Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [40]
These first two escapes set the general pattern for future years, where a lone patient would first formulate, and then execute a plan which they hoped would lead to their freedom. These plans were sometimes thoroughly prepared, and sometimes wholly opportune. The level of preparation involved did not statistically make a difference to success. Yet while the lone lunatic runner was the norm, and it was exceptional for patients to conspire in concert, the third and last attempt of 1864 would also be the only one in the Victorian period that might be described as a ‘mass breakout’.
Even then, it was only four patients who were involved: Timothy Grundy, Richard Elcombe, John Thompson and Thomas Douglas. The last two appear again later in this story, where their tales are told in more detail. Like McBride and Hage, they were also ‘time’ patients: convicts who had become insane while serving a fixed sentence in prison. Similarly, Elcombe was a thirty-seven year old sailor who had been sentenced to seven years for theft in 1851. Sent to Portland Prison, he had assaulted a warder and been given another twenty years inside. Like Hage, he developed the delusion that he was poisoned: a delusion that is common to many other patients in Victorian Broadmoor. Elcombe ended up in Bethlem, and eventually spent the whole of his sentence either there or in Broadmoor, from where he was sent to the Dorset Asylum in 1874.
It was Grundy who was the ringleader, ‘a powerfully built man’ according to William Orange, Meyer’s then deputy. Accused of drowning his sweetheart after a quarrel, Grundy had been found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ at Worcester in 1863, aged twenty-seven. He was the first ‘pleasure man’ – as opposed to the convicts, a patient detained indefinitely at Her Majesty’s Pleasure – to try and escape. He had come to Broadmoor from Fisherton House, the provincial alternative to Bethlem, in Salisbury, only three months before. He was noted by the Broadmoor staff as a man who liked to try and organise direct action, and was often secluded in his room for his troubles. In 1873, he directed a gang attack on the Principal Attendant of Block 1, who was badly injured. By the 1880s, Grundy had calmed down sufficiently for his sister to unsuccessfully petition twice for his discharge. However, it was felt to be too risky to ever let him go, and Grundy remained inside the walls. He died in the Asylum in 1908 from old age, at seventy-one.
Back on Sunday, 14th December 1864, these four men had an elaborate plan. While the Chaplain was conducting an evening service on the ground floor for the men of Block 1, this little gang stood in the Block’s gallery upstairs, around the central staircase. They were not attending the prayers. Rather, Thompson – a professed atheist - asked the attendant on duty if the latter might fetch a small piece of pie that Thompson had left in the ward. When the attendant obliged, one of the men shut the gallery door behind him and jammed the lock with a stone. The four of them then made their way into the first floor day room, barricaded the door, broke a window, and took out knotted ropes made from handkerchiefs, with which they proceeded to shin down the wall. The Chaplain, part way through his lines below, looked up to see four burly figures passing by the ground floor windows. The alarm was raised, whereupon it was discovered that an accomplice, presumably on a given signal, had similarly stuffed stones into all the external door locks for the Block, effectively locking in the attendants.
Fortunately, the stones delayed rather than prevented the staff from getting out, and the fleeing patients had not managed to exit the airing court before they were caught. It had been a near miss on this occasion. Block 1, together with the later Block 6, formed what were termed the ‘back