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By Root 171 0

secure the Asylum, and better practice was beginning to result from the experience of staffing Broadmoor. There was a brief respite in the frequency of patients trying to absent themselves from care. In 1867, there was only one serious effort to get away, on 22nd June. It did not amount to much, but it came from the sort of patient that a modern tabloid would squeal about. Cuthbert Rodham Carr, a youth of nineteen and newly arrived to Broadmoor, had been found insane at his trial for the murder of a five year-old girl in Gateshead. It was a particular unpleasant crime, a stranger killing with paedophile overtones, and with suggestions that Carr may have attacked another young girl too. He had been determined to plead guilty at his trial but had the matter taken out of his hands by his lawyers. He came from a well-to-do background – his family home was at Carr’s Hill in the town, overlooking the Tyne Valley and in whose stables the murder was committed.

Although he had been determined to face the gallows, Carr now appeared to have rediscovered his lust for life. On that day in June, he made his move to leave when on the way up the stairs of the central block to the Chapel. As a group of patients trooped to the first floor for a service, where the entrance door to the Chapel could be found, he manoeuvred himself out of the landing window and then made off over the roof of the Asylum stores. He navigated one complete side of this roof until he was at the entrance to the Asylum. Here, he stood on top of the Gatehouse, beside the clock tower, then leapt down onto the outside road. Various staff and workmen were already in pursuit and he was surrounded in the stables building a short distance from the gate. Outnumbered, he tried to resist but was held firm.

At first sight, the decrease in the rate of escapes implied that the security systems, particularly the buildings, had been shorn of defects. The events of 1868 would demonstrate that this was not the case, and Meyer and his staff would shortly find out how much work there was still to do. Before that, the first attempt of the year came, by coincidence, from Carr once more. He was joined on this occasion by Thomas Douglas, who had been party to two previous escape conspiracies. Now, on the evening of 6th May 1868, the two men broke a window on the first floor of Block 4 using a piece of metal, and then followed the route that Carr took across the roof the previous year. Both men were quickly missed in a head count and found hiding behind a chimney. There was a standoff. Douglas scurried away as Carr confronted his captors. He had managed to find an old piece of metal which he had sharpened into a weapon, and he used this to stab one of the attendants who cornered him. Fortunately, the man was not badly hurt, and Carr was retaken by other staff who were part of the search party. Douglas, meanwhile, had managed to creep along the roof towards the gatehouse from where he proceeded to shout a number of explicit phrases at an unfortunate young woman who was passing along the road outside. When he finally jumped down he was taken by staff waiting on the road. The attendant who was stabbed was given the maximum reward of five pounds, while three other staff also received a token for their efforts.

Carr remained a troublesome patient to care for. Though he now found himself in the back Blocks, he turned his frustrations onto the fabric of the building, damaging bedding, windows and even bricks and mortar. He harboured many persecutory ideas, like a lot of Broadmoor patients, and considered the medical officers to be part of the conspiracy. Although he had enemies amongst his cohort, he also had friends, including William Bisgrove, who will be found in Escape from Broadmoor: Part Two. Carr died at the age of forty, in 1888, from a subarachnoid haemorrhage.

Carr and Douglas’s escape was put down to a lack of supervision rather than any wider matter. This failure of the staff was also blamed for the second escape of the year. Another pleasure patient, George Turner, successfully evaded