Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [32]
Amongst other tales, Mr Meller recounted an evening when his wife had told the servants that she was going out to listen to a lecture. Since the venue was one where the couple had season tickets, with seats reserved for each event, Mr Meller set off with the intention of joining his wife. Of course, when he reached the auditorium in question, both seats were empty, and Mary was not there. Distraught, William Meller set off for a nearby chemist’s to buy some pills to calm his frayed nerves. As he waited for his tablets to be counted out, he chatted idly to the man behind the counter. The chemist mentioned that he had just seen a drunken woman pass his shop, pursued by a mob of ‘a couple of hundred people’. Meller stopped dead: it couldn’t be, could it? He raced out of the shop, following the direction in which the chemist had pointed, and shortly caught up with the mob. Sure enough, at the centre of the angry crowd he found his wife. Meller had no idea what she had been accused of doing, and was not particularly interested to investigate. He called a nearby policeman, who managed to disperse the throng, and Meller took his wife home in a hansom: ‘but she would not sit in the seat and I was compelled to bid her lie in the bottom of the cab.’
William Meller asked Dr William Orange, Broadmoor’s Superintendent, to write to his wife. He said that she took no notice of him, but he thought that she would take notice of Orange. About the same time, and apparently unconnected, Mary Meller wrote to Broadmoor herself. In it she asked Dr Orange to visit her. ‘I am miserable and unhappy and require your assistance’, she wrote. Her side of the story was different. She alleged that William had broken her nose, and stated that ‘I would rather be under your care than be thus ill used’.
It seems likely that Dr Orange did write to the Mellers, possibly as a couple, as William addressed a further two letters to him directly in April 1873. It appears that husband and wife had managed to reach some kind of resolution themselves. Mary became more settled, and had been on a trip to Lancashire and Yorkshire. William also stated that Mary had bought little Henry home: whether or not he had been looked after by relatives up till then is unclear.
Although they had another child, the Mellers’ family unit did not last significantly longer. Mary Meller would be another Broadmoor mother who died young. Her death occurred on 23rd December 1878 at the age of thirty-seven, and she was buried in Nunhead Cemetery in Southeast London. However, unlike Stephen Dawson, Henry had enjoyed an upbringing together with his parents and his siblings. He grew up to have his own family.
The Broadmoor staff had now experienced two quite different outcomes for the children born in their care. They would use these precedents to shape their future experiences. Their next chance to do so was three years away. This time, the mother was Margaret Crimmings, a twenty-six year-old single servant from London.
Unlike the other Broadmoor mothers in this story, she was a convict patient, rather than a ‘pleasure woman’. She had not been found innocent by reason of insanity, but found guilty, and then developed mental health problems while in jail. Margaret had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment on 11th October 1870 at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions. Her crime was stealing two coats, apparently from her brother. The length of her sentence was down to her past record, for this was not the first time that she had been inside. She had four previous convictions for theft on her file, the first at the age of eighteen, and a further one for assaulting a police officer. Already, she had spent a little more than two years of her life in prison.
The first few months of this latest and longest sentence were spent at both Westminster and Millbank Prisons in London. It was while she was here that the Prison