Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [49]
The horse had gone, but the stable door was bolted when the ironworks on the windows in Blocks 2, 3, 4 and 5 were replaced in early 1869. This removed one of the principal methods of escape entirely, and henceforth, any attempt to escape from inside a block would have to be considerably more complex. There remained, though, another small window of opportunity within the fabric of the complex, that of the Asylum’s boundary wall, and it would be from here that the only woman to be lost for good made her way out on 27th July 1869.
Alice Kaye (alternatively known as Ellen Cook) was a thirty year-old factory worker from Bolton, with a partner and three children. Existing close to the poverty line, she had been convicted of stealing clothing in 1864 when living in Salford and given four months imprisonment; then, when she was caught stealing a pair of boots and two gold rings in 1866, she was given seven years inside. Sent from Salford jail to Brixton, alleged to be feigning insanity, she was removed to Broadmoor in March 1868 suffering from delusions that she was the Queen. In the Asylum, she had generally worked hard in the laundry and on the ward, and not presented many problems.
At seven o’clock on the evening in question, Alice and roughly twenty-five other women were in the airing court of the new, additional female block. In the old block, the Asylum band was playing, and the female attendants in the new one were listening, some of them dancing with the patients. Sensing an opportunity, Kaye and another patient made their way towards the north boundary wall of the Asylum. This wall had rather been neglected while security had been improved on the male side. There had not been an attempted escape from the female wing since Mary McBride, five years ago. Now Kaye did what McBride had done. She got a leg up and a push, and she was over the wall and away. She was only noticed missing when the band had finished playing, and it was time to go back in. Like in McLane’s case, this was too late, and the vital minutes had given her ample opportunity to secret herself in rural East Berkshire.
Her description – brown hair, brown eyes, five foot one – was circulated to the Metropolitan and the Bolton police, and unlike McLane, there was also a lead to follow up. Kaye had developed a close friendship with an attendant, who had briefly worked in Broadmoor a few months earlier, called Isabella Saby. Saby had, apparently, given Kaye an address in London and asked her to come and see her ‘on the outside’. Saby was tracked, visited and interviewed, but neither she, nor Kaye’s family, provided information that they had seen the fugitive. Like McLane, Kaye was also written off the Asylum’s books when her sentence expired.
The north boundary wall on the female side was raised later on in 1869, and the ground also lowered on the patients’ side. John Meyer had finally achieved the basic levels of security that would have prevented most of the escape attempts so far. Though improvements were still required, never again would there be a lack of basic confidence in the accommodation provided to Her Majesty’s lunatics. Unfortunately, Meyer himself would not have a chance to re-establish the Asylum’s reputation for public safety. His sudden death, in May 1870, brought to an end his time as Broadmoor’s first chief of staff. With Orange promoted from deputy, the new Medical Superintendent immediately began agitating against the convict ‘time’ patients who he saw as the main source of disruptive behaviour, including escapes. Statistically, he was correct: of the sixteen patients who had made serious attempts to escape under Meyer’s tenure, only four were pleasure men. In this second phase of