Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (9 page)

The subject of
Christiana’s make-up appears often in her notes. She was evidently
perceived by the male doctors as Broadmoor’s painted lady, and as a
creature motivated by romantic desire. They were the sole males in
regular contact with her, and she appears to have been determined
to maximise their attention to her. A note made in 1877 by David
Nicolson, as Edmunds approached the age of fifty, related her daily
life as one of embroidery and etching; but also maintained that she
‘affects a youthful appearance’ and that ‘her manner and expression
evidently lies towards sexual and amatory ideas’. It seems certain
that at the annual Christmas dance for female patients, no doctor
or male attendant could escape a dance with Christiana.

Her life at
Broadmoor continued in this vein for another thirty years. She
presented no danger to any staff or patients, and unlike some
patients she showed no obvious signs of insanity. Many times her
notes described her as being obsessed with her personal appearance.
She won the battle to wear her own clothes eventually. We know this
because she sent out a parcel of them to a Wokingham lady for
repair in 1887, and the parcel was sent back to the Broadmoor
steward, who made a fuss because he was not expecting it.
Otherwise, she became less disruptive. She sewed, she painted, she
made herself up and demanded acknowledgement from the male staff
when she met them; she was quiet, she was well-behaved, and she
showed no remorse for her crimes. And in doing all these things,
she grew into an old woman.

Perhaps if she
had been one of the Broadmoor women who had acted while suffering
from post-natal depression, she might have been discharged. But
there was no clamour for that, nor any regular petitions to the
Home Office, letters in the newspapers or campaigning friends to
ask questions on her behalf. Dr Orange even noted in 1884 that he
did not actually have any paperwork authorising her detention,
because the Treasury Solicitor had lost it all. It never seems to
have crossed anyone’s mind that she might be discharged to rejoin
society. As the years went by, her remaining family died, and she
was left alone at Broadmoor.

Gradually her
own health weakened. In 1900, she was bedridden for a while with
flu. By 1901 her sight was fading badly, and she could barely see
out of her right eye. She rallied in time to attend the Asylum’s
annual ball in 1902, but her mobility decreased, and by 1906 she
could hardly walk to go anywhere. As she entered the last year of
her life, a final Christmas ball approached. Laid up in the
infirmary, and closely observed by the medical staff, a snippet of
conversation between her and another patient was entered into her
case notes:

Edmunds: How am
I looking?

A: Fairly
well.

Edmunds: Are my
eyebrows alright?

A: Yes.

Edmunds: I
think I am improving. I hope I shall be better in a fortnight. If
so, I shall astonish them; I shall get up and dance – I was a Venus
before and I shall be a Venus again!

She died nine
months later on 19th September 1907, aged 78. The cause of death
was given as senile decay, or old age.

Edmunds had a
lasting effect on many of the professionals around her. Her case
had been notable, and Dr George Blandford used it to illustrate his
book Insanity and its Treatment, quoting Dr Orange’s original
report on Edmunds. In 1892, Blandford was preparing a new edition
of his book, and wrote to Nicolson, Orange’s successor, asking if
he could have an update on how Edmunds had changed during her
twenty years at Broadmoor. Dr Nicolson replied that he had seen no
change in Edmunds during the fifteen and a half years that he had
known her.

Most
significantly, hers was apparently the first capital trial
witnessed by the great English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall.
Marshall Hall would later make a name for himself by taking on the
defence case in a number of high profile English murder trials,
earning himself the title of ‘The Great Defender’. Another Brighton
resident, he was only thirteen at the time of Edmunds’s trial, but
it is generally accepted that he joined other spectators at the
Brighton Police Court hearings, and perhaps he was captivated by
the undoubted sense of legal theatre which surrounded Edmunds and
her woman in black persona.

This sense of
performance was something that attached itself to Edmunds, and as a
result her case has leant itself to dramatisation. She was the
subject of an ITV Saturday Night Theatre film as part of its Wicked
Women season in 1970, where Anna Massey starred as Edmunds. The
story has also been broadcast as The Great Chocolate Murders on BBC
Radio 4 in 2006, and recently become part of Steve Hennessy’s
series of Broadmoor plays.

In Brighton,
Christiana and the other characters in her story are still
well-known and used regularly in written or dramatic works. The
facts of the case have become a popular path travelled by those
interested in Victorian true crime. The facts have told a story,
though still an incomplete one, for Edmunds leaves behind a sense
of mystery in terms of her motivation. She is a character who
always seems within grasp and then disappears beyond reach. She
never denied her actions, nor offered up an explanation of what she
was trying to achieve.

She was
certainly a slave to adulation, and must have thrived on the
publicity that her criminal actions generated. She must also have
enjoyed the secrecy attached to affair on which she embarked with
her doctor neighbour. Perhaps her motive was no more than to enjoy
all these experiences. It is unclear whether she wanted to have Dr
Beard or to ruin him, and there is no firm evidence that she ever
sought to correspond with him again after August 1871. It is,
though, too neat an ending to conclude simply that all was vanity
with her: that this unusual woman can be reduced to a female
stereotype, a frustrated spinster whose desires eventually
destroyed her. Not enough of her survives in the records to be able
to see the true Christiana, and she has left us with only shards of
the mirror containing her reflection. The search to discover the
Venus of Broadmoor goes on.

Broadmoor was
no different to any other institution which housed women of
childbearing age. Like a workhouse, a prison or a charitable
refuge, it admitted women on a series of set criteria, regardless
of their physical condition. The same was true equally of the
county and city asylums which had sprung up during the nineteenth
century, though with one notable difference. Although the average
local asylum would have plenty of patients who had just experienced
childbirth, those asylums very rarely received women who were
pregnant, and who went on to have their babies within the
institution. Generally, asylums were seen as somewhere to be
avoided during pregnancy. Broadmoor, by comparison, showed its
judicial side in these circumstances. As its patients had been
deprived of choice in this matter in favour of direction, it had a
small, if irregular number of confinements to manage. That these
events were dealt with in-house, as just another part of ward life,
was entirely in keeping with the ethos of the self-contained
community that was Victorian Broadmoor.

To a large
extent, the female side of the Asylum operated as an independent
unit. The initial women’s Block and its later companion were
separated from the male side to the west by a high dividing wall.
There was a dedicated body of staff of around twenty female
attendants to nurse the residents of these blocks, with a female
operational head, although the medical staff remained stubbornly
male well beyond the Victorian period. The doctors’ offices also
remained on the male side, and in their charge, notionally at
least, were the clinical interventions designed to remedy around
one hundred lunatic women.

Male and
female patients were barely aware of each other’s existence. Work
and entertainment were both provided separately. The result was
that there was a parallel, segregated life going on for patients
either side of Broadmoor’s great divide. The women sewed and looked
after the laundry, they promenaded along their Terrace or the wider
grounds; they read in the day room and conversed; or, if they were
in the female back Block, they were minded and managed as their
aggressive counterparts were in the other half of the site. Even at
the centrepiece annual events, such as the flower show or annual
ball, the women were permitted only to mix with male staff, and not
male patients. It provided both what was considered a safe
environment for initial recovery, and also one where refuge could
be given to help a patient to progress. It was into this single-sex
regime that the women who arrived pregnant would find
themselves.

The first
patient to give birth in the Asylum was Catherine Dawson, who did
so on 26th December 1866, a little more than two and half years
after Broadmoor opened. That Boxing Day, at one o’clock in the
morning, she was delivered of a baby boy in the infirmary ward in
the female block. Her labour lasted only half an hour.

Catherine was
in many ways a typical Broadmoor female patient. She was thirty-one
years old, and a working class housewife from the industrial north
west: Liverpool, in this case. The new baby was her fourth child.
The older children had also been her victims. On 27th October 1864,
she had cut the throat of her middle child, twenty-two month old
Matilda, at the family’s basic rooms in Toxteth Park, close to the
Liverpool docks where her husband worked. She had also tried to
kill her eldest daughter and had then attempted suicide. She was
found insane before her trial, and given the pleasure sentence.

Although
Broadmoor had opened eighteen months previously, Catherine was
transferred initially from Kirkdale Prison to Rainhill Asylum (the
Lancaster County Asylum) in Liverpool on 30th November 1864. It is
unclear from her case notes why she was not immediately transferred
to Broadmoor, as by that date the hospital had cleared its backlog
of patients requiring admission from the older criminal lunatic
accommodation at Bethlem, Fisherton House and other institutions.
After Broadmoor’s opening, it was unusual for a pleasure man or
woman to be placed elsewhere, with incidents linked usually to the
suffering of a temporary accommodation crisis; rarely, it might be
because a patient was considered exceptionally harmless. Catherine
evidently did not fit into the latter category, because she
remained at Rainhill for fifteen months, until March 1866, when she
managed to escape from the asylum. It took a month to track her
down, though it was not difficult to find her. She was eventually
discovered living once more with her husband, Henry, and the
remaining two girls. She was brought back to Rainhill at once, and
this time moved quickly to Broadmoor, on 15th May 1866.

On her arrival
at Broadmoor she was instantly sick in the waiting room, and after
her details were taken and her handover complete, she was confined
to bed in the female infirmary, dosed up on beef tea and
effervescing salts. The initial diagnosis was that her sickness had
most likely been caused by a dose of morphine, administered to her
to keep her calm on the train during the long journey south. That
view held good for a few days, but when the sickness did not
subside, the Broadmoor doctors concluded the true cause. During her
month at large she had resumed entirely her marital duties, and had
managed to become pregnant.

Catherine was
probably not high up on the list of patients whose expectant
condition would be easy to manage. She was an aggressive patient
while she was in Broadmoor. She was quarrelsome and paranoid,
imagining that tricks were being played deliberately on her. When
her sickness eventually subsided she was moved to the Block’s
number two ward, then the ward for the more disturbed patients on
the female side, and occupied her time with needlework and
suspicion until she gave birth. The event itself was almost
entirely unremarkable; in fact, the only remark Catherine made at
the time of birth ‘was that there was a nasty smell in the room’.
Her baby boy was immediately removed from her after his birth and
handed over to a dedicated attendant, who looked after him but
reared him artificially on cow’s milk. As Catherine was in no state
to name her child, and the boy had been born on St Stephen’s Day,
the Broadmoor chaplain christened him Stephen. His baptism is
recorded in the parish register for St Michael’s, Sandhurst,
presumably from a piece of paper supplied to the incumbent, as his
mother’s name was incorrectly recorded as Caroline.

The mother did
not ask to see her child until a week after the birth, and it was
not until two months had passed that she was finally allowed to see
him. Their first, and almost certainly only meeting was not a
success. Catherine behaved strangely with little Stephen, placing
him on his legs to see if he would walk already and otherwise
acting that he was older than a newborn, and the boy was taken away
from her again on the same day, this time for good. It was clear
that mother and child would never bond, but then it had never been
intended that they should. As soon as Stephen had been born, Dr
John Meyer, Broadmoor’s first Medical Superintendent, had begun to
plan arrangements for the baby’s life away from his mother.

Meyer’s plan
was to ask either Catherine’s local workhouse, or her husband Henry
to take the child. He wrote to both. Henry Dawson replied most
clearly: he was reluctant to accept his newborn son on the grounds
of his own poverty. Now lodging in Birkenhead, he was continuing to
work while trying to feed the two surviving girls. He had a duty to
the family that was in sight, not to that out of it. Meyer had more
success with the Union. They had a series of questions for him as
to their liability, but at no point did they refuse his request.
After a little further correspondence, Broadmoor managed to
persuade the officers of the Chorley Union Workhouse to take on the
child of ‘their’ patient. A date for his removal was fixed, and
Stephen was collected from Broadmoor on 25th February 1867 by the
master and matron of the workhouse, and taken back to
Merseyside.