Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [42]
So far, so good, yet in all this planning Walker had overlooked one small, but significant detail. Throughout his escape, he was wearing nothing except his nightshirt. When he duly arrived in the nearby village, it was half past four in the morning and he was naked from the waist down. Whichever way you looked at him, Walker must have stood out in at least one crucial area. What was a man on the run to do? He sought assistance. He came across a local carpenter, William Bunch, also up early in the morning, and told the tradesman that his unfortunate state could be explained by the occasion of his drinking with friends in London. Walker maintained that he was drunk, had missed his train and then been walking all night towards home.
Bunch took Walker round to the village postman, with the initial intention of getting Walker a lift to Blackwater Station. The three men sat in the postman’s stables, where a jacket and trousers were found for Walker and some bread and cheese supplied for breakfast. However, their new companion’s appearance and behaviour had immediately given them cause for alarm, and they kept Walker talking while separately, a messenger was sent to the Asylum. A party of attendants headed for Yateley, and Walker was back inside Block 1 in time for lunch.
Walker’s third attempt of the year was made with Thomas Douglas, who was making his own second bid to abscond. Both men managed to gain access to one of the wards in Block 1, then broke through the window of a single room much like Walker had done previously in May. From there, they made out first into the Block 1 airing court, and then over its dividing wall into the airing court of Block 3. The alarm was raised at once, and the pair were found hiding in the coalhole of the admin block. It was clear by now that Walker owed his successes to more than just good planning. ‘Walker has long been supposed to have had a key and this alone can account for his being enabled to pass through the doors’, reported Meyer. He was quite right. Three months later, it was discovered: an intricate piece of ironwork, probably based on an impression made of a Broadmoor key by Walker or another and then worked up for the patient by a criminal associate outside. An attendant, suspected of helping Walker to hide the key, though not of being party to the escapes, was dismissed.
This third attempt was both the least effective, and the last of Walker’s efforts, and it landed him in a form of solitary confinement for most of the next few years. ‘Seclusion’ was the principal method of containing unruly patients, and now Walker found himself secluded as a matter of course. His management became a great challenge, as almost uniquely amongst Broadmoor patients, the medical staff found Walker impossible to control. He was an insubordinate extrovert, and at times, he had an attack on sight policy. He would prowl around in Block 1, naked apart from a strip of cloth around one arm or leg, covering his room in faeces or using them as missiles with which to javelin the doctors when they visited. This made him into something of a cause célèbre for the Commissioners in Lunacy, as Walker was in consequence kept alone in one end of the first floor gallery of Block 1, away from the other patients and with an attendant beside him at all times. The Commissioners lobbied Meyer to allow Walker greater freedom, believing this situation to be unpalatable, and, depending on his behaviour, Walker was sometimes permitted to exercise in the airing court, also alone, where he had a collection of pigeons that he fed. Dr Orange later succeeded at integrating Walker a little more, though it was probably with some relief that Walker was discharged to the Middlesex Asylum at Colney Hatch in 1874, when his prison sentence expired.
Walker’s and Douglas’s escape in 1865 led to the replacement of the cast iron bars in Block 1 with wrought iron bars and window shutters. This replacement would prove to be an effective