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Dr William Orange, Broadmoor’s second Medical Superintendent, had been a member of the staff since the Asylum opened. He had been part of the establishment that experienced the escape attempts of the early years, had directly witnessed some of them, and also knew the history of the protracted improvements to the window bars and external walls. On John Meyer’s death in May 1870, he inherited an institution that had passed through an inevitable period of teething troubles in terms of managing difficult behaviour.

Nevertheless, it would only be in 1875 that Orange finally felt confident that he had stemmed what was, admittedly, a gentle trickle of patients seeping out through the bricks and mortar. Until then, he would also suffer the indignity of reporting briefly successful escapes to his superiors on the Asylum’s Council of Supervision and in the Home Office. That Orange continued initially to fight against turbulence in flight was partly down to the building, again, and partly down to Orange’s more mature regime, with greater responsibilities and privileges placed upon both his patients and his staff.

During the early 1870s, though, Orange also strongly believed that many of his institutional ills could be attributed to the lack of segregation between his different classes of patient. Orange argued that the convict class of patient – the ‘time’ patient - was far more destructive than Her Majesty’s lunatics, the ‘HMPs’ or ‘pleasure men’ who were detained at Her Pleasure.

Broadmoor had always taken convicted patients with defined time sentences, and as we have seen in Part One, statistical evidence from Meyer’s time suggested that there might be some truth in the proposition that such patients were more prone to making escape attempts. Orange also believed that their disruptive influence ran wider than this narrow problem, with the convicts liable either to wreak havoc on their own in myriad ways or to corrupt the mostly harmless HMPs. On top of that, the numbers of both classes of lunatic had grown since the Asylum opened. By the time that Orange took over, the patient population at Broadmoor numbered over four hundred and fifty, which meant that his nursing staff of fewer than one hundred were significantly outnumbered by those who they were meant to watch. Around a third of these patients were ‘time’ sentenced, though the ratio was slightly higher on the male side. As the numbers continued to grow, Orange’s view was that the potential for convicts to cause trouble was not diminishing.

Though Orange felt he had identified the building bricks of trouble, the potential escapees continued to come from both sides of the lunatics’ dividing wall. So it was that the first escapee with whom Orange had to deal was a pleasure man. On a frozen winter’s day, 11th January 1871, a working party of seven patients and two attendants were labouring to break up the heavy soil in one of the fields on the Asylum estate, outside the walls. Isaac Finch, a thirty-one year old farm labourer from rural Essex, was a member of the group. Just before lunchtime, having finished his work and by now bitterly cold, Finch asked to be allowed to leave the party to return to his Block inside. He was given permission to cross a small bridge which divided the field from the enclosed part of the estate. Rather than make his way back through the gate, he seized his opportunity to run, and instead took off into the woods. The attendant in charge of the party was severely reprimanded. Orange was frustrated by this further proof that higher security in the compound could always be circumvented by poor working practices.

Finch had entered the Asylum as a married man with five children. Family life was poor, and the Finches lived only just above the poverty line. As Finch searched for hope and meaning in his struggle, he had become captivated by the form of evangelical Christianity preached by the Peculiar People. Their ministry was