Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [1]
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
Broadmoor Hospital:
By Way of Introduction
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