Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [43]
William Smith was first, when he attempted to escape from a walking party on Wednesday 2nd May 1866. This method would become increasingly popular once the building security was improved. It had always been intended that the Broadmoor estate should consist of a walled compound, but that outside that there would be much ground left for cultivation, and that this could be used for patients’ work and leisure. With a walking party, a small group of patients would enjoy a long stroll around the fields, watched over, typically, by a couple of attendants. Smith’s approach was simple: he made a sudden and unexpected run for the woods which bordered the estate, as several patients would in the years ahead. His particular effort did not get very far, and he was quickly caught and retaken before he could disappear from sight. Although it was largely uneventful, the whole event unsettled him, and with tragic consequences.
Smith was a career criminal, who had been transported to Australia at a young age. When his sentence expired, he obtained a passage back to Britain, and ended up in Scotland. He was sentenced to another twenty-one years’ transportation for theft at Glasgow in 1856, but after arriving en route at Dartmoor Prison, he had become delusional and so was transferred to the state asylum at Fisherton House. He was moved to Broadmoor in 1865. A pale man, with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, he had been a diligent employee in the shoemaker’s workshop throughout the past year. Returning to work after his failed bid for freedom, on the morning of 23rd May, he took himself and one of the workshop knives into the toilets, knelt in front of the bowl and cut his own throat. By the time he was discovered, he was dead. His was only the second suicide at Broadmoor, following that of a female patient earlier the same year. Smith had appeared in good humour on the fateful morning, volunteering to sweep the shop floor and also discussing the previous night’s play put on by the patients. The event shocked the staff, as they had not considered him to be suicidal. Perhaps, having failed to get away, Smith could see no future beyond his own, long-term custody.
A few days after Smith’s attempt, patient Peter O’Donnell tried to escape on 8th May by an established method. He mounted the internal wall which divided the Terrace from Block 5’s individual airing court. It was daylight, and it was his height on the wall that gave him away. He was spotted walking along the top, and though he ran and jumped onto the external wall, he was soon retaken on ground adjacent to the Deputy Superintendent’s house, just outside the boundary.
O’Donnell had previously tried to make off through the Asylum’s kitchen garden in March and had been stopped before he reached the wall. He was another convict, but of a slightly different kind. He was part of the significant forces population in Broadmoor, which formed roughly 10% of the male population during the Asylum’s early years. A twenty-two year old soldier, he had faced Court Martial at Aldershot in 1863 for desertion and shooting at an officer. He had subsequently been branded with a ‘D’. After his escape, he was moved from Block 5, one of the privilege blocks, to Block 4. Here he was more restricted in his movement, though he continued to cause a nuisance through breaking windows and furniture until he was discharged to the Hampshire Asylum in December 1867, when his four-year sentence was complete.
His escape had highlighted a simple truth to the Broadmoor management. ‘It is obvious that the walls dividing the different airing courts must be raised’, wrote Dr Meyer; separately,