Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [37]
The fact that no one could understand Catherine was a source of concern to both the Broadmoor doctors and the Home Office. It was not safe to have a patient sick in bed, yet unable to communicate their needs. Orange soon began agitating for his patient’s transfer back to a Welsh-speaking asylum, as quickly as her health was up to it. Even when she rallied, after December 1878, Orange still sought to transfer her to an asylum nearer her home before she gave birth.
The Home Office took a different view, possibly as it was so soon after her verdict and sentence had been delivered, and instead asked Orange to find ‘some respectable woman, who can speak the Welsh language’ to act as a dedicated attendant to Catherine. Orange retorted that employing a dedicated member of staff to act as translator was not seen as practical. So the other Welsh patient, who came from Glamorganshire, continued to act as Catherine’s official interpreter during her time at Broadmoor.
Perhaps because of the inability to communicate with her, the staff at Broadmoor did not feel able to let her nurse her child, and the baby boy was removed from her immediately after birth. Without the possibility of a thorough interview, and given her previous medical history, it was felt too risky to leave little William in the sole care of his mother. One of the female attendants, Harriet Hunt, took charge of him instead. The suggestion, though, is that Catherine was recovering from her mental illness, even if her physical health continued to be poor. She was allowed to see her baby on the infirmary, and bond with him while the usual arrangements were made for his removal. This case was a simple one, as William Jones was very eager to take care of his infant namesake. He visited both mother and child regularly before he took the three-month old baby home on 16th April 1879, with Harriet Hunt, the nursemaid, accompanying him on the journey.
At roughly the same time, the Home Office finally acquiesced regarding Catherine’s transfer. They delivered the warrant that Dr Orange had requested to remove Catherine to the Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum at Denbigh in North Wales. Yet Orange’s satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Catherine’s health took another turn for the worse. She was bedridden again, and her transfer was postponed. Over the spring, she remained in Broadmoor’s infirmary while her husband and child were at home.
Fortunately, this experience was to be short lived. As before, she rallied, and by July she was sufficiently well enough for her transfer to be effected. Orange wrote to Denbigh, and a female attendant from that Asylum arrived by train on 29th July 1879 to collect Catherine and escort her back to Wales. She had stayed in Broadmoor for a very short time, a little over ten months, but for the time being she remained a pleasure woman.
The care that Catherine had received in Broadmoor had been considerable, and this was acknowledged by her family. The last paper on her Broadmoor file is a letter written on behalf of William Jones in January 1880. In it, he stated that although his wife seemed rational and sane in Denbigh, her general health was worse, and he ascribed this to the inferior diet she was given compared to her Broadmoor rations. He asked for Dr Orange’s help in gaining his wife’s discharge back home.
The Home Office relented in her case within a year. She was conditionally discharged from the Joint Counties Asylum and moved back to the farmhouse that she now shared with William senior, William junior and the other children at Llwydcoed Fawr in Llanllyfni. Her husband carried on with the farm, and she carried on as a mother, that day in May 1878 now forgiven, if not forgotten.
These women’s stories are