin did not
bother with the normal handover of his charge to another employee.
Lyndon had never presented him directly with any trouble, and the
attendant was relaxed about the oversight required of him. It was
not long before Franklin realised that he had made a misjudgement:
rather than saunter down the path to gather vegetables, as was
intended, Lyndon upended a wheelbarrow at rest in the garden,
stepped onto it and jumped astride the boundary wall. A supple
youngster might have vaulted straight over the wall and made for
the woods, but for Lyndon, making it over the wall had been
exertion enough, and he was spotted progressing at low speed by
another attendant at work in his own garden, and wrestled to the
ground. Franklin was admonished, and Meyer pointed out to him that
were similar circumstances to arise in the future, it would be
quite clear where the blame would lie.

Lyndon was
quite open about his behaviour, saying that he could find many ways
to get out of Block 5, the privilege block that was his domicile,
and suggesting that he be moved to a more secure block. Meyer
obliged. Given Lyndon’s previous actions, it was clear that his
escape might prove highly embarrassing. The move worked: Lyndon was
no trouble, even if he was implicated in abetting another patient’s
escape attempt in 1871. He became a quiet old man, and was finally
discharged to the Hanwell Asylum at the age of seventy.

By the end of
1866, then, some remedial work had been undertaken to greater
secure the Asylum, and better practice was beginning to result from
the experience of staffing Broadmoor. There was a brief respite in
the frequency of patients trying to absent themselves from care. In
1867, there was only one serious effort to get away, on 22nd June.
It did not amount to much, but it came from the sort of patient
that a modern tabloid would squeal about. Cuthbert Rodham Carr, a
youth of nineteen and newly arrived to Broadmoor, had been found
insane at his trial for the murder of a five year-old girl in
Gateshead. It was a particular unpleasant crime, a stranger killing
with paedophile overtones, and with suggestions that Carr may have
attacked another young girl too. He had been determined to plead
guilty at his trial but had the matter taken out of his hands by
his lawyers. He came from a well-to-do background – his family home
was at Carr’s Hill in the town, overlooking the Tyne Valley and in
whose stables the murder was committed.

Although he
had been determined to face the gallows, Carr now appeared to have
rediscovered his lust for life. On that day in June, he made his
move to leave when on the way up the stairs of the central block to
the Chapel. As a group of patients trooped to the first floor for a
service, where the entrance door to the Chapel could be found, he
manoeuvred himself out of the landing window and then made off over
the roof of the Asylum stores. He navigated one complete side of
this roof until he was at the entrance to the Asylum. Here, he
stood on top of the Gatehouse, beside the clock tower, then leapt
down onto the outside road. Various staff and workmen were already
in pursuit and he was surrounded in the stables building a short
distance from the gate. Outnumbered, he tried to resist but was
held firm.

At first
sight, the decrease in the rate of escapes implied that the
security systems, particularly the buildings, had been shorn of
defects. The events of 1868 would demonstrate that this was not the
case, and Meyer and his staff would shortly find out how much work
there was still to do. Before that, the first attempt of the year
came, by coincidence, from Carr once more. He was joined on this
occasion by Thomas Douglas, who had been party to two previous
escape conspiracies. Now, on the evening of 6th May 1868, the two
men broke a window on the first floor of Block 4 using a piece of
metal, and then followed the route that Carr took across the roof
the previous year. Both men were quickly missed in a head count and
found hiding behind a chimney. There was a standoff. Douglas
scurried away as Carr confronted his captors. He had managed to
find an old piece of metal which he had sharpened into a weapon,
and he used this to stab one of the attendants who cornered him.
Fortunately, the man was not badly hurt, and Carr was retaken by
other staff who were part of the search party. Douglas, meanwhile,
had managed to creep along the roof towards the gatehouse from
where he proceeded to shout a number of explicit phrases at an
unfortunate young woman who was passing along the road outside.
When he finally jumped down he was taken by staff waiting on the
road. The attendant who was stabbed was given the maximum reward of
five pounds, while three other staff also received a token for
their efforts.

Carr remained
a troublesome patient to care for. Though he now found himself in
the back Blocks, he turned his frustrations onto the fabric of the
building, damaging bedding, windows and even bricks and mortar. He
harboured many persecutory ideas, like a lot of Broadmoor patients,
and considered the medical officers to be part of the conspiracy.
Although he had enemies amongst his cohort, he also had friends,
including William Bisgrove, who will be found in Escape from
Broadmoor: Part Two. Carr died at the age of forty, in 1888, from a
subarachnoid haemorrhage.

Carr and
Douglas’s escape was put down to a lack of supervision rather than
any wider matter. This failure of the staff was also blamed for the
second escape of the year. Another pleasure patient, George Turner,
successfully evaded the attentions of his custodians on 29th
September. A young Berkshire man, he had been accused of arson but
was completely mute when asked to plead, and spent ten years in the
Wiltshire Asylum before being transferred to Broadmoor shortly
after it opened for male patients in 1864. On this particular day,
he had been instructed to clean out the ash pits adjacent to the
female block, just outside the boundary wall. It was the sort of
job given to a patient who could be relied upon, and who had worked
his way into a trusted position. But while he was shovelling a pile
of ash into a cart, Turner suddenly downed tools and jumped through
a nearby hedge on the estate. He headed for the woods, outrunning
an attendant who was in close pursuit.

Initially, it
was thought that Turner had made a clean getaway. Then, two days
later, a message was received from Inspector Herbert Reece of the
Clewer Police, near Windsor. Turner had been picked up wandering
aimlessly around Windsor Great Park on the day after his escape. He
must have stood out easily, as he was a florid-looking man, over
six feet tall and still wearing the blue Asylum uniform with its
Broadmoor markings. He put up no resistance, gave his name to the
Police and was sent back to Crowthorne on 2nd October.

Turner
remained well behaved on his return, and was employed inside as a
ward cleaner. Meyer had previously described Turner as ‘an
exceedingly quiet harmless man’, so he was surprised to receive a
letter from a Windsor resident alleging that Turner had assaulted
the correspondent’s maid during his brief sojourn outside. Meyer
questioned Turner, but the latter denied the offence, and Meyer
decided to side with his patient. The matter was closed, and Turner
continued to live a quiet life until he died on 9th April 1874.

By the autumn
of 1868, it had been two years since Meyer and the Council of
Supervision had spent any sums on making changes to the buildings
as a result of escapes. All that was about to change, as Broadmoor
was about to encounter the most successful period for escapes of
Meyer’s entire reign. It would be the window bars in Blocks 3 and 4
that were the Medical Superintendent’s undoing. Identified as a
weakness in 1865, the decision to retain the cast ironwork in the
less secure blocks would become a risk that the Asylum could no
longer afford to bear.

On the evening
of 4th November, James Bennett, a youth of eighteen, removed a cast
iron cross bar from the window of the ground floor gallery in Block
3 and made his way over the still-deficient boundary wall. Bennett
became the first patient since George Hage to get away for a
considerable period of time, and, despite the obvious blame that
could be attached to the window bars, his escape led to the
resignation of the attendant who was on duty at the time.

Bennett had
come to Broadmoor in March 1867 as a depressed and suicidal young
man. He had an unenviable start in life: suffering from mild
learning disabilities, and evidently prone to anti-social
behaviour, he had spent three years in a reformatory school between
the ages of nine and twelve. The sharp shock did not work:
subsequently given seven years for theft in London, he had been
sent to Portland Prison. In the month before he ran from Broadmoor,
he had been fighting intermittently with another patient on the
ward. When he escaped from the Asylum, he quickly returned to his
old stamping ground in Chelsea.

Bennett had a
full three months of freedom before he managed to get himself
arrested again, this time caught exiting someone else’s property
with a quantity of linen. Although he gave his name as ‘William
Watson’, he also owned up to the fact that he was wanted back in
Crowthorne. The Westminster Police Court officials sent a message
to Broadmoor and asked someone to attend court to identify him,
which they did. He was returned to Broadmoor on 10th February 1869.
Meyer subsequently concluded that like Hage, Bennett had only been
faking his insanity, and so he had his patient removed to Millbank
Prison, whereupon Bennett’s involvement with Broadmoor was
over.

Just as Meyer
was beginning to fear that Bennett had been lost forever, another
two patients disappeared from his radar. On 9th November, Thomas
Douglas – he of Carr’s caper the previous year, the ‘mass breakout’
of 1864, and Richard Walker’s 3rd escape of 1865 – and John
Thompson, another survivor of the 1864 gang, broke a similar iron
cross bar to Bennett in a single room in Block 4. The Block’s
patients had just had tea, and the attendants were engaged in
tidying away the crockery and cutlery. Douglas’s and Thompson’s
escape was slightly more complicated than Bennett’s in that they
were on the first floor, but using their experience of escapes,
they had ripped up the bedding in their rooms and tied the pieces
together to form a rope. Throwing it out of the broken window, they
both shimmied down into the yard, and then up another blanket rope
that they had dropped previously from a room nearby. This second
rope brought them close enough to the top of the external wall that
they could swing over and onto it. Once on the wall, they were down
the other side and away. For Douglas in particular, this must have
felt like the completion of a long-held dream. Like Bennett, both
men enjoyed a prolonged respite from Asylum care and ended up
elsewhere in England. That evening, Meyer was facing the loss of
three patients within a week.

Douglas is
arguably Victorian Broadmoor’s most persistent escaper, not only
for his four separate attempts but also because he never seemed to
lose the habit throughout his time in the retreat. He was a
soldier, a native of Cumberland, who struck a Corporal on Corfu and
was given ten years at a Court Martial. He believed that the
Corporal was persecuting him, and continued to believe the man had
influence over him during his sentence. Between 1860 and 1864 he
shuttled between Millbank and Dartmoor, before ending up in
Broadmoor at the age of twenty-three. After three failed attempts
to escape, he intended to make the most of his achievement in
November 1868, and so he walked to Southampton with the aim of
securing a passage to America. He had been a sailor before he
joined the Army, and still wore an anchor tattoo on his left arm.
But sailor Douglas could not get his ship at port, so he then
decided to walk the length of England and return to his native
home. Eventually, exhausted and starving after nearly three weeks
on the road, he gave up at Lancaster and surrendered to the Police
on 30th November.

He returned to
the Asylum a reformed man. Biddable and co-operative, he worked in
the garden and asked to be returned to prison. His wish was granted
in 1870, and he served the short remainder of his sentence in
Millbank once again. This was not, though, to be Douglas’s last
experience of Broadmoor. A little over a decade later, he was had
up for assaulting a police officer in Portsmouth and given six
months hard labour. Though he called himself Kelly, he was
identified as Douglas and sent back to the Asylum, where William
Orange, Meyer’s successor, suggested he might be happier to remain.
Douglas spent the last twenty years of his life back in Broadmoor’s
care and died there in 1903 from heart disease.

Meyer’s luck
continued to hold when Thompson was arrested by the Police in
Garstang, Lancashire on 7th January 1869. He was identified and
sent back down south. Thompson was also removed to prison soon
after his recapture, now considered sane. He was thirty-one when he
escaped, some four years after he had been among the first intake
to Broadmoor from Bethlem. He was convicted of burglary in 1862 at
the Appleby Sessions in Westmoreland. A swarthy man, with auburn
hair and blue eyes, he hailed from Plymouth and had first travelled
north to work in a factory. He had often tried to escape after his
admission to Bethlem, and apart from his membership of Grundy’s
gang, he had also had another go at Broadmoor in September 1865,
when he was overheard removing bolts from his window and
immediately removed to another room. Despite his transfer from the
Asylum, like Douglas, he would be back again at Broadmoor after his
release from jail: in March 1871 he was given five years by the
Plymouth Sessions for theft, and returned to Broadmoor in September
1873, staying for the rest of his sentence before being repatriated
to the Devon County Asylum.