Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [18]
Whatever Minor’s confused reasoning for his actions, the jury were quite clear that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. He duly received the sentence of detention at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and was sent on to Broadmoor.
Minor arrived from the Surrey County Gaol on 17th April 1872. Unusually for a Broadmoor patient, he travelled with another patient being transferred from the same prison, a gentleman called Edmund Dainty, who had killed a fellow patient in the Surrey Asylum. Described on admission as ‘A thin, pale and sharp-featured man with light coloured sandy hair; deep-set eyes and prominent cheek bones’, Minor dutifully recounted his persistent nocturnal experiences, as well as giving an account of his current bodily health (gonorrhoea and possibly signs of tuberculosis, though none were found). Like Dadd, his delusions appeared to be self-contained and manageable, and he was obviously thought to be a low risk and was placed in Block 2, where privileges were greatest.
Minor was one of a small band of foreign nationals in Broadmoor, though most of these had become naturalised even if they were not citizens, and they did not quite have the character of a tourist that Minor’s case suggested. As a result, almost as soon as he arrived in the Asylum, the American Consulate in London wrote to Dr Orange for permission to send various things to Minor – both his own possessions and ‘some comforts, such as Dunn’s Coffee, French Plums etc’. The Consulate sent on Minor’s retrieved possessions shortly after, including clothes, drawing equipment, his tobacco and his diary. They kept hold of his surgical instruments, which had also been found in his rooms.
As a patient in Block 2, Minor enjoyed a reasonable degree of freedom within the Hospital routine. He had his own clothes, his art materials, and a regular income from his family which allowed him, like Dadd, to ask the Hospital to purchase things for him. Examples of things Minor bought include: beef, haddock, poultry, game, steak, bacon, salmon, as well as biscuits, coffee and lots of eggs. Once he bought himself a macaroni cheese. He also regularly purchased newspapers and a number of engineering journals (quite possibly for advice about solid building construction, which might prevent his nightly suffering).
He experienced as comfortable an existence as would be possible for any Broadmoor patient. At some point, he was allowed a separate day room as well as his bedroom, where he presumably kept his books, and by 1901 if not before he employed another patient as his servant (occasionally having to change his domestic staff if they were discharged). Winchester suggests that Minor’s two rooms were interconnecting, but this is unlikely as he was a tenant rather than a freeholder, and more probably they were either next door to each other or close together in Block 2. The exact date from when the extra room was granted is not clear, though it is likely that it postdates 1876, when Orange succeeded in having most of the convict patients transferred to Woking Prison. Certainly, Minor must have enjoyed the privilege for most of his stay, as a note in his file from 1887 suggests that Minor could not get into his day room one morning as the lock was faulty (which no doubt provided him with further evidence of the conspiracy against him), until the attendants had removed an obstruction from it.
Much of the anecdotal evidence for Minor’s comfort comes from a 1958 letter written by Dr Patrick McGrath, then the Superintendent, in response to an academic enquiry. He reported on a conversation with the daughter of David Nicolson, Superintendent