Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (4 page)

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.

***

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.

Shooting at Royalty

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.