• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 168 0

the attentions of his custodians on 29th September. A young Berkshire man, he had been accused of arson but was completely mute when asked to plead, and spent ten years in the Wiltshire Asylum before being transferred to Broadmoor shortly after it opened for male patients in 1864. On this particular day, he had been instructed to clean out the ash pits adjacent to the female block, just outside the boundary wall. It was the sort of job given to a patient who could be relied upon, and who had worked his way into a trusted position. But while he was shovelling a pile of ash into a cart, Turner suddenly downed tools and jumped through a nearby hedge on the estate. He headed for the woods, outrunning an attendant who was in close pursuit.

Initially, it was thought that Turner had made a clean getaway. Then, two days later, a message was received from Inspector Herbert Reece of the Clewer Police, near Windsor. Turner had been picked up wandering aimlessly around Windsor Great Park on the day after his escape. He must have stood out easily, as he was a florid-looking man, over six feet tall and still wearing the blue Asylum uniform with its Broadmoor markings. He put up no resistance, gave his name to the Police and was sent back to Crowthorne on 2nd October.

Turner remained well behaved on his return, and was employed inside as a ward cleaner. Meyer had previously described Turner as ‘an exceedingly quiet harmless man’, so he was surprised to receive a letter from a Windsor resident alleging that Turner had assaulted the correspondent’s maid during his brief sojourn outside. Meyer questioned Turner, but the latter denied the offence, and Meyer decided to side with his patient. The matter was closed, and Turner continued to live a quiet life until he died on 9th April 1874.

By the autumn of 1868, it had been two years since Meyer and the Council of Supervision had spent any sums on making changes to the buildings as a result of escapes. All that was about to change, as Broadmoor was about to encounter the most successful period for escapes of Meyer’s entire reign. It would be the window bars in Blocks 3 and 4 that were the Medical Superintendent’s undoing. Identified as a weakness in 1865, the decision to retain the cast ironwork in the less secure blocks would become a risk that the Asylum could no longer afford to bear.

On the evening of 4th November, James Bennett, a youth of eighteen, removed a cast iron cross bar from the window of the ground floor gallery in Block 3 and made his way over the still-deficient boundary wall. Bennett became the first patient since George Hage to get away for a considerable period of time, and, despite the obvious blame that could be attached to the window bars, his escape led to the resignation of the attendant who was on duty at the time.

Bennett had come to Broadmoor in March 1867 as a depressed and suicidal young man. He had an unenviable start in life: suffering from mild learning disabilities, and evidently prone to anti-social behaviour, he had spent three years in a reformatory school between the ages of nine and twelve. The sharp shock did not work: subsequently given seven years for theft in London, he had been sent to Portland Prison. In the month before he ran from Broadmoor, he had been fighting intermittently with another patient on the ward. When he escaped from the Asylum, he quickly returned to his old stamping ground in Chelsea.

Bennett had a full three months of freedom before he managed to get himself arrested again, this time caught exiting someone else’s property with a quantity of linen. Although he gave his name as ‘William Watson’, he also owned up to the fact that he was wanted back in Crowthorne. The Westminster Police Court officials sent a message to Broadmoor and asked someone to attend court to identify him, which they did. He was returned to Broadmoor on 10th February 1869. Meyer subsequently concluded that like Hage, Bennett had only been faking his insanity, and so he had his patient removed to Millbank Prison, whereupon Bennett’s involvement with Broadmoor