Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [31]
Catherine spent the last two and half years of her life in the infirmary in the female wing, losing weight and becoming weaker. She was suffering from a degenerative disease. Her mind continued to sink with her body, and by January 1876 she had ceased speaking to the medical staff or being able to get out of bed.
There was one last moment of clarity. On 16th April 1876, she rallied briefly on her death bed. She spoke coherently, she chatted to her fellow patients around her. Then she died from tuberculosis, aged forty-one.
The story of the second child born at Broadmoor was a somewhat different one. Some fifteen months had passed since Catherine Dawson had given birth when Henry Meller arrived 18th March 1868. Henry’s mother was called Mary Anne, and she was a stonemason’s wife from Newington in South London. Mary Meller was twenty-seven years old; a small, stout woman with dark hair. She already had four children when she became pregnant once again in the summer of 1867. A few months later, on 1st November 1867 she attacked a widow who lodged with her and her family, hitting the woman over the head as she stooped to light the kitchen fire, and then trying to cut her throat as she sat down to recover. Her victim, Mrs Mary Cattermole, managed to run from the house to safety, while Mrs Meller tore at her lodger’s hair and chased her into the street. Two men managed to tackle the assailant, and held onto Mrs Meller until a police constable arrived to arrest her. Her trial in December was at the Old Bailey, and both her doctor and her father testified that she suffered from regular but intermittent bouts of insanity. She had attempted suicide on previous occasions. The prosecution made no attempt to press her guilt, and after a short hearing she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Despite the verdict, the Governor of Horsemonger Lane Gaol was not convinced. He wrote on her transfer document to Broadmoor that she was ‘quiet and well-educated, betraying no symptoms of insanity’. Nevertheless he noted that she had attempted to poison herself while in his custody. She was admitted to the Asylum on 14th January 1868, seven months pregnant.
Mary was in better health than Catherine Dawson had been when her son was born. As a consequence, she was allowed to nurse her child for around three weeks before her husband, William, came to collect the baby and take him home. Mary was also noticeably improved since her admission, and though occasionally prone to physical outbursts, was employed regularly in needlework on the convalescent ward. Her change in character had been remarkable, and the Broadmoor staff suspected that it could be attributed to one thing: that she was sober. The possibility that it had been the drink that had driven her to attack Mrs Cattermole had not surfaced at her trial, yet Mary was prepared to concede that it might be so. She confessed to previously intemperate habits, and even that she was drunk the night before the attack. Her experience was not uncommon to Victorian Broadmoor patients, several of whom had taken drinking to such a stage that the courts considered insanity to have intervened. In 1869, a report summarised her state as ‘no doubt a bad-tempered woman but betrays at present no symptoms of insanity’. With a comfortable home and a caring, solvent husband, she was considered to be both well and at a low risk of reoffending. She was subsequently conditionally discharged into William’s care on 3rd May 1870.
But this was not the last contact between the family and the hospital. In February 1873, William Meller wrote to one of the attendants saying that his wife had recently begun drinking heavily again. He complained that Mary was pawning the family possessions for