Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [30]
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.
The Dawson family was now split three ways. Catherine stayed in Broadmoor, her moods swinging between excitement and depression. When she was better, she kept in contact with her husband, reading his letters and writing her replies. But as well as her mental illness, she was often in poor physical health and unable either to write or to work at her sewing. She would lay in bed, exhausted, with her hands and wrists scarred from breaking windows in the female block. During one such period, in 1871, Henry worried that the long silence from his wife was fatal. He wrote directly to the Broadmoor authorities asking whether his wife were dead or alive. Shortly after it was confirmed that she was still alive, he visited her. He did not know when he would be able to do so again.
Though Catherine was slowly failing, it was Henry who died first, on 18th June 1872. A friend of the family wrote to Broadmoor to pass on the news,