Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [41]
This was the first proper alteration made to the original specifications for the building which had been brought about by an escape attempt. More would follow after the attempts of 1865. This next year belonged to a serial escape essayer, when Richard Walker tried his luck a grand total of three times, on 8th April, 21st May and 3rd October. As might be concluded, he was unsuccessful on every occasion. Walker was not an exceptional man: he was five foot eight inches tall and of normal, if robust build. A thirty-six year old postman, who had stolen two letters in 1864, he had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Ending up in Millbank, he too believed that he was poisoned and had recently arrived at Broadmoor.
On 8th April, he and another patient, a Scotsman called Peter Waldie, managed to slip away from the attendants in Block 3 at twenty to eight in the evening. The only logical explanation at the time was that Walker had somehow managed to obtain a skeleton key, and then bided his time before taking his chance. Waldie was an opportunist collaborator, who had been smoking near the ward doorway beside the ground floor day room when Walker made his move. They exited through the day room’s external door and onto the Terrace, scaling the still man-size boundary wall.
Waldie shared a similar disposition to Walker. A fellow convict, found guilty of robbery with violence and given eight years, he also had delusions of poisoning and wished to be free from incarceration. He was a little younger, aged thirty-one, and had been both in Bethlem and Fisherton House Asylum, near Salisbury, before coming to Broadmoor in September 1864. Originally from Falkirk, Waldie had a broad accent and was also partially paralysed in one arm.
The pair, still in their Asylum clothes, managed to walk as far as Bracknell, where they enjoyed a pub meal at The Bull Inn using some money that Waldie had procured. The landlord either failed to notice their attire or raised the alarm after they had left him. Instead, the pair were spotted the next day, lying down on the benches at Bracknell Station, by Broadmoor’s gardener, who promptly went to get the nearest Constable. Walker and Waldie had enjoyed a little over twenty-four hours freedom before their return to Crowthorne.
Waldie was considered to be the junior party in this venture, and found himself back in Block 3, though no longer with Walker. He never tried to escape again. He was an increasing sick man, and he died from tuberculosis only a couple of years later, on 18th August 1867.
Walker was readmitted not to the more genteel surroundings of Block 3, but to the back Block 1, in theory at least a more secure part of the Hospital. Not that Walker paid any heed to theory: he had developed a taste for freedom, and after lights out on 21st May he began to put a new plan into action, which was both detailed in its cunning and also not wholly thought through. This time it began with pebbles. Stuffing the lock to his door full of small stones that he had garnered from the Block’s airing court, he then turned his bedstead on its end and placed it under his window. He stood on it, reached towards the high, small window in his room and broke the glass. Next, he passed his hand outside, whereupon he was able to unscrew the retaining nut and bolt of the centre circle of the window frame. He removed this and used it to smash the rest of the glass, until before him was left only a window-shaped hole. It was just large enough to squeeze through. Dropping into a yard adjacent to the block, he was able to scale the six-foot wall he was faced by,