Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [36]
By January 1890 Dr Nicolson, then Superintendent, was of the view that Margaret could be discharged to an ordinary asylum. For several years she had been withdrawn and uncommunicative but otherwise well behaved. The official description of her was ‘demented’ but ‘harmless’. It was decided to move her to the Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool, where Catherine Dawson had stayed some three decades before. By now, her husband was dead, and the move north would not bring her closer to any family connections. But perhaps that was irrelevant, as she continued to write to Joseph and to talk to him long after his death. So on 10th February 1890, she was transferred to what became her final home.
At Rainhill, Margaret carried on much as she had done at Broadmoor. She wrote to Joseph and worked a little on the wards until her health failed. For the last seven years of her life, she was effectively immobile. She died on 3rd February 1912, choking on her own vomit as she tried to digest her lunch.
Those four cases in nine years constituted the initial glut of Broadmoor babies. Afterwards, there were fewer cases, and as these drift later towards the twentieth century, a number of the Victorian babies become part of case files which will remain closed for some years to come. There is one more baby to include at present, and this one came after a gap of nearly six years from the birth of Margaret Davenport’s child.
This time, the labour was long, despite it being the mother’s fourth child. The new baby entered the world at eight o’clock on the morning of 14th January 1879. A third Broadmoor boy, William, he was born to Catherine Jones, a thirty-three year-old farmer’s wife from Llanllyfni, Caernarvonshire. Catherine was described by Dr Orange on her admission notes as ‘of respectable appearance but with a decided air of melancholy’. She had been brought from Carnarvon Prison the previous September, where she had been in custody since May. She had been aware of her own pregnancy while in prison, and when her transfer was arranged she had informed the authorities that she was pregnant, so they had been prepared for the birth since her arrival.
Catherine’s case was yet another of infanticide. She had killed the youngest of her children, her eighteen month-old daughter Sarah. Catherine’s was considered by the medical men to be a classic case of ‘puerperal mania’, or of dangerous postnatal psychosis. She had already attempted to cut her daughter’s throat at the family farmhouse in North Wales, when on 9th May 1878 her husband William left her alone with the child in the kitchen for a few minutes. On his return, the child was dead, with blood trickling from its nose and ears. Catherine said that the little girl had fallen from a chair, but her past history meant that this story was challenged. Later the same day she confessed to one of her servants that she had placed her hand over the toddler’s mouth until she had suffocated. Her case proceeded to a full trial at the local Assizes, where the jury acquitted her on the grounds of insanity.
Catherine brought an additional complication to Broadmoor as well as her pregnancy. For she could not speak, read or write a word of English. She was a native Welsh speaker, with no other languages. This was a comparatively unusual situation for the Asylum. There were a few patients in Victorian Broadmoor for whom English was not their first language, but many of these spoke French or German instead, and the medical staff, not least Orange, were able to converse in these other tongues. This would not be so with Catherine. When she arrived at Broadmoor, she could not communicate with any of the staff, and so some other method was required. As luck would have it, there was another Welsh female patient who could speak a little of the language, and so she was drafted in to act as Catherine’s translator. This was just as well, as Catherine quickly fell ill, showing signs of pleurisy, and was confined to bed.
William