Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [29]
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