Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [3]
Of course, with the new sentence there quickly came further Hadfields, all similarly afflicted and all requiring some form of secure accommodation. As luck would have it, Bethlem had outgrown its city space and was on the verge of moving to larger premises, so the Government negotiated the first dedicated space for criminal lunatics when the new Bethlem opened in St George’s Fields in 1816. Two new wings were built as what became known as the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It was an opportunist move, rather than a long-term one. When space at Bethlem reached capacity a few decades later, further space was purchased at Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury, though this also only bought a little more time. As the national population mushroomed during the nineteenth century, so too did the small subset that comprised the criminal lunatics.
The Home Office, under Secretary Sir George Grey, decided in the late 1850s to identify a piece of land on which to build a dedicated special hospital. The site at Crowthorne, part of the Crown estate of Windsor Forest, was chosen for being reasonably isolated, yet also easily accessible from London. Crowthorne itself barely existed at the time, but Wellington College was being built nearby and was due to gain a station on the London and South East Railway, so the area was ripe for development. Broadmoor itself was to be perched high-up on a ridge within the forest, commanding a magnificent and suitably healthy view across the countryside below.
Plans were shelved briefly when the Whig Government fell, and Grey removed from office, but as a result of Parliamentary enquiries into lunacy, it was not long before the Criminal Lunatic Asylums Act 1860 was passed. This allowed the Government to act on its plan and fund construction of its own asylum. Sir George Grey was back in post by the time building had begun, and under his instruction the Home Office’s prison architect, Sir Joshua Jebb, was given the task of designing the structure. Within three years, an army of convicts had supplied their forced labour, the woods had been cleared, several brick boxes reached up to the sky, Jebb was on his death bed, and Broadmoor was open for business.
***
For the first nine months of its existence, Broadmoor was a female only hospital. This was because the site design included fewer buildings on the female side, and they were finished first. The one female block was in a separate compound to the five male blocks that made up the initial building phase (a further block for each sex was finished within the next few years). It was only when these five blocks were ready, and the remaining convict labour retrenched to what would become Block 6 that coaches of men from Bethlem and Fisherton began replicating the women’s arrival. That process began on 27th February 1864. Patients like Oxford and Dadd were amongst those transferred.
By the end of 1864, there were two hundred men and one hundred women in the Asylum, though the numbers would swell further until there were around five hundred patients at any time, in a ratio of roughly four men to one woman. Of course, the social mix within