Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [39]
Over time, it would mostly be the men who tried to discharge themselves, so when the first escapee came from the female side it was a more novel event than might have been supposed. The date was Wednesday 8th June 1864, and it was late at night. Mary McBride woke up from her dormitory bed in the female block, went through an unlocked internal door into the ladies’ chapel, jumped down from one of the chapel windows and ran off across the estate. It had been a remarkably straightforward escape. Not only had the dormitory door been left open, against regulations, but also there were no bars across the chapel windows, and once McBride was in the women’s airing ground, she found only one wall, roughly six foot high, between her and the outside world. Action was taken promptly: the attendants in charge of the dormitory were reprimanded, and the absence of bars on the chapel windows was rectified at once.
McBride was a fifty-one year old widow, a tall, thin woman with grey hair who had been convicted of theft at the Lancaster Sessions in 1857 and ended up in the county asylum there. She was a factory worker who was also allegedly a prostitute. She was a curious case for admission, as although convicted, her sentence had expired five years before she had been transferred to Broadmoor, within a month of its opening, in June 1863. After her flight, her absence was not spotted immediately, and so a potential head start was afforded to her. Despite this, her apparel was spotted by a local bobby and she was retaken the next day in Reading. Broadmoor’s Council of Supervision fined the two attendants ten shillings each, and paid two pounds to the Superintendent at Reading Police Station as a reward. McBride tried to escape again in November, when she was part of a walking party exercising in the wider grounds, and as a result she found her future movements restricted solely to the female block and airing court. She was removed to Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool three years later.
Low walls would remain a weak spot of the Asylum for a while to come. The next escape also encompassed them, when George Hage made off from the Terrace at around seven o’clock on the evening of 19th September. On the evening of his escape, a gate had been left open from that part of the Terrace that formed the airing court for Block 5, one of the two Blocks for more trusted patients, and beyond the gate, the Asylum boundary wall had temporarily been knocked down while the water tower was being built. Once again, it was a simple exit, with Hage ambling away from the Terrace, out of the gate and through the dismantled wall.
Hage was a young man, aged just twenty-two, with distinctive, auburn hair and hazel eyes, who had been convicted of theft at Leicester in 1861. In jail, he developed delusions that he was poisoned, so was removed first to Bethlem and then to Broadmoor in July 1864. He lasted a little longer than McBride outside, working in a coal mine for a few weeks before his distinguishing features were recognised by Police in Sheffield, and he was re-admitted on 8th November. His escape, though, led to a minor scandal, when he explained that an attendant called John Philport had agreed to turn a blind eye to his run. Philport had been trouble to the Asylum throughout his brief stay on its establishment. He had been found to be so neglectful of his duties that a week before Hage’s escape, he was given notice to leave at the end of the month. The authorities’ mistake was in allowing him to remain on site at all, and he carried on misbehaving to such an extent that he was dismissed summarily before his notice period expired. In the meantime, unknown to anyone, he had intentionally assisted Hage with the plan to allow the patient’s liberty. After Hage had implicated the now ex-attendant, Medical Superintendent John Meyer turned the case over to the Police. They located Philport, arrested