Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [47]
Just as Meyer was beginning to fear that Bennett had been lost forever, another two patients disappeared from his radar. On 9th November, Thomas Douglas – he of Carr’s caper the previous year, the ‘mass breakout’ of 1864, and Richard Walker’s 3rd escape of 1865 – and John Thompson, another survivor of the 1864 gang, broke a similar iron cross bar to Bennett in a single room in Block 4. The Block’s patients had just had tea, and the attendants were engaged in tidying away the crockery and cutlery. Douglas’s and Thompson’s escape was slightly more complicated than Bennett’s in that they were on the first floor, but using their experience of escapes, they had ripped up the bedding in their rooms and tied the pieces together to form a rope. Throwing it out of the broken window, they both shimmied down into the yard, and then up another blanket rope that they had dropped previously from a room nearby. This second rope brought them close enough to the top of the external wall that they could swing over and onto it. Once on the wall, they were down the other side and away. For Douglas in particular, this must have felt like the completion of a long-held dream. Like Bennett, both men enjoyed a prolonged respite from Asylum care and ended up elsewhere in England. That evening, Meyer was facing the loss of three patients within a week.
Douglas is arguably Victorian Broadmoor’s most persistent escaper, not only for his four separate attempts but also because he never seemed to lose the habit throughout his time in the retreat. He was a soldier, a native of Cumberland, who struck a Corporal on Corfu and was given ten years at a Court Martial. He believed that the Corporal was persecuting him, and continued to believe the man had influence over him during his sentence. Between 1860 and 1864 he shuttled between Millbank and Dartmoor, before ending up in Broadmoor at the age of twenty-three. After three failed attempts to escape, he intended to make the most of his achievement in November 1868, and so he walked to Southampton with the aim of securing a passage to America. He had been a sailor before he joined the Army, and still wore an anchor tattoo on his left arm. But sailor Douglas could not get his ship at port, so he then decided to walk the length of England and return to his native home. Eventually, exhausted and starving after nearly three weeks on the road, he gave up at Lancaster and surrendered to the Police on 30th November.
He returned to the Asylum a reformed man. Biddable and co-operative, he worked in the garden and asked to be returned to prison. His wish was granted in 1870, and he served the short remainder of his sentence in Millbank once again. This was not, though, to be Douglas’s last experience of Broadmoor. A little over a decade later, he was had up for assaulting a police officer in Portsmouth and given six months hard labour. Though he called himself Kelly, he was identified as Douglas and sent back to the Asylum, where William Orange, Meyer’s successor, suggested he might be happier to remain. Douglas spent the last twenty years of his life back in Broadmoor’s care and died there in 1903 from heart disease.
Meyer’s luck continued to hold when Thompson was arrested by the Police in Garstang, Lancashire on 7th January 1869. He was identified and sent back down south. Thompson was also removed to prison soon after his recapture, now considered sane. He was thirty-one when he escaped, some four years after he had been among the first intake to Broadmoor from Bethlem. He was convicted of burglary in 1862 at the Appleby Sessions in Westmoreland. A swarthy man, with auburn hair and blue eyes, he hailed from Plymouth and had first travelled north to work in a factory. He had often tried to escape after his admission to Bethlem, and apart from his membership of Grundy’s gang, he had also had another go at Broadmoor in September 1865, when he was overheard removing bolts from his window and immediately removed to another room. Despite his transfer from the Asylum, like Douglas, he would be back again at