Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [33]
Dr Orange replied positively, and she was admitted on 10th May 1871. This small, stout woman was eight months pregnant when she arrived inside the Gatehouse. Her skin was pale from her incarceration, and it contrasted with her dark brown hair. Immediately she was interviewed, and the Broadmoor staff unconvinced of her suitability for their care. Dr Orange wrote in her notes that she ‘talks nonsense saying that she was frightened at Millbank and that I was the person who frightened her…it is evidently her desire to be thought insane at present’.
Nevertheless, she was here now, and was not about to be moved again. Her child was born soon after her arrival, at 5.15am on the morning of 8th June. The first girl to be born in Broadmoor, she was christened Margaret Julia by Broadmoor’s visiting Catholic priest. Like Mary Meller, Margaret senior was allowed to nurse her baby at first, doing so ‘in a sensible and affectionate manner’. But on 12th June something changed, and she began to act oddly, suggesting that she had known the attendants for many years, but that now they were using false names; that the nurse helping her was not holding the baby properly, intending to hurt it; and that people were being unkind and speaking badly of her. Diagnosed as having entering a maniacal state, her baby was quickly taken from her.
With no husband or partner to care for the illegitimate child, Broadmoor wrote to the St Marylebone Union, where Margaret had spent time in the workhouse during 1870, to confirm the guardians’ duty to take the baby. They acknowledged their obligation, but reluctantly, and asked whether Broadmoor could allow the baby to stay with its mother until her removal back to prison. Dr Orange considered this to be of no benefit to the infant. He replied that ‘the mental condition of Margaret Crimmings is such as to preclude the possibility of leaving the child under her care…as under any circumstances the child is deprived of its mother’s care its removal from the Asylum would appear to be desirable on all accounts.’
So the Assistant Matron of St Marylebone Workhouse came to collect Margaret Julia on 19th July, and take her back to central London. Sadly, the baby girl was to have a very short life outside the asylum. She died at the workhouse nursery, Southall School, on 19th August 1871, when she was only ten weeks’ old. The guardians wrote that her death was due to ‘debility’, an unspecific cause, though a description of Margaret Crimmings’s teeth in her Broadmoor notes raises the possibility that both mother and child suffered from congenital syphilis.
Meanwhile, Margaret remained at Broadmoor, and was pronounced recovered from her mania by August. She was employed in the asylum laundry where she was an industrious worker, occasionally prone to excitable outbursts but otherwise diligent. She became a patient suitable for discharge.
As a convict prisoner, Margaret’s sentence had a defined end date of March 1877. Several years of good behaviour and hard work meant that the Home Office was prepared to consider releasing her early. As she approached the last year of her sentence, the Broadmoor staff began to make enquiries as to who might take care of her. Her brother, from whom she had stolen all those years ago, had remained in contact and occasionally visited her and so he was asked if he might help. He was happy to do so, and to offer her accommodation at his lodgings back in London. Once reassured on that point, her order of licence for release arrived from the Home Office, and she was presented with the parchment document, signed and sealed. She was discharged on 9th February 1876. Orange