Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [51]
A religiously conservative man, one summer day Finch had been found clutching his Bible - ‘with the leaves turned down at the death of Solomon and David’, the son and father who, amongst other things, incurred divine displeasure through their sexual behaviour - and covered in blood, shortly after his wife’s body was found at their home with her throat cut. He was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity and arrived in Broadmoor in September 1870.
Now, Orange had a murderer on the run, and it was only Finch’s lack of organisation that spared the doctor’s blushes. A pleasure man was, almost by definition, unaware of the consequences of his actions, and Finch’s inability to act rationally was to be his undoing. Walking first to Windsor, then back westwards to Reading, Finch had turned once more and eventually decided to make for home in Essex. He tore off some of the Broadmoor labels from his clothing but did not complete the job, either forgetting to remove the rest or not identifying the need. Reaching the Capital, and without food or shelter, an exhausted and hungry Finch asked to be admitted to the Fulham Workhouse in Hammersmith, where his remaining markers were noticed by the staff. He was returned to the Asylum only five days after he left, and the superintendent of the Workhouse’s male ward for casual paupers found himself one pound better off.
Finch would enjoy no further change of scene, apart from a regular oscillation between the blocks at Broadmoor, from refractory to privilege then back again. He remained industrious, only indoors rather than out, spending most of his working time in the Asylum cleaning the wards, even when he was in the ‘back Blocks’. His children remained in constant contact with him, writing and visiting, until he died from a brain haemorrhage in March 1900.
Eighteen seventy-one would turn out to be a busy year for escapes. On 18th June, the sleepy east dormitory on the first floor of Block 4 was woken by the sound of a window breaking. It was three o’clock in the morning. Patient Patrick Burke had taken a rasp from the shoemaker’s shop, filed off one side of his bedframe, plunged it into the window and exerted such force that he had begun to bend the new wrought iron frame. The windows in the dormitory were a decent size, and very quickly, Burke had managed to bend enough of the frame for his five foot six body to have a chance at escape. Now that the windows were made of wrought iron, this was a considerable achievement of power. Two other patients, William Biglands and Patrick Lyndon – who, it may be recalled, had himself tried to escape five years earlier – got up and went over to where the remains of Burke’s bed lay lopsided on the floor. Burke, meanwhile, had already begun to tie his sheets together, and proceeded to throw them out of the window, anchoring them on the remnants of the frame. The other two men gave him a leg up and he began to squeeze himself through the tiny aperture, before shinning down his makeshift rope. Biglands took up the next place in the queue. During the whole commotion, not a single attendant had peered in on the dormant lunatics, and it seemed as if the patients might succeed in their endeavours. Then Burke’s sheet was seen by an attendant below, the alarm was raised and the dormitory secured. Burke was retaken on the roof of the covered way between the central Blocks, the line of which was just below the level of the first floor, and whose useful situation had featured in earlier escape attempts. It would not do so again: Orange ordered this roof to be taken down immediately, making the potential drop for future exploits much less inviting.
Both Burke and Biglands were convicted thieves, which added fuel to Orange’s gently burning, convict fire. Burke, forty-one, was serving seven years for stealing potatoes