Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [54]
On the afternoon of 10th December 1872, Wheeler, now aged forty-eight, was amongst a group of patients from Block 4 who were strolling around the Terrace to the south of the Asylum as part of their exercise routine. As it began to rain, the attendants in charge of the group started to marshal their troops back inside the Block, via its airing court. The patients massed at the gate, and filed past an attendant who was detailed to count the marchers as they went back in. His concentration, however, was broken when he noticed that a patient was attempting to smuggle in a stone inside a handkerchief, undoubtedly for use as a weapon at some later point. With the attendant focused on searching the patient, Wheeler acted on an impulse to conceal himself behind some large shrubs on the Terrace. He squatted down amongst the evergreens and waited in the wintry rain. Remarkably, he was not omitted from the initial head count when the gate was locked. Instead, he was able to wait until it was dark, whereupon he walked to a point where the boundary wall was lowest, found something to stand on, and climbed over.
Two hours later, he was eventually missed. It was enough of a delay to afford Wheeler a head start, and by now, he had begun to walk to the village of Blackwater, some three miles away. Unfortunately for Wheeler, the experience proved overwhelming. Frightened of losing himself in the pine woods along the route, he began to walk back towards the Asylum, intending to find and follow a different route away. Of course, moving back from whence he had come was associated with its own risks. As he approached Broadmoor, he was spotted by the Asylum’s messenger, who managed to detain Wheeler in conversation for time enough until the duty attendants looked out of the Gatehouse and realised what was going on. Wheeler had endured, rather than enjoyed a confused four hours of freedom, and he would not repeat his action. He reverted to his Block, and died in Broadmoor in 1907, having spent fifty-five years in hospital care.
Wheeler’s escape was of no long-term consequence. There was no soul-searching or grand inquiry after it. Rather, the greater impact to strategic direction had been felt after the escapes and attacks of 1871. Orange was convinced that the convicts were a positive harm to his community of generally peaceful lunatics, their influence far outweighing their constitution of only a third of the patient population. During 1872, although their had been fewer serious incidents, he had taken the most drastic action available to him, and increased the number of patients, mostly convicts, who had been forced to spend time isolated in seclusion. It was not the solution. Whatever his own views on its success, his harsher regime had incurred the criticism of the Commissioners in Lunacy after their annual inspection.
Orange concluded that the only way to properly manage the pleasure and the time patients was to separate them entirely. His basic starting premise was that the pleasure men were innocents who had no wish to cause him trouble. None of them had ever been guilty of a crime, and had no propensity to wickedness. Orange wanted new accommodation to be built, so that he could relieve the blameless residents from the convicts, whose bad and unlawful behaviour was part of their everyday lives. Delivering his annual report for 1872, he questioned ‘whether it is just or expedient to permit those other inmates whose lives have not previously exposed them to such evil influences to be contaminated by the degraded habits and conversation