Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [44]
It was still felt that any patient allowed outside an airing court was either lower risk, or being invigilated to such an extent that making it over the boundary wall was not an option. Any failings in this area were likely to be through human error. That hypothesis was strengthened on 20th August 1866, when it was the turn of Patrick Lyndon, a trusted patient, to make an unsuccessful attempt to discharge himself from the Asylum.
Lyndon was the first pleasure man since Grundy to try and get away. He had always been keen to remove himself, whether by orthodox means or not. He regularly petitioned the Home Secretary for his discharge, and sought to place himself in situations where he might escape. He had been given his indefinite sentence in 1838, at the age of twenty-six, and had now spent twenty-eight years awaiting a word from Her Majesty.
In Lyndon’s case, it was his motivations for Her Majesty’s pleasure that had indirectly contributed to his present position. A native of Liverpool, Lyndon made the journey south to Buckingham Palace, where he presented himself as a divine messenger who had been instructed to marry the young Queen Victoria. It was not necessary to treat him as a king, he said, and he was taken at his word. Declaring that he had ‘no earthly residence, not even an earthly name’, he fought with the sentry on duty at the Palace Lodge and was charged with assault. Found not guilty through insanity, he became a Bethlemite for seventeen years and was then moved onto Fisherton, where he was considered to be ‘an industrious man’, albeit one who had also escaped on more than one occasion there. Now, he was in his mid fifties. He was first put into the shoemaker’s shop at Broadmoor, where he was not considered to be good at his work, and had been moved into the garden. It was the decision to place him in the garden that led to his temptation.
Usually the staff were vigilant of Lyndon, as his auto-removal tendencies were well known. Now though, when sending Lyndon on his way to the Asylum garden from its kitchen, attendant Henry Franklin did not bother with the normal handover of his charge to another employee. Lyndon had never presented him directly with any trouble, and the attendant was relaxed about the oversight required of him. It was not long before Franklin realised that he had made a misjudgement: rather than saunter down the path to gather vegetables, as was intended, Lyndon upended a wheelbarrow at rest in the garden, stepped onto it and jumped astride the boundary wall. A supple youngster might have vaulted straight over the wall and made for the woods, but for Lyndon, making it over the wall had been exertion enough, and he was spotted progressing at low speed by another attendant at work in his own garden, and wrestled to the ground. Franklin was admonished, and Meyer pointed out to him that were similar circumstances to arise in the future, it would be quite clear where the blame would lie.
Lyndon was quite open about his behaviour, saying that he could find many ways to get out of Block 5, the privilege block that was his domicile, and suggesting that he be moved to a more secure block. Meyer obliged. Given Lyndon’s previous actions, it was clear that his escape might prove highly embarrassing. The move worked: Lyndon was no trouble, even if he was implicated in abetting another patient’s escape attempt in 1871. He became a quiet old man, and was finally discharged to the Hanwell Asylum at the age of seventy.
By the end of 1866, then, some remedial work had been undertaken to greater